{"id":94976,"date":"2016-02-25T13:20:12","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T18:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94976"},"modified":"2016-02-25T14:04:51","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T19:04:51","slug":"haunted-convict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/25\/haunted-convict\/","title":{"rendered":"Haunted Convict"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0rediscovered prison memoir of\u00a0a nineteenth-century black man.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The inside cover and first page of Reed’s manuscript. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0Jean Genet\u2019s\u00a0<\/a><\/em>Our Lady of the Flowers, here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the back cover of the manuscript of his prison memoir, which he completed in New York\u2019s Auburn state jail sometime after 1858, Austin Reed pasted a clipping of the third chapter of Lamentations: \u201cI am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath \u2026 \/ He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. \/ He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.\u201d Around the thirtieth verse, the tone shifts to one of reassurance\u2014\u201cFor the Lord will not cast off forever\u201d\u2014and then, by the fifty-fifth, to one of retributive anger. The last verses Reed excerpted are a plea \u201cout of the low dungeon\u201d for God to avenge the poem\u2019s narrator against his enemies: \u201cPersecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

These lines suggest the tone and shape of a literary genre: a lament in which sorrow coexists with requests for divine vengeance. By placing them at the end of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict<\/em>\u2014acquired by Yale\u2019s rare-book library in 2009 and published last month with helpful editorial comments by the scholar Caleb Smith\u2014Reed was making a strong suggestion about the kind of book he\u2019d written. The text itself, however, is an amalgam of genres that wouldn\u2019t seem to combine: a picaresque memoir in which sermons jostle up against pulpy adventure anecdotes; dutiful recollections of fact move with little notice into fantasies and dreams; radical gestures of black empowerment share the page with the coarsest kinds of racial caricatures; and assertive denunciations of the prison system coexist with passages of meek and guilty self-recrimination. It\u2019s puzzling to make sense of these apparent contradictions\u2014to decide what Reed meant his book to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Austin \u201cRob\u201d Reed was born a freedman in Rochester sometime between 1823 and 1827, soon before the death of his father, an African Methodist Episcopal pastor, in 1828. Burrell Reed\u2019s death is the first event in Haunted Convict<\/em>, and his memory has a violent effect on the book whenever it\u2019s invoked. \u201cHis last look\u201d and \u201chis last dying advice\u201d to his son\u2014\u201cthat I might be kept from all the snares and temptations of the world, and that I might grow up and become a useful man, that I might be a help meet to my mother when she should be bowing down between the weight of old age\u201d\u2014gave Reed a standard with which he could measure his grim eventual circumstances against the early promise that was his fragile birthright as a freeman. Throughout Haunted Convict<\/em>, the name of Reed\u2019s father becomes both the son\u2019s religious consciousness, reducing him to tears whenever he hears it out of the mouths of prison chaplains, and his guilty conscience. \u201cNo sooner had the clods covered the remains of my father before I forgot his last blessing and dying prayer,\u201d Reed confesses on the book\u2019s second page. \u201cI soon broke through the restraints of my mother and fell a victim to vice and crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lurid tone of that last sentence is neither incidental nor atypical. In the titles of the nineteenth-century crime pamphlets and prison expos\u00e9s Smith mentions in his introduction to Reed\u2019s memoir\u2014\u201cBlack Jacob,\u201d A Monument of Grace<\/em>; Secrets of the Mount-Pleasant State Prison<\/em>; A Voice from Prison<\/em>; The Question, What Did You Do To Get There? Answered<\/em>\u2014you recognize a genre of popular American literature mostly lost to history, a body of works designed at once to titillate, moralize, and advocate for reform. Confessional crime pamphlets published under the names of black authors were, according to Smith, \u201cusually written, or heavily edited, by the white ministers and lawyers who ran the penal system.\u201d Even in later reformist autobiographies, the author\u2019s crimes and vices were mined as heavily for shock value as the punishments he received.<\/p>\n

We are rediscovering Reed\u2019s book at a moment when much effort is made to distinguish sensationalistic advertisements for the prison system (Lockup<\/em>) from serious testimonies about its cruelty (among other recent examples, the collection Hell Is a Very Small Place<\/em>, an anthology of essays on solitary confinement). No distinction so firm held in Reed\u2019s own time, and since he clearly intended his book for a general audience\u2014he punctuates the narration with frequent appeals addressed to an unnamed \u201creader\u201d\u2014he took what opportunities he could to shock and seduce. It\u2019s hard to know how else to account for the pivotal scene in which a merciless warden chooses to whip Reed and one of his fellow prisoners based on the false testimony of a third inmate\u2014a \u201cthick lip nigger\u201d whose \u201cinfernal\u201d blackness Reed contrasts unfavorably with his friend\u2019s innocent whiteness. (\u201cI did not care so much about myself as I did about poor Strongman, whose skin only an hour before was clean from stripes and as white as milk.\u201d) The duplicitous boy ends up mortally injured soon after, and Reed relishes describing how he tormented the dying inmate with images of his damnation. Haunted Convict<\/em> leaves itself unusually open to the intrusion of new tones and vocabularies, and Reed employed those of the minstrel show as readily as the sermon or the gothic novel.<\/p>\n

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An undated postcard of Auburn State Prison.<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time of that incident, Reed had been imprisoned as a juvenile for roughly a year. One night, in 1933, when Reed couldn\u2019t have been older than eleven, he had disguised himself in one of his sister\u2019s dresses, taken a gun, and stolen at night to the house of a white farmer to whom he\u2019d been indentured after his father\u2019s death. This was a revenge mission. He was justifiably enraged over having been \u201ctied up like a slave and thrash [sic] by the rough hand of a farmer who had no business nor no right nor authority to lay a hand on me\u201d\u2014a memory strong enough, in Reed\u2019s telling, to spur him on even while \u201cin loud peals of thunder I heard my father\u2019s prayer, playing in the flashes of lightning from beneath the ground where he laid.\u201d Reed shot at the farmer, missed, and lit a fire in one of the landowner\u2019s houses.<\/p>\n

