The Man Who Bought His Freedom — Olaudah Equiano

A London street, 1789. A man in his mid-forties walks door to door with a leather satchel of bound books. He is collecting subscriptions. The book in his satchel is his own life. He wrote it. He published it himself. He is selling it one reader at a time, in coffeehouses and dissenting chapels and the parlors of abolitionists, because he has been doing the difficult thing by himself since he was eleven years old and sees no reason to stop now.

He does not ask for the sale. He presents the evidence.

It is 1789.

He does not just survive. He learns. Kidnapped from West Africa, by his own account, at age eleven, sold into the Atlantic trade, passed from ship to ship and owner to owner across Virginia and the Caribbean and the British Navy, he learns to read, to navigate, to negotiate, to survive every system built to erase him by mastering it well enough to use it.

He does not just learn. He earns. By 1766 he has saved enough money from trading on the side to buy his own freedom from a Quaker merchant. The price is forty pounds. He has the forty pounds. He pays it. He walks out free.

He does not just earn. He writes. Twenty-three years after buying his freedom, he publishes The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He sells it by subscription. It goes through nine editions in his lifetime. Members of Parliament read it. When Britain abolishes the slave trade in 1807, his book is among the documents the debate has been built on.

His Spark of Liberty was ownership of his own story. The conviction that a man who has been made into property has the right, when he has bought back his freedom, to become the author of his own life, to set it down in his own words, and to put it in front of every person who needs to read it, even if he has to sell it coffeehouse by coffeehouse himself.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

By his own account, he was kidnapped from a village in West Africa at age eleven, survived the Atlantic slave trade, and spent years earning the forty pounds it cost to buy his own life back. Then he wrote a book about it. The book outlasted the trade it helped dismantle.

His name was Olaudah Equiano.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

www.NowWeKnowEm.com

#NowWeKnowEm #SparksOfLiberty #TurningPointPress #QuietHands #AfricanHistory #Abolitionism #NarrativeLiterature