Slave Narratives Mega Collection: 18 of the Most Moving & Telling Memoirs

Twelve Years a Slave, Up From Slavery, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The History of Mary Prince, The Life of an American Slave (Fifty Years in Chains), and more

By: Solomon Northrup, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet A. Jacobs, Mary Prince, Charles Ball, Thomas H. Jones, Phillis Wheatly, William H. Robinson, Louis Hughes, Elizabeth Keckley, Josiah Henson, Kate Pickard

Narrated by: Museum Audiobooks cast

Length: 115 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's Summary

This collection contains: Twelve Years a Slave, Up from Slavery, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, The Life of an American Slave (Fifty Years in Chains), The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery, Thirty Years a Slave, Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, The Life of Josiah Henson, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife "Vina" After Forty Years of Slavery, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher, Africa for Christ: Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, and The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman.

The slave narrative is a literary genre involving the autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans. A slave narrative gives an account of the life, or a portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave. It could be written or orally related by the slave personally. More than 6,000 such narratives are estimated to exist; the overwhelming majority of American slave narratives were authored by African Americans. 

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

this could've been good if only..

the narrator is so drone robot i can't pay attention AAAARGH these stories NEED to be told by someone good

Educational

The narrator was spectacular. The content was a necessary development in my own development as an African American female. For many years I have followed the prescribed teaching of the primary, secondary and higher institutions of learning. Now I am beginning to educate myself concerning the parallel history of my own racial heritage in America. A history not separate but is also a part of American History.

I wish it was authentic

I have taken the advice of others who have reviewed this recording and downloaded some of the individual narratives from LibriVox … not only is the quality SOOO much better but it is actually authentic !! This is edited for content ! I thought it was skipping or glitched but after listening to two entire narratives in here and two of the exact same there, this is edited and cut ! Dont waste time with the auto tuned voice reading this… move on to LibriVox ( oh, and it’s free there!)

Many, many incredible stories.

Many of these stories I knew nothing about, and quite a few are incredible. Much of the violence gets downplayed, but it's palpably there in the background as a constant threat.
Life in the 1800's is also described in detail, so I learned quite a bit about methods for collecting salt and fish.

"The entire ... the entire affair." This sort of repetition happens frequently in the affair, obviously intended to be edited out, but that audio editing was not done. However, the narrators did such a good job on such great stories that I can overlook it. I kept giving up on other books with duller stories to come back to this collection. I already plan to listen to it again. Still, an an audio editing pass would improve this.

Highly recommended. From my large Audible library, this is easily in the top ten. I would also recommend U S Grant's autobiography from the same time frame.

Is this read by a robot?

I thought this was a good deal, but it’s a horrible deal because it’s unlistenable. Cannot even listen to it— it sounds like it has been recorded by a robot/natural voice reader. I’m not convinced that it hasn’t, either. Better to download each of these books individually from LibriVox for free.

Kept interest throughout

I thought this might become a tedious listen but each story was different and captivating. And the many similarities in the slave experience were also interesting. It was definitely one of the poorer quality narrations I've listened to on Audible - much of it very robotic and it skipped to a different story in quite a few places! But even with this, it was definitely worth a listen. (If it skips, fast forward by a few minutes then skip back 30s at a time.)