Suggested plantation reading for HRC: 1850s first prison memoir by black prisoner.
At an estate sale in Rochester, N.Y., in 2009, a rare book seller came upon a curious literary artifact. As it turned out, it was a memoir written in the 1850s by Austin Reed, a black man who spent most of his life in prison. It's the earliest known prison memoir by an African-American writer, and it has now been published as The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict.
The Haunted Convict, dated 1858, is the earliest known prison memoir by an African-American writer. Reed learned to read and write during his time in prison.
When Reed's memoir found its way to Yale University, librarians and scholars were eager to get a look at it. Robert Stepto, a professor of African-American studies, has spent a lifetime studying slave narratives. "My immediate interest was just to begin to compare what I knew about slave narratives to this prison narrative," Stepto says.
But Reed was never a slave. He was born into a free black family in Rochester around 1823. But his memoir nonetheless has its roots in the plantation, says Yale English professor Caleb Smith, who edited Reed's memoir. He sees the system taking shape that will allow the prison to become the inheritor of the plantation. Caleb Smith, English professor at Yale
"We sometimes tell the story of where our own racialized system of mass incarceration came from, as a story that begins in the plantation and ends in the prison," says Smith. "What Reed sees is the way the prison was prepared to serve that purpose even before emancipation. So he sees the system taking shape that will allow the prison to become the inheritor of the plantation."
Reed's story begins when his father dies. His mother couldn't support the family, so when her young son got into trouble, she sent him out as an indentured servant to a local farmer. Reed was 6 years old. There's a parallel here to the slave experience, says Stepto. "Frederick Douglass famously said all slaves are orphans," Stepto explains. "Austin Reed is telling a story of being orphaned, if you will. Part of the story is how he is removed from family; his father is dead, his mother is not in the picture."
In prison, Reed endured brutal punishment, including "the showering bath," an early version of waterboarding. It was initially considered more "humane" than whipping, but when an inmate died after being punished in the showering bath, prisoners rioted. In prison, Reed endured brutal punishment, including "the showering bath," an early version of waterboarding. It was initially considered more "humane" than whipping, but when an inmate died after being punished in the showering bath, prisoners rioted.
Things did not go well at the farm. Reed felt that being an indentured servant was like being a slave, Smith says: "Especially at this moment in which the farmer decides to whip him for his idleness. Reed completely associates that with the dishonor, with the stigma of being whipped, he says, 'like a slave.' And this provokes in him a kind of crime of revenge that lands him in the House of Refuge."
more at link: https://www.facebook.com/pooryorickjournal/?fref=ts
Also featured on NPR's All Things Considered.
= new reply since forum marked as read
