Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

Back in 1927 and 1928, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston interviewed a man called Cudjo Lewis in Africatown, Alabama. The elderly Lewis, whose birth name was Kossola, had been captured in 1860 in his native Africa, in what is now Benin, and transported aboard the very last slave ship to Louisiana. In 1927, he held the tragic distinction of being the last known survivor of those "cargo" who had been aboard. Hurston visited Lewis and, over the course of several months, recorded his fascinating show more but heartbreaking history, but she was unable to find a publisher willing to include either Lewis' speech as transcribed or descriptions of Africans' own involvement in the slave trade, and the book's release was aborted — until 2018.

It feels awkward to express affection for a book whose roots lie in dehumanizing hardship and misery, but I truly treasure this book and what it contributes to history. Lewis had an amazing memory, and the reader will be astounded at the level of detail he was able to recall, well into his late eighties, about his early life and his native culture. Hurston's patience and kindness shine during times when Lewis didn't feel like opening up because he had to mend a fence or work in the garden, as well as on the days when the heaviness of his losses overwhelm him to the extent that he was unable to speak at all. The scenes in which they just sit around eating peaches are so heartwarmingly wholesome. This is a quick, insightful read, and once you recognize the patterns, Lewis' speech is not difficult at all to understand, so it's unfortunate that was a reason given for it not having been published nearly 100 years ago. Highly recommended. show less

My interest sagged toward the middle, and I almost decided this was a book to be tasted, not wholly read. But then Janie, Tea Cup, and the others in the ‘Glades failed to take the departure of the Seminoles seriously, nor their warning of an approaching hurricane. From then on, I couldn’t stop.
Janie irritated me in the first half of the book; life seemed to her a choice between lying under a flowering pear tree or being some man’s mule. Not that I failed to understand her preference show more for the one over the other, but was there no third option?
Her relationship with her third husband, Tea Cup, finally offered that third option: a chance to combine autonomy with responsibility, a love based on mutual respect. This is despite an unpromising start when he makes off with her emergency money and disappears for two days. He is disarmingly open about his shortcomings, but this gives Janie her voice.
Another initial hurdle was easier for me to jump over. That was the orthography with which Hurston approximates the speech of Florida Blacks. It forced me to slow my reading pace, but that was not a bad thing: It freed me to read with the ear as well as the eye, revealing the creative and eloquent beauty of the spoken word.
The narrator’s voice differs from the dialog she reports, yet equals it in freshness and beauty. When Janie’s second marriage deteriorates, the narrator writes: “The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.” Further, “For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull.”
This book abounds with fresh imagery and unforgettable characters. It was well worth reading. show less

Barracoon is about a man named Cudjoe Lewis (nee Oluale Kossola), who at the time was the last known survivor of the Clotilda. This was a ship that was involved in bringing slaves from Africa to America at a time when slavery was still legal within the U.S. but transporting slaves from other countries was made illegal. After years of being a slave, Cudjoe lives through the Civil War and is freed. But his life is not all uphill there by a long shot. He and his family go through many show more sufferings, including the early deaths of his children. Some of his stories sadly still resonant today, such as the shooting of his youngest son by a police officer and the feeling of hopelessness he expresses of ever being able to see justice done. Nevertheless, Cudjoe is often times optimistic about his life.

This book originated from an article that Zora Neale Hurston wrote as an anthropologist; it is NOT a novel like her more famous Their Eyes Were Watching God. Despite Hurston interviewing the main subject in the late 1920s to early 1930s, this book was not published until 2018. One reason it was not published during Hurston's lifetime is that it is written in vernacular language; I could see this maybe being a bit of a hurdle reading in print but the audiobook narrator was so excellent that it wasn't a problem.

For the audiobook listener, this is a relatively quick read clocking in at about 4 hours long in total, and about 45 minutes to an hour at the top was an academic introduction. There were a couple of informative tidbits from that section, but it meandered for a bit too long about the origins of this work ... apparently there was a bit of controversy about Hurston not properly quoting some source material in the first article she wrote about Cudjoe. Robin Miles, the audiobook narrator, was wonderful all around. I felt like I was sitting down having a conversation with Cudjoe for the main part of the book; during the introduction, I felt like I was sitting in a college classroom listening to a really good lecturer.

All in all, this was a fascinating read. Cudjoe's ways of thinking are so open and honest; Hurston lets his voice come through on the page with little interference from herself except as a narrator coming to collect his stories. It's heart-breaking at times and occasionally humorous at other times. It may be far too many years late, but it's good his story is finally being told to a broader audience. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/barracoon-the-story-of-the-last-black-cargo-by-z...

it was written in 1927 and 1928 by the great Zora Neale Hurston, but published only in 2018, ninety years after it was written and more than half a century after she died. It’s an account of her interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, who was one of the last Africans to be captured, enslaved, and sold into the American South. About a third of the book describes his childhood and life in Africa. As show more a teenager, he was captured by the ruler of a neighbouring territory in 1860, and sold to an American slaver who brought him along with more than a hundred others to Mobile, Alabama. Importing slaves had supposedly been illegal since 1808, but one could politely describe the enforcement of the ban as rather patchy.

Kossola / Lewis’s slavery lasted only five years, as the South lost the Civil War and all slaves were freed. He and some of the other ex-slaves tried to raise enough money to return to Africa, but the odds were stacked against them, and in the end they formed a new community south of Mobile called Africatown (or Plateau). He married and had six children, all of whom he outlived. (He would have been in his late 80s when Hurston interviewed him.) One of his sons was shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy; nothing new there. He himself was severely injured in a railway accident in 1902; he sued the train company and won compensation, but the award was overturned on appeal.

There are questions about how much of the text is Hurston’s and how much by local Mobile writer Emma Langdon Roche, but there are no questions about the effective immediacy of the first-person account of slavery and its aftermath. Apparently one of the reasons that the book was not published in Hurston’s lifetime is that she reports Kossola/Lewis’s words in his own dialect; for me that adds to the impact. I was startled to discover that 40 seconds of footage of him survives at the start of a short film compiling Hurston’s fieldwork.

A really interesting and moving book. show less