Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

                Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" is the book Zora Neale Hurston was never able to publish. She originally interviewed Cudjo Lewis at the behest of Dr. Franz Boas. Her report was meant for the Journal of Negro History. She would return and interview him over three months at his home in Alabama, learning of his journey from Africa, his life in bondage and his eventual freedom.

                This book is told through the words of Oluale Kossola, the man history now knows as Cudjo Lewis. He had been in the United States for over sixty years at the time this interview took place. Hurston tells this story with little of her own interjections and this allowed his passion for his home to come through. Regardless of the time that had passed, he still valued the memories of being in “Affica.” It was heartbreaking to read his story, to read his description of what life was like in Takkoi. His father a chief, his mother the second wife, his siblings with him always. Then the deaths that took place when the Dahomey came and captured so many, taking them to the ships that would eventually take them to America. Then the realization that he was no longer a free man, in a land he had never known. Only to be given his freedom and have no way of returning home.

                I appreciated the fact that Hurston allowed his words to shine through, inflections and all. It grounded Kossola’s story in a brutal reality. To know and remember your home and to find yourself in a land so brutal and so foreign from your own is heart-wrenching. This is a really short book but it highlights the brutality of the slave trade. And not just the transatlantic journey, Kossola’s capture and separation from all he knew was bloody and disturbing. I would recommend this book. This narrative told by a man who was once enslaved that includes his life in Africa is rare. The introduction to this book holds quite a bit of information, most regarding a controversy regarding the original report on Cudjo, and accusations of plagiarism on behalf of Hurston.  
             But overall, I enjoyed this, as a biography. This book was much less about Hurston's beautiful prose and narrative and more about a man stripped from his home, chained and eventually freed.  I can’t stress how important that is and how mind-blowing the circumstances are when you consider the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade was supposed to have been abolished. And yet, the Clotilda made its passage and here we have the story of Cudjo.

Now it must be stated that not everything in this book is accurate. Later research into the story of the Clotilda and Cudjo Lewis, will show that some of what is written was based off the research that Hurston conducted at the time. Research not available to her corrects certain aspects of the story, like the name of the town Cudjo was from, and aspects of the tribe that captured him. Nothing, that I know of, disproves the facts of his experiences as relayed to Hurston and described in this book. 

Thank you Edelweiss for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.