From the standpoint of both form and content, it is nonetheless ordinary in that it embodies, maybe better than any other, the charactersistic ambiguity of fugitive slave notices. Does Richard Poore's description in the end enable the reader to form a mental picture of Ned, Harriet, Philip and Juddy? Probably not: we only know that three of them are marked with the letter $S$ - we do not know the size - that Juddy has smallpox scars and that she has a 'yellow' complexion like Philip. That is very little information when one considers that the slave population at the time was over three hundred thousand, that several thousand men and women attended the Sunday market in Kingston, where Juddy probably managed to sell her forage (McDonald, 1993, p. 29), and that smallpox was a common disease among slaves, not to mention their variety of appearance and skin colours.  
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[^0]:    2 On Jamaican Creole: D’Costa, Lalla, 1989; glossary, pp. 142-51; D’Costa, Lalla, 1990.  
In this chapter I would like to show that runaway slave notices were not only intended to be mimetic, tracing and describing as accurately as possible the features of the missing bodies, but also purely and simply narrative: telling a story, in a nutshell, in which, paradoxically, the primary voice of the narrator mingled under the surface of the words with the voices of the slaves, the 'he' or 'she' in the notices. The notices distil and reveal, in the manner of the autobiographies of fugitive slaves analysed by Frances Smith Foster in the late 1970s, much more than simple, unambiguous and supposedly objective facts:  
My original goal had been to examine this body of autobiographical writings by former slaves not from the perspective of historical accuracy or data, but as writings that somehow had the power to reveal, to transform, and to transcend. It was not that mimesis was unimportant. Certainly the narratives offered unique and valuable information about slavery as it was experienced by slaves themselves (Smith Foster, 1994). [My emphasis]