Borders and Betrayal in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: Rethinking Truths and Facts in the American Slave Narrative

Abstract

Due to skepticism about authenticity, facts became a central trope in the American slave-narrative genre. Authors bolstered their credibility by emphasizing factual details about the barbarity of enslavement on Southern plantations. Based on interviews conducted with Cudjo Lewis, believed to be the last known surviving African slave in America, Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published Barracoon expands the slave narrative’s borders by unpacking the ramifications of transnational betrayal. Lewis’s harrowing memory of the African culprits who captured and sold him to white slave traders complicates the slave narrative’s adherence to facts. Although the transatlantic slave trade, created and operated by Europeans and Americans, was a greater evil than the slave-trading practices carried out by Africans, Lewis’s betrayal by his own African neighbours reveals an existential trauma often ignored by the facts of slave narratives. Barracoon is Hurston as her most subversive, choosing to explore the unresolved complications of a truthful lived experience instead of the clarifying comfort of contained facts.