Abstract
This article argues that The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the earliest known prison memoir by an African American, is an adaptation of the prototypical adventure narrative, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Through his retelling, Reed constructs a counter-narrative that revises the straightforward relationality between literacy and personhood. A self-fashioned Robinson in a world who treats him like Friday, Reed lays out with painstaking vividness the development of double-consciousness and the consequent criminalization of agency. The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict marks a new addition to the archive of the African-Americanization of British literature and resonates with the crisis of mass incarceration in the USA today.
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Notes
Reed exhibits recurrent preferentiality towards white skin. For instance, on seeing his friend Strongman whipped by prison authorities, he writes: “Reader, could you told the feelings of my heart and mind as I sat there, wrapped in fountains of tears? Could you told my sympathies as I look upon that beautiful milk white skin of Strongman’s, Who wants to be lash and stripes like a slave, and that innocently, too, for that which he knew nothing at all about” (61).
See Christopher Span, “Educational and Social Reforms for African-American Juvenile Delinquents in 19th Century New York City and Philadelphia” (2002) and Shane White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue our Honest Callings’: Free Blacks in New York City, 1783–1810” (1988) for more on the minimal presence of African Americans in correctional settings in the nineteenth century.
For more on literacy as white property, see Janet Cornelius, When I can read my title clear (1991); Leah Price “Reading: The State of the Discipline” (2004); and Catherine Prendergast, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education (2003). Janet Cornelius notes that, despite higher levels of literacy than is often accounted for among African Americans in the nineteenth century, literacy still became white property and African-American literacy was relegated to the realm of the taboo. The sweeping extent of anti-literacy laws, which according to Cornelius were rarely enforced, are exaggerated, yet the legal power that whites held nonetheless cannot be ignored. Catherine Prendergast and Leah Price contend that the ideology of literacy helped to foster the conception of white nationhood.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 26.
Ibid., 26.
Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” 146.
Watt, “Robinson Crusoe as Myth,” 95.
Ibid., 288.
McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 334.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 25.
“The sovereign, in the broadest sense of the term, is he who has the right and strength to be and be recognized as himself, the same, properly the same as himself” (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 66).
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 4.
These external constraints are imposed primarily by what Deborah Brandt calls literacy sponsors, which are “agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who teach, model, support, recruit, extort, deny, or suppress literacy and gain advantage by it in some way” (166). Some key examples of literacy sponsors include the church and the state. In Reed’s case, the literacy sponsors were the correctional authorities.
See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power;” & Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”.
Fuleihan, “The Criminal State in Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict.”.
See Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” (1984).
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 394.
Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination, ix.
Bender, “The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary,” 395.
Adaptations included titles as varied as J Spraggles Schoolboy Edition (1860), Robinson Crusoe; or, Friday and the Fairies! A pantomime, etc. (1868), Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable (1882), Perseverance Island: or the Robinson Crusoe of the Nineteenth Century (1884), and Little Miss Robinson Crusoe (1898). In some of these versions, such as Little Miss Robinson Crusoe, Robinson’s middle-class character is transformed to speak for more disempowered groups. In other versions, such as Friday and the Fairies!, Robinson’s white male privilege is threatened by the emphasis on previously marginalized figures—the final line of Friday and the Fairies! is “Don’t forget about poor Robinson!” Many adaptations of Robinson Crusoe consequently spoke to the ways in which cultural adaptations were a platform for imagining social mobility.
Virginia Woolf points out the centrality of Robinson’s role as colonizer, stating in her essay on the novel that Robinson “thinks of Nature, the fields and grass, and full of very fine woods, but the important thing about a wood is that it harbours an abundance of parrots who may be tamed and taught to speak.” Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe,” 285.
See John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth (2009), for more on the associations between dominion and language.
Hack, Reaping Something New, 5. Hack goes against the Gatesian tradition, which claims African-American literature is unique and separate, and he instead argues that it is in dialogue with mainstream Western literature from both sides of the Atlantic (7).
See The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, pp. 89–90. In the notes, Caleb Smith suggests the likelihood that Reed composes the poem from memory, as there are substantial changes in the phrasing and the ordering of the lines (264).
See the epilogue of Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New (2016) for more on England representing a space void of racial prejudice.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 111.
Reed’s interpretation of Robinson Crusoe as a history is suggested several times on pp. 25–26 when he refers to it in those terms. His later denunciations of novel reading seem to corroborate this.
Caleb Smith discovers the process of verifying the author’s identity in the New York State archives by using the author’s handwriting. He was an actual prisoner, though Austin Reed was a pseudonym and his actual name was Rob Reed (Introduction to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, xvi).
For more on prolix eighteenth-century titles, see Peter Garside et al., The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 3.
Smith, Introduction to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, xvii.
Ibid., 4–5.
Ibid., 3.
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 4.
In Chapter II, Reed describes getting in trouble and being sent upstairs to bed: “She order me off to bed, where I turned in and slept away the gloomy hours of the night. It was a long time after breakfast before I arose and went down stairs” (5).
