Though the narrator's voice in the notices can seem all-powerful and overwhelming, it is equally often the case that the voice of the slaves can be heard, although it is generally reported in indirect speech and thus truncated. The runaway slave 'says', 'does not say', 'gives an account of himself', 'declares', 'tells', 'told' or 'will tell a story', or stories. In the notices he speaks mostly of imprisonment or arrest, often there are transcripts or adaptations of depositions, voluntary or obtained by force. This, for instance, is the statement of a young African slave, recently imported into South Carolina:  
Committed to the Work-House,
AS RUNAWAYS :
[...]
An African Boy, of the Congo nation, taken up by the city guard [...]. The Boy accounts of himself (as from an interpreter) is that he was stolen from the wharf with another of the same age, that they arrived here in a ship commanded by a capt. Clark, a French gentleman; when taken from the wharf he was clothed in a red flannel shirt, blue trowsers and a blue cap.
[...]
Daniel Ward, M. W. H.
August 2 (Charleston Courier, 2 August 1808).  
Unfortunately it is not enough to change back the personal pronouns [he and I] to hear the words actually spoken by the slave. In this case his words are doubly indirect, first translated by an interpreter and then summarized and reported by the prison guard, Daniel Ward. It is unlikely that the slave would have used the words 'flannel' or 'gentleman', but it is perfectly possible on the other hand that he would have remembered the name of the captain of the slave ship on which he crossed the Atlantic, a Frenchman named Clark, though we can assume the name was either misheard or spelled wrongly. The slave is speaking, relating the sequence of events, taking the role of narrator. And like all narrators, he makes temporal choices: first he relates being stolen, then, in a flashback, refers to his Atlantic crossing and arrival in Charleston, before coming back to the moment he was stolen to describe his clothes.