The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

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, slavery and the penal system in America.

In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoirs 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, they give a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside of the institution of slavery that bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution.

Now, for the first time, we can hear Reed’s story as he meant to tell it. Reed was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when Reed’s 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 the brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor.

Seven years later, Reed found himself working hard, without pay, in 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Formatted for optimal readability and accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life),The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty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.

Austin Reed (1827–unknown) was born in Rochester, New York. His memoir was written around 1858–59, when he was still incarcerated.

Caleb Smith is a professor of English at Yale University and the author ofThe Prison and the American Imagination and The Oracle and the Curse.