Reed describes studying the Bible, yet this does not necessarily mean much, as people often “studied” the Bible without having much ability to read. His mother gave him a pocket bible and wrote a little prayer in it for him to learn. Notes Reed, “After reading a few of its contents I closed the little book, and have never opened it from that day to this” (9). Given that he is only six years old at the time he is first sent to the House of Refuge, his reading skills were only rudimentary at best at this point.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 18.
Ibid., 103. Reed mentions this was the first time he held a gun and his sole purpose was to protect the “virtuous female.” He is sent back to jail nonetheless. Here, the reliability of the narrator is also something to take into account, and his lack of specificity about his other crimes makes his reliability all the more of a question.
Ibid., 125.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 118.
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 8.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 15.
Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900, 28–29.
Brown & Smith, “In for Doom: Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict.”.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 26.
Ibid., 48.
Bender, “The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary,” 398–399.
Ibid., 398.
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 49.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 83.
Though Reed usually finds solace in the Bible, his relationship with the text is at times a fraught one. When an officer orders him to read the Bible to reflect on his poor conduct, Reed writes, “I took my bible from my shelf, and with all my might I dash it to the floor and pick it up and tore it in a thousand pieces and tramp the leaves under my feet” (163). Immediately after doing this, however, he fears God’s judgment and condemnation.
For instance, the following lines from the Lamentations excerpt chosen by Reed mirror his own narrative:
2. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness but not into light.
6. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.
53. They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me.
See Cassie LeGette’s Remaking Romanticism, particularly the introduction, for a more thorough history on the recirculation of texts in nineteenth-century literature.
Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, 224.
Overton, “The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict by Austin Reed Review- The First African American Prison Memoir.”.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 24–25.
See Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Though anti-literacy laws forbid many African Americans from learning to read and write, oral performative forms of literacy were encouraged through the propagation of black face and minstrelsy. Mr. Wood’s choice to teach Reed to read and write for the purpose of performing on the stage is an unlikely combination, given the binary separation of written and oral forms of literacy in nineteenth century culture. Thus, in some ways Mr. Wood’s thinking is forward for its time, despite the oppression still inherent within it. For a more detailed discussion of minstrelsy and the construction of racial identity, see Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 22.
Reed first gets an education at the House of Refuge, which was an early form of juvenile detention that many (Including Alex de Toqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in 1831) saw as more rehabilitative than prisons. However, many insiders exposed the corruption inside.
Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, 563.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 26.
Ibid., 21.
Robinson inhabits his abode upon developing paranoia that he is being watched. He writes, “I fancy’d my self now like one of the ancient Giants, which are said to live in Caves, and Holes, in the Rocks, where none could come at them; for I perswaded my self while I was here, if five hundred Savages were to hunt me, they could never find me out; or if they did, they would not venture to attack me here” (130).
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 25–26.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 27. Here Reed’s narrative closely aligns itself with the theme of literacy as freedom in slave narratives. Like Douglass, Reed relies on the assistance of others to acquire literacy.
Ibid., 28–29.
Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 25.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 39.
Ibid., 39. Reed describes “cats,” which were devices used to inflict physical punishment: “Reader, these cats are made out of cat gut with a small knot made at the ends of them and wound around with a small wire, then rubbed well with shoe maker’s wax and attach to a piece of rattan that has a pretty good spring to it, so as when the officer strikes, it leaves a deep cut in the back, casing the tender skin to burst while the blood flows freely down the back from the cuts it leaves, leaving the back entirely striped with red” (40–41).
Caleb Smith identifies Metamora as the play that is being reenacted in the footnotes (255).
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 44.
For more on sentimental racism, see Caleb Smith’s introduction to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 44–45.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 45.
Claude Meillassoux in Slavery and Social Death (Patterson 1982).
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 196.
Ibid., 196.
Ibid.,127.
For more on this spiritual conception of home as nativity in slave narratives, see Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1992).
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 90.
Here, again, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict bears parallels with Frederick Douglass’s narrative, in which the sea serves as a prominent metaphor for freedom.
Ibid., 90.
The final lines of Cowper’s poem, omitted from the recitation by Reed, allude to the abolition of British slavery. While the slave trade was terminated in Great Britain in 1807, the Slavery Abolition Act was not passed until 1833. Cowper was imagining its occurrence half a century earlier:
That BRITANNIA, renown'd o'er the waves,
For the hatred she ever has shown.
To the black-scepter'd rulers of slaves,
Resolves to have none of her own.
Smith, Introduction to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, xli.
Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, 91.
Ibid., 102.
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 198–204.
Ibid., 206–207 (emphasis mine).
Ibid., 218.
Davis & Gates, The Slave’s Narrative, xxvi–xxvii.
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Kling, R. “THE MASTER OF A PEN:” Rewriting Robinson Crusoe in the Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict. J Transatl Stud 20, 251–273 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-022-00099-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-022-00099-0
Keywords
- Counter-narrative
- Robinson Crusoe
- Incarceration
- Literacy
- African-American