The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writerrecently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholarssheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession part jeremiad part lamentation part picaresque novel (reminiscent at times of Dickens and Defoe).Michiko Kakutani The New York Times. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. In 2009 scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources Reeds text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore in its day-to-day details unsettling resemblances to that very institution.. Now for the first time we can hear Austin Reeds story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester New York but when his father died his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattans brutal House of Refuge an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor.. Seven years later Reed found himself at New Yorks infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir which explores Americas first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmates point of view recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation exploitation and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South into free New York.. Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life) The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism violence labor and captivity in a proud defiant voice. Reeds memoir illuminates his own life and timesas well as ours today.. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict . One of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.Annette Gordon-Reed The Washington Post. Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The books greatest value lies in the gap it fills.O: The Oprah Magazine . Reed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that a century and a half later earn and hold the readers ear.Thomas Chatterton Williams San Francisco Chronicle. [The books] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.The Guardian. A sensational novelistic telling of an eventful life.The Paris ReviewVivid and painful.NPR. Lyrical and graceful in one sentence burning with fury and hellfire in the next.Columbus Free Press