The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict: The Recently Discovered Memoir of African American Life and Incarceration in the Nineteenth Century
Written by Austin Reed
Narrated by Dominic Hoffman and Caleb Smith
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.
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, Reed's 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 Reed's 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, Austin 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 Manhattan's 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 York's infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America's first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate's 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.
Formatted for optimal listenability, 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. Reed's memoir illuminates his own life and times—as well as ours today.
Read by Dominic Hoffman. Introduction Read by Caleb Smith.
Related to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
Related audiobooks
Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Can't Wait to Call You My Wife: African American Letters of Love and Family in the Civil War Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInvisible Man Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Don Perkins: A Champion's Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOpen Wounds: A Native American Heritage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poetry of James Weldon Johnson Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One Deadly Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Short Life of Jonathan Edwards Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Race Against Time: The Untold Story of Scipio Jones and the Battle to Save Twelve Innocent Men Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSUMMARY - Between The World And Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpooked!: How a Radio Broadcast and the War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Brown: Defending the Innocent or Plotting Terror? Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Discovering My Royal Heritage While Surviving in Black Skin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Monkey Wrench Gang Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ides of March: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Andrew Jackson: The Making of America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Andrew Jackson: Heroic Leader or Cold-hearted Ruler? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
United States History For You
Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Up From Slavery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dragonfire: Four Days That (Almost) Changed America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: 2nd Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wright Brothers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letter from Birmingham Jail Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
0 ratings0 reviews