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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston Randy J. Sparks Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Amistad, 2018. 208 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-0627-4820-1. Once largely forgotten, Alabama native Zora Neale Hurston is now widely regarded as a "genius of the South," as writer Alice Walker put it, and her best-known works are now featured on college syllabi across the country. A new book by her is a major event, and Barracoon is sure to join Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on any list of her most important works. The book grew out of a series of interviews she conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis or Kossola, as he was known in his Yoruba homeland. Lewis was a survivor of the Clotilda, the last African slaver to arrive in the United States, which landed outside Mobile in 1860. When she completed the manuscript in 1931, Viking Press expressed interest, but only if she rewrote Cudjo's distinctive English to make it more palatable to white readers, something she refused to do. She shopped it around to other publishers, but none were willing to publish it without those revisions. As a result, the manuscript went unpublished and remained in Hurston's papers until now. There can be little doubt that Hurston was right to refuse those publishers' demands, for Lewis's voice is a powerful one and fundamental to the book's success. Lewis was not an easy subject—sometimes he was willing to talk, but other times he was more reticent, more interested in weeding [End Page 246] his garden than in taking questions from Hurston who bribed him with cured ham and other treats. His story is a remarkable one. Even though over twelve million Africans crossed the Atlantic as victims of the international slave trade, firsthand accounts of African captivity and the Middle Passage are extremely rare, making Lewis's narrative an invaluable historical document. He was captured during a bloody military conflict between the kingdom of Dahomey and the Isha, a small sub-group of the Yoruba to which he belonged. Once the Dahomey army captured his hometown, he and the other captives were marched to the coast and sold from the port of Ouidah, located on the Bight of Benin, a major entrepot in the illegal slave trade of the nineteenth century. United States shippers played an important role in that trade, but primarily in voyages to Cuba and Brazil. There are only thirty recorded voyages to the U.S. mainland from the closing of the trade in 1808 until 1860 when the Clotilda landed its human cargo. The expedition was the brainchild of the three Meaher brothers, Jim, Tim, and Burns, who operated a shipyard on the Alabama River, and a business associate, Captain William Foster, who was listed as the ship's owner. After a difficult voyage Foster arrived at Ouidah and negotiated for the purchase of 130 captives, equally divided between men and women, but he was forced to sail with only 116 onboard (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives a lower number of 110 captives). He narrowly avoided capture by British naval cruisers and successfully crossed the Atlantic without a single loss of life. When the ship arrived in Mobile Bay, it sailed to an isolated located where it was burned and the captives were transferred to a steamboat and taken up the Alabama River to a plantation. (After years of searching, the remains of the ship were discovered in May 2019.) Some of the enslaved Africans were sold, the rest divided between the Meahers and Foster. According to Hurston, the Meahers were tried and convicted in federal court and fined for their role in the expedition, though in fact they and Foster were tried and acquitted. When Kossola, renamed Cudjo, and the other enslaved Africans learned that they had been freed in 1865, they dreamed of [End Page 247] returning to Africa, but lacked the means to do so. They demanded land from Meaher, who scoffed at that demand, but agreed to...