A Haunting History of Incarceration

“Firsts” in African-American literary history have captured public attention in recent years. In 2002, when scholars identified an unpublished manuscript called The Bondwoman’s Narrative as the first novel written by an African-American woman (later identified as Hannah Bond, writing under the pseudonym Hannah Crafts), it became a best seller. A few years later, The Curse of Caste, a serialized tale originally published in 1865 by Julia C. Collins, was presented as a rival “first,” in part because Bondwoman was too autobiographical to count as fiction. These stories of discovery cast the scholar as an explorer of the wilderness of the past, promising to bring back firsthand accounts of how “race” was made into what we know today, and how the earliest black writers tried to unmake those meanings by wielding the pen.

Significant attention has now attended the recovery of a manuscript detailing the life of Austin Reed, a young black man from Rochester, N.Y., who bounced in and out of a juvenile reformatory before passing most of his adult years in prison. Caleb Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Yale University, authenticated it as “the earliest known prison memoir by an African-American writer” — written in 1858, while the author was held at Auburn State Prison.

In the foreword of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, Smith’s colleagues David W. Blight and Robert B. Stepto claim that the new/old book “joins great works in the canon of classic African-American literature” such as fugitive-slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, and Harriet Jacobs, and that it will “forever change our understanding of antebellum America” and the modern institutions it spawned.

Indeed, the book’s publication seems especially timely given the current political focus on the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Like many others, I approached it hoping to better understand the origins of the problems so powerfully diagnosed in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and so urgently voiced by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Readers bearing those lofty expectations may be disappointed. Reed’s fascinating story speaks movingly — in rough-hewn, utterly distinctive prose — of the many unfreedoms in American history that are overshadowed by the story of slavery: indentured servitude, reform school, prison. Reed himself emerges as a resilient, defiant figure, rejecting the logic of an institution that supposedly builds character and reforms the soul. Prison is instead a “place of torment,” its inhabitants “haunted” rather than reconstructed. Yet his narrative is also difficult to follow at points, with a pastiche of frequent moralistic interludes, sudden transitions, and a hazy sense of chronology. And it’s strangely, though tellingly, muted in its treatment of race.

Reed’s life in the correctional system begins at age 10. Shortly after his father dies, his mother sends him to work as an indentured servant to a white farmer, Mr. Lad. He runs away after Lad whips him but returns to the farm and tries to kill the farmer and to burn down his home and barn. For those crimes, he is sent to New York’s House of Refuge, where he is given a rudimentary academic education and simultaneous schooling in the power of the lash. He develops “such a greedy appetite for reading” that he is given “fifteen cuts with the rattan for having more than one book in my desk.” After several escapes and intermittent stints as a waiter, a gambler, and a bartender, Reed eventually falls into a life of crime. He finds himself back in prison after being caught colluding with a proprietor of a brothel in swindling a john. All that while he is still a teenager.

His torments in prison present the book’s most gripping material. Auburn State was a brutal (and much-copied) institution in which inmates served by day as forced laborers in industries such as comb-making and rug-weaving. Smith’s sure-handed introduction draws out its racial history, explaining that while similar convict-leasing schemes became a means of reinstituting white supremacy in the South after the emancipation of the slaves, in 1840s New York fewer than 10 percent of imprisoned laborers were black. That relative isolation from other black prisoners helps explain Reed’s silence — conspicuous to today’s ears — on issues of race.

Instead he focuses on the baroque punishments meted out for even minor offenses, such as speaking at the wrong time: a whipping followed by a bath of salt brine, a rope-and-pulley system forcing a painful spread-eagle position, iron yokes and caps, and the notorious “showering bath,” a precursor of waterboarding.

When Reed steps back from this painful chronicle, he tends to sermonize rather than reflect. In this respect, Haunted Convict falls short of the most powerful African-American writing from the antebellum period. There is none of Douglass’s extraordinary probing into his tormentors’ psychology, nor any of Jacobs’s complex ruminations on the difficulty of behaving ethically in an immoral institution. Harriet Wilson’s painfully intense novel, Our Nig, more dexterously compresses the anxiety and terror of 19th-century black servitude in the North into a taut narrative, while Martin Delany’s political writings and his fictional portrait of a black revolutionary in Blake, or the Huts of America offer more insight into a dawning black political consciousness.

Indeed, one of the most surprising features of Reed’s writing is how fleetingly, and thinly, he identifies himself as “black.” How could it have been otherwise? He certainly didn’t learn what his society made of race in the House of Refuge, where he read what was at hand: schoolroom primers, English classics, temperance tracts, religious writings. Reed devotes far more space to the trifecta of 19th-century moral dangers — novel-reading, alcohol, and masturbation — than he does to racism. Of the few direct mentions of race, two come when he wants to distance himself from other black men.

Part of what is most distinctive and arresting about this narrative is what it’s missing. Where contemporary readers might look for insight into “race,” we find a startling blankness, and where we might want literary depth, we get something like narrative cobbling. While these thwarted expectations can make for frustration, they also might lead us to question whether our quest for origins blocks us from hearing the voices of the dead.

Walter Benjamin wrote that historical memory gains significance “as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Humanities scholarship at its best makes sense of our own dangerous moments by poring over the documentary record of the past. Yet once we’re on the track, it’s sometimes best to suspend our urgent questions and simply let the text reveal its own world to us.

When I began to accept the memoir for what it was, I found a halting narrative of a nearly broken man trying to put himself together with words given to him by those who had broken him. I heard a tender conversation between a black man and a white “fallen woman” in jail as both await their trials. (Reed even writes a little song for her.) I peered down a fascinating trail of a prisoner’s reading, reminding me of the power that books had in the darkest of 19th-century corners. Even the lack of a discussion of race made all the more striking an incipient fellowship across the color line among the outcast and down-at-heels. If Reed was less race-conscious than black writers on the outside were, perhaps it was in part because his fellow prisoners had been stripped of the privilege of whiteness.

From the first sentence onward, Smith’s sensitive editorial work preserves Austin Reed’s voice, rough edges and all: “The bright sun was just a shining into the window of my father cottage when I was called by the voice of a female to come and take the last look of my dying father.” The best respect we can pay him is to let go of our expectations and listen.