From the House of Bondage

Yale University's Beinecke Library has announced the acquisition and authentication of a 304-page manuscript said to be the earliest known prison memoir by an African-American. Entitled The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison, the manuscript has been traced to one Austin Reed, who was born to a free black family in Rochester, New York around 1827, was assigned to the New York House of Refuge, a reformatory, at an early age, and served multiple terms in Auburn State Prison. He was apparently imprisoned at Auburn when the manuscript was written, sometime in the late 1850s, and he was still alive as late as 1895, when he wrote a letter to the warden of the House of Refuge seeking records of his confinement. Reed clearly had a keen, and longstanding, interest in documenting his own life; an unbound scrap of paper that accompanies the manuscript appears to instruct an unidentified person (Ms. Ives?) "this is the beg[inn]ing of the first chapter of my book — please [do] not lose it."

There are a number of well-known African-American slave narratives from the nineteenth century, including those of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, but Reed was evidently never enslaved, though the conditions of his own civil captivity are said to have been appallingly brutal. His detailed account was preserved and passed down, in a manner not publicly described, until it was sold to Yale by the rare book dealer Between the Covers in 2009. Random House has acquired the rights to the manuscript, which, however, won't be available until 2016, presumably in order to give the editors time to a prepare a definitive text and supply additional material on Reed's life and confinement. Update: details on the edition are here.

For those disinclined to wait, the Beinecke Library has made images of the entire manuscript available online. I've dipped into it just enough to be able to predict that the final result should be eye-opening and fascinating, but I suspect I'll wait for the published version before I read it as a whole. This kind of discovery inevitably raises the question of how many other accounts of comparable interest may have been lost, or are still preserved tucked away in someone's attic or bookshelf; from a first look at this manuscript, however, the answer would seem to be "not many."