The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
by Zora Neale Hurston
From the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God comes a landmark publication—a never-before-published work of the American experience, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Alice Walker.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to visit eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda, the last slaver known to have made the transatlantic journey. Illegally brought to the United States, Cudjo was enslaved fifty years after the slave trade was outlawed.
At the time, Cudjo was the only person alive who could recount this integral part of the nation’s history. As a cultural anthropologist, Hurston was eager to hear about these experiences firsthand. But the reticent elder didn’t always speak when she came to visit. Sometimes he would tend his garden, repair his fence, or appear lost in his thoughts.
Hurston persisted, though, and during an intense three-month period, she and Cudjo communed over her gifts of peaches and watermelon, and gradually Cudjo, a poetic storyteller, began to share heartrending memories of his childhood in Africa; the attack by female warriors who slaughtered his townspeople; the horrors of being captured and held in the barracoons of Ouidah for selection by American traders; the harrowing ordeal of the Middle Passage aboard the Clotilda as “cargo” with more than one hundred other souls; the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War; and finally his role in the founding of Africatown.
Barracoon employs Hurston’s skills as both an anthropologist and a writer, and brings to life Cudjo’s singular voice, in his vernacular, in a poignant, powerful tribute to the disremembered and the unaccounted. This profound work is an invaluable contribution to our history and culture.
About Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Huston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. She was the author of four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935; and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); and more than fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University, and graduated from Barnard College in 1927. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She died in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at Hurston’s grave site with this epitaph: Zora Neale Hurston: “A Genius of the South.”
Deborah G. Plant is an African American literature and Africana studies scholar and literary critic whose special interest is the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston.
Alice Walker is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple.
Photo courtesy Barbara Hurston Lewis, Faye Hurston, and Lois Gaston
Praise for Zora Neale Hurston
“Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”
— Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple
“That Zora Neale Hurston should find and befriend Cudjo Lewis, the last living man with firsthand memory of capture in Africa and captivity in Alabama, is nothing shy of a miracle. Barracoon is a testament to the enormous losses millions of men, women and children endured in both slavery and freedom—a story of urgent relevance to every American, everywhere.”
— Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars and Wade in the Water
“Barracoon reinforces what those of us who love Hurston’s work have known all along: her keen intellect and curiosity was only surpassed by her genuine empathy for her subjects. This book is not just an account of one man’s survival in the face of atrocity, it’s a celebration of language and tradition; a clear labor of love.”
— Angela Flournoy, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Turner House
“Barracoon is a powerful, breathtakingly beautiful, and at times, heart wrenching, account of one man’s story, eloquently told in his own language. Zora Neale Hurston gives Kossola control of his narrative— a gift of freedom and humanity. It completely reinforces for me the fact that Zora Neale Hurston was both a cultural anthropologist and a truly gifted, and compassionate storyteller, who sat in the sometimes painful silence with Kossola and the depth and breadth of memory as a slave. Such is a narrative filled with emotions and histories bursting at the intricately woven seams.”
— Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun
In the News
A Work by Zora Neale Hurston Will Finally Be Published
New York Times - May 1, 2018
The Last Slave
Vulture - April 29, 2018
Wreckage of Last Known Slave Ship in U.S. May Have Been Found
New York Times - January 24, 2018
Descendants’ Stories of the Clotilda Slave Ship Drew Doubts. Now Some See Validation
New York Times - January 25, 2018
Deborah Plant on Barracoon
Between the Lines: Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 6:30 p.m.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Langston Hughes Auditorium
New York, NY
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"