His sentence was ten years\u2019 confinement in a youth reformatory euphemistically named the House of Refuge. In Reed\u2019s picture, the prison\u2019s supervisors, Mr. Heart and Mr. Wood, come off as reluctant disciplinarians, eager to mentor, educate and Christianize their charges. It\u2019s disquieting to read the generous adjectives Reed piles on Mr. Heart\u2014\u201ca fine venerable old gentlemen\u201d\u2014when the gentleman in question is preparing to give him twenty-five lashes for having escaped and been recaptured. This is Reed in a conciliatory mood. Elsewhere, he didn\u2019t shrink from describing his captors less forgivingly: Heart and Wood\u2019s eventual replacement, \u201can old Presbyterian minister\u201d named Mr. Terry, turns out to be a petty, tyrannical sadist. His religious pretensions inspire one of Reed\u2019s most uninhibited screeds:<\/p>\n

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Oh, ye leaders of the blind, be careful while you are on your knees and uttering those sacred words and imploring blessing from above on behalf of those afflicted people whom you are praying for, that the brittle thread of life don\u2019t snap and send you away to take up your portion with hypocrites and unbelievers. Then, with solemn and mournful prayers, you\u2019ll cry for the solid rocks and the firm mountains to fall and crumble down upon your defenseless pates.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Years after his imprisonment, according to a letter he wrote to the House of Refuge in 1895 asking for access to his old records, Reed went \u201call over the union and telling sinners the troubles and trials that I Have been through and How I came to be a Christian man.\u201d And yet he was already capable of similar speeches in the 1850s, when most of Haunted Convict<\/em> was probably composed. One way to look at the book is as an anthology of homilies and warnings, from directives not to persecute the Irish (\u201cOh, you dare devil Yankees, who run down the poor Irishmen as they land upon your docks \u2026 \u201d) to long discourses on the evils of alcohol, which Reed twice personifies as a malevolent king (\u201cBeware of me, for lo, I come in a moment when you think not, with my glittering sword which you see in my hand stained with red \u2026 I only make one dash, and you are gone\u201d).<\/p>\n

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From the cover of Haunted Convict<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes these lectures threaten our assumptions about the sort of book we\u2019re reading. Midway through the book, Reed claims to have finally finished disclosing \u201cthe mysteries and miseries of the New York House of Refuge.\u201d Now, he wonders \u201cwhat it is that brings so many boys to this place.\u201d A long list of sins and crimes follows, culminating, unexpectedly, in the moment when the boy\u2019s \u201clittle hands grasps [sic] at some novel,\u201d which he consumes \u201cas if he was reading the life and adventures of some great man of the country.\u201d Reed is set off:<\/p>\n

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I despise the looks of a novel. The cursed infernal things, I can\u2019t bear the sight of one. They are a curse to every one that reads them \u2026 They are pack full of lies. They are a store House of lies. I never could take comfort in reading them. Give me the history of some great and good man who is laboring for the welfare of his country, like Wm. H. Seward\u2026 That is such a book which I love to read. Novels are books that will bring many a young man to a gloomy cell, and many a weeping mothers to their graves.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What could explain this opprobrium? One way to take it is as a way of protesting, or counterbalancing, the kind of literary performances Reed had found himself pressured to deliver elsewhere in the book. Much in <\/span>Haunted Convict<\/em> is transparently invented and embellished\u2014its catalog of \u201cmysteries and miseries\u201d suits the dramatic form of prison and crime narratives popular in the earlier nineteenth century. Reed\u2019s escapades as a juvenile runaway, during which he works reluctantly serving drinks in a gambling den and rescues a white woman from a leering black drifter (another of Reed\u2019s odd gestures towards minstrelsy); his re-imprisonment at Auburn after a young prostitute frames him for theft; his aggressive acts of defiance towards the prison\u2019s director, for which he\u2019s punished with days in solitary and trips to the \u201cshowering bath\u201d: one can imagine Reed fretting that his memoir was becoming too much of a novel, a source more of lurid secular entertainments than of spiritual encouragements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Toward the end of the book, Reed reflects more often on who bore the guilt for his life\u2019s miserable outcome. \u201cThose who might have done me a heap of good turned out to be destroyers,\u201d he insists, \u201cand took away all of the good principles and reasons to which I was endowed with, and the high and noble mind which God had given me have all been destroyed by hard usage and a heavy club.\u201d He was channeling a line of thought that abolitionists at the time eagerly embraced, but which now seems deeply spurious\u2014that black Americans had been so \u201cdegraded\u201d by the abuse of whites that over time they\u2019d been rendered somehow spiritually deficient or incomplete. At the same time, with his characteristic mixture of self-excoriation and righteous anger, he was airing his guilt over having written not an edifying book of sermons or a history of a great man, but a book like this<\/em>\u2014a sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life. When they sent him to prison, Reed\u2019s \u201cdestroyers\u201d also decided the kind of literature he, as a convict rather than a preacher, was qualified to produce.<\/p>\n

Surrounded as they are by this sordid material, the sermons, visions, jeremiads, and lamentations that fill Haunted Convict<\/i>\u00a0are something like prison breaks themselves\u2014chances for this fundamentally religious author to elude the conventions of the secular genres into which he\u2019d been impressed. Now that those genres have gone largely extinct, his memoir may have finally found a body of readers willing to appreciate it for what it is: a book of prophecy rather than, as Reed might have put it, \u201ca pack full of lies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and<\/em><\/em>\u00a0Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n