Southern History Book of the Month: Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

by Mary Anne Ellis, Southern History Department, Central Library

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Zora Neale Hurston
Edited by Deborah G. Plant
Foreword by Alice Walker

Fans of author Zora Neale Hurston are generally most familiar with her famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God or with her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road.

But another work by Hurston has just been published, even though it was originally written in the 1920s. This was when Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama—also known as Africatown—to interview Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor to have crossed the ocean in the slave ship Clotilda. Like many of his unfortunate brothers and sisters during the nineteenth century, Lewis was abducted from his homeland and faced the harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic until he arrived in Alabama and was sold as a slave. His original name, Oluale Kossula, was taken from him and he was given the new name of Cudjo Lewis. Hurston movingly recounts an early meeting and his response to being addressed as Kossula:

Cudjo Lewis

It was summer when I went to talk with Cudjo so his door was standing wide open . . . I
hailed him by his African name as I walked up the steps to his porch, and he looked up into my face as I stood in the door in surprise. He was eating his breakfast from a round enameled pan in his hands, in the fashion of his fatherland.

The surprise of seeing me halted his hand between pan and face. Then tears of joy welled up.

“Oh, Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me my name from cross de water but you. You always callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!”

During that summer and autumn of 1927, Hurston slowly coaxed out of Lewis the story of his capture and enslavement, his response to Emancipation, and his part in the founding of Africatown: “We call our village Affican Town. We say dat’ cause we want to go back in de Affica soil and we see we cain go. Derefo’ we make de Affica where dey fetch us . . . We here and we got to stay.”

Door of No Return

Throughout the numerous interviews, Hurston follows her instincts as an anthropologist and insists on recording Lewis’ responses exactly as he gives them, in the dialect of English that he speaks. During an early attempt to publish the manuscript, Hurston ran into difficulties; the publisher wanted her to revise his spoken words to “language rather than dialect,” and her refusal to do so may be one reason why she faced multiple rejections, especially during the early days of the Great Depression when no publisher was willing to risk losing money on any book that was not certain to be a popular hit. But by allowing Lewis to tell his own story in his own voice, Hurston captures his terror of crossing the ocean, his bitter homesickness at the prospect of never seeing Africa again, and his sadness as he faces multiple tragedies such as the deaths of his wife and children. At times he is so overwhelmed with grief at his recollections that he insists Hurston go away and come back later. And she does—steadily, relentlessly, patiently, until she sets down the entire story of his life. Barracoon is a remarkable chronicle of one man’s survival in the face of almost unimaginable suffering during one of the darkest periods of American history.

For further information:
“Zora Neale Hurston’s Story of a Former Slave Finally Comes to Print”
Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
Slave Ship Clotilda
Wreck of the Clotilda Has Not Been Found
Africatown, Alabama
The Legacy of Cudjo Lewis
Zora Neale Hurston Field Work 1928