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December 11, 2013<\/p>\n
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![\"Beinecke](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/prison-memoir.jpg\")
<\/a>Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library \/ Inside cover and first page of Austin Reed’s manuscript.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n By\u00a0JULIE BOSMAN<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Years ago, a rare-books dealer browsing at an estate sale in Rochester came across an unusual manuscript, dated 1858. The family selling it said little about where it had been for the last 150 years. It appeared never to have left upstate New York.<\/span><\/p>\n Scholars now believe that the mystery manuscript is the first recovered memoir written in prison by an African-American, a discovery that Yale University says it made after authenticating the document andacquiring it<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for its\u00a0Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n The 304-page memoir, titled \u201cThe Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict,\u00a0or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison<\/span><\/a>,\u201d describes the experiences of the author, Austin Reed, from the 1830s to the 1850s in a prison in upstate New York.<\/span><\/p>\n Caleb Smith<\/span><\/a>, a professor of English at Yale who has written extensively about imprisonment, said he believed the manuscript to be authentic. Reed\u2019s account was corroborated through newspaper articles, court records and prison files, with help from Christine McKay, an archivist and researcher who also works for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Manhattan.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still a very unusual thing for us to find any previously unknown document from this period by an African-American writer,\u201d Mr. Smith said. \u201cFrom a literary point of view, I think there\u2019s no other voice in American literature like the voice of this penitentiary narrative, which has a very lyrical quality. And from a historical perspective, what makes this so fascinating at this moment is the deep connection between the history of slavery and the history of incarceration.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Nancy Kuhl, a curator at the Beineke library, said the manuscript \u201csignificantly enriches the canon of 19th-century African-American literature and deepens our understanding of all 19th-century America.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Reed is believed to have been born a free man near Rochester. As a young man, according to Yale\u2019s research, he was sent to the New York House of Refuge, a juvenile reform school in Manhattan, where he learned to read and write. By the 1830s, a string of thefts resulted in his incarceration in a state prison in Auburn, now known as the Auburn Correctional Facility, which was built in 1816.<\/span><\/p>\n Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library \/ An 1831 drawing of Auburn State Prison in New York.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n The manuscript, written with the dramatic flair of a natural storyteller but in unpolished English, with grammatical and spelling errors, traces his life from childhood to his years at Auburn. It is written under the name Rob Reed, although it is unclear why he used that name, according to Yale.<\/span><\/p>\n In the early pages, Reed describes a childhood incident when, encouraged by his sister, he disguised himself as a girl and attempted to kill a man to avenge an earlier whipping.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI cocked the pistol and with an uplifted hand of revenge I let fire and missd my shot,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt was a dark night. I could hardly see my hands before my face. The old man hollowd murder, murder, but before any aid could get to him I drew the knife a cross his shoulders wich left a deep wound for months afterward.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Later, Reed describes torturous punishments at Auburn that were typical at the time, including frequent whippings and a device known as the shower-bath, a kind of precursor to waterboarding that was occasionally fatal.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cStripping off my shirt the tyrantical curse bounded my hands fast in front of me and orderd me to stand around,\u201d Reed wrote. \u201cTurning my back towards him he threw Sixty seven lashes on me according to the orders of Esq. Cook. I was then to stand over the dreain while one of the inmates wash my back in a pail of salt brine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/a>