The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano (books to read for teens .TXT) π
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In the mid 1700s, around the age of eleven, Olaudah Equiano and his sister were kidnapped from their village in equatorial Africa and sold to slavers. Within a year he was aboard a European slave ship on his way to the Caribbean. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published by the author in 1789 and is part adventure story, part treatise on the corrupting power of slavery, and part tract about the transformative powers of Christianity.
Equianoβs story takes him from Africa to the Americas, back across the Atlantic to England, into the Mediterranean, and even north to the ice packs, on a mission to discover the North-East passage. He fights the French in the Seven Yearβs War, is a mate and merchant in the West Indies, and eventually becomes a freedman based in London.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first popular slave narratives and was reprinted eight times in the authorβs lifetime. While modern scholars value this account as an important source on the life of the eighteenth-century slave and the transition from slavery to freedom, it remains an important literary work in its own right. As a valuable part of the African and African-American canons, it is still frequently taught in both English and History university courses.
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- Author: Olaudah Equiano
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Once, for a few days, I was let out to fit a vessel, and I had no victuals allowed me by either party; at last I told my master of this treatment, and he took me away from it. In many of the estates, on the different islands where I used to be sent for rum or sugar, they would not deliver it to me, or any other negro; he was therefore obliged to send a white man along with me to those places; and then he used to pay him from six to ten pisterines a day. From being thus employed, during the time I served Mr. King, in going about the different estates on the island, I had all the opportunity I could wish for to see the dreadful usage of the poor men; usage that reconciled me to my situation, and made me bless God for the hands into which I had fallen.
I had the good fortune to please my master in every department in which he employed me; and there was scarcely any part of his business, or household affairs, in which I was not occasionally engaged. I often supplied the place of a clerk, in receiving and delivering cargoes to the ships, in tending stores, and delivering goods: and, besides this, I used to shave and dress my
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