A Narrative of Events: Since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Laborer in Jamaica

A teenaged slave-turned-apprentice in nineteenth-century Jamaica recorded his experiences in the British apprenticeship system in this book, which constitutes one of the only autobiographical texts by a Caribbean slave. While working as a laborer at a pimento plantation in the St. Ann parish, James Williams suffered flogging, imprisonment, and other punishments. His narrative reveals the ugly truth behind the apprenticeship system that developed after the outlaw of the British slave trade, ...