James Stout

Yeah.

It's really powerful.

Yeah.

I do really recommend reading it because among other things, it's just, there's a lot, I mean, the early portions of the book are just a lot about life in that part of Africa at the time that you're not going to run into a lot of firsthand accounts of.

No, it's interesting.

Yeah.

I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.

At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.

We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

So again, within this horrible situation, he gets crazy lucky again because the next person to buy him is a Quaker.

And again, most – a lot of Quakers are anti-slavery.

This guy, Robert King, clearly isn't totally against slavery, but he's also still a Quaker, right?

And he's like a merchant or something.

I don't know exactly what he's there to do, but –

He sees he once recognizes, wow, this kid is smart as hell.

And he's he already speaks a ton of languages.

There's a lot I can have him do.

So King starts having Equiano work a bunch of different jobs.

And he starts like basically assigning him out to like subcontract him with other guys.

And some of these guys are like fairly decent and are like, hey, what if we hired you to do extra side work and pay you personally for it?