Direct reported speech has been described as serving many functions in stories, such as increasing vividness, creating authenticity, and enhancing audience involvement. Drawing on Bamberg's model of positioning and focusing on reported exchanges, we argue that through its "constructed sequentiality" and its use of discourse strategies, direct reported speech also enacts power relations as they are constructed between the story characters in the referential world. This, of course, has implications for the function of these reported exchanges in the interview world and the construction of the interviewee's moral position in relation to the local and global context. In particular, we focus on reported exchanges in narratives about slavery. First, we discuss fragments in which hegemonic power asymmetries between protagonists in stories are talked into being. Second, we focus on a lengthy story in which a slave is constructed as the powerful interlocutor whose discursive rights surpass those typical of his social category. As such, the nonessentialist nature of this discursive construction of power within the referential world is foregrounded, and it is also demonstrated that reported exchanges can have many diverse functions within the interview setting. (Contains 1 table and 7 footnotes.)