Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Updated: Aug 8
Cudjo Lewis, whose African name was Oluale Kossola, was the last surviving African of the last slaver, the Clotilda, known to have made the transatlantic journey. His purchase, along with 129 other captives, was made possible by four Americans: the Meaher brothers, Jim, Tim, and Burns, and Captain William “Bill” Foster, and the King of Dahomey, King Ghezo, who had long concentrated his resources on providing slaves for the foreign market. After a 70-day voyage from the port of Ouidah (in present-day Benin), Cudjo and the others landed at Mobile Bay in August 1859—fully 50 years after the slave trade was outlawed. Having survived capture at the hands of Dahomian warriors, the barracoons of Ouidah, and the Middle Passage, Cudjo spent five and a half years as a slave before Union soldiers told him he was free.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston, who had only recently graduated from Barnard College, and was not yet the famous novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist she would become a decade later, traveled to Plateau (nee Africatown), Alabama to conduct a series of interviews over a three-month period with Cudjo Lewis. Cudjo was not always a willing subject, but Hurston persisted, and the story she captured is one filled with loss, longing, and loneliness—for his native Africa, for the life that was stolen from him, for his wife and children who all passed before him.
This is a grisly, harrowing read, full of tragedy and trauma. But it is also one of hope, of love, of nobility, of understanding, of peace. As Alice Walker writes in her foreword, “Here is the medicine: That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and medicines as we go. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.”
Sadly, this book was never published before Cudjo’s death in 1935. Though ready for publication in 1931, Viking and other publishers balked at the use of dialect for Cudjo’s narrative. Hurston considered his vernacular both vital and authenticating and would not submit to such revision. Cudjo’s words would have to wait another 87 years before they would reach the public—ironically he was just a year shy of that mark when Hurston sat down to record his story all those decades ago.
Comments