Arline Wilson
University of Delaware
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Delaware, working on my dissertation, “Haunting in Plain View: Textual Ghosts and Cultural Hauntings and Reading Eruptions in 19th-Century African American Literature and American Culture.” My scholarship examines eruptions of gothic language in 19th-century African American texts and analyzes why authors turned to gothic language to articulate experiences and trauma specific to African American lived realities. My dissertation advisors are Dr. Jeannie Pfaelzer, Professor of English, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Studies at the University of Delaware and Dr. John Ernest, English Department Chair, University of Delaware.
On July 19th, 1833, a ten-year-old African American boy named Austin Reed was arrested for arson against the property of Mr. Herman Ladd, a wealthy farmer in New York (Reed 224). Reed, who was indentured to Ladd, set fire to the home in retaliation for Ladd brutally beating Reed. Reed, a free black child, claimed Ladd strung him up in the barn, whipped him like a slave, and left him hanging in the hot barn for several hours. The law, however, sided with the white, wealthy farmer. On September 19th, 1833, Reed was sentenced to serve a ten-year prison term at the New York House of Refuge, the first juvenile prison in the United States. His incarceration institutionally orphaned Reed, who would not see his mother for nine years, and exposed him to some of the most inhumane physical abuses, psycho-spiritual tortures, and penal experimentation available in 19th-century America. Completed in 1858, Reed’s text, The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, is the only known 19th-century convict narrative written by an African American. Recalling his childhood terror of physical and psychological torture, Reed writes: “Horrors, horrors, horrors, eternal horror of horrors . . .” (155).
Turning to scholars, such as Colin Dayan in The Law is a White Dog, Caleb Smith in The Prison and the American Imagination, and Jeannine DeLombard’s In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, whose works examine the law’s transformative powers to establish, retract, and erase civil, personal, and human identity, this essay will examine the devastating human toll of living-death status on the child convict and proposes the concept of the anti-childhood. Raised in state captivity, imprisoned in carceral warehouses, confined to living coffins, and forced into long hours of labor in prison factories without pay, Reed’s imprisonment exemplifies the epitome of the anti-childhood. My essay will analyze how race, socioeconomic, and civil death status of the child convict coalesce and exiled and rendered him or her politically irrelevant, subjected to unspeakable tortures, abuses, exploitations and cruelty behind prison walls and beyond the periphery of the dominant culture moral surveillance. For example, how does the inclusion of the anti-childhood and living death status of the child-convict force scholars to reconfigure our historical and conceptual approach to 19th-century American teleologies of individual, psychological and national development? What does it mean for Reed to be raised by white surrogate fathers, agents of the state, charged with incarcerating and torturing him and exploiting his labor? Reed’s text delineates the life cycle of living death—the anti-childhood—from the perspective of the black child and the life long consequences of personal, social, and historical invisibility. His narrative exposes “the haunt of the self made extinct” through civil death and what it means to be a haunted convict, haunted by the man he would never become (Dayan 20).
