Venture Smith (–1805)

Venture Smith sounds like a 1930s comic hero! In reality Venture was a native of West Africa, born around 1729, who was taken by slave traders as a young boy across the broad waters to a master on Long Island. According to Wikipedia, "Out of almost 12 million African captives who embarked on the Middle Passage to the Americas, only about a dozen left behind first-hand accounts of their experiences," making this one of the earliest slave narratives and early writings by an African-American. Considering how old it is, it reads easily enough though is short on detail. In outline it is similar to Roots with the boy snatched from a jungle village by slave traders, abuse and whippings by a cruel master and his capricious white wife, the selling off and breaking up of slave families, and finally able to buy his freedom and establish himself as an independent farmer. There are many tragedies that go by in a sentence or two. It's not really a book, more like a pamphlet presumably produced under the influence of the abolitionist movement.… (meer)