What I Am Reading: "Barracoon" by Zora Neale Hurston

This, the first Zora Neale Hurston book I've read since high school, is an oral history, the transcription of interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, a.k.a. Kossola, in 1927. Kossola was the (not quite) last survivor of the last shipment of slaves to make the Middle Passage to the United States, long after the slave trade had been outlawed. The book couldn't find a publisher at the time, and was only published in 2018.

Hurston was a novelist and anthropologist of the Harlem Renaissance, and her interviews with Kossola are the follow-up to an earlier article she had written on him. He was also written about in other studies at the time - he had been taken prisoner on a slave raid in Africa, and crossed the ocean on the Clotilda, the last slave ship (archaeological excavations of which also started in 2018). After the Civil War and emancipation, the survivors of the ship formed Africatown, their own settlement near Mobile, Alabama. It was here that young Hurston came to interview Kossola in his late eighties.

One of the reasons that Hurston suggests in her introduction for the book's delayed publication (long after her death in 1960) may have been that Kossola's first-hand story, the bulk of the text, is transcribed in his dialect. I didn't find this difficult to read once I got started; but I did find it a bit uncomfortable, as I find it similar to the way that many southern white writers in the Jim Crow era and beyond portrayed African American speech. However, here Hurston is trying to legitimize it, and let Kossola tell his own story in his own voice, without the interference of the social scientist (though she did provide context both for their conversations and the historical accuracy of his reminisces).

Kossola's is the rare slave narrative that speaks of his time in Africa, where he was captured and sold into slavery at age 19. He was a member of the Isha subgroup of the Yoruba people, thus living roughly in modern Nigeria. A lot of his narrative, as recounted by Hurston, concerns his time in Africa. Kossola's father was an officer of their local king, and he recounts executions (tying the criminal to the body of the deceased), burial rituals (burying his father in the house itself), courtship (women with wealthy fathers being kept in luxury to grow larger), warrior training (weapons training, and hunting/tracking), and manhood initiation rituals (chasing an artificial noise out into the forest, followed by feasting). Each of these subjects receives its own little chapter. Eventually, the tribe is raided by the king of Dahomey, who has been tipped off to their usual combat style (fleeing into the bush, then returning in counter-attack). Many of Kossola's friends and family were killed, though he did not witness their deaths directly. He and his compatriots were marched through the jungle to Whydah on the coast, where they were held for months in a barracoon, or stockade/hut. Eventually, the Clotilda showed up, a slave-smuggling ship launched by the Meaher brothers of Maine (great job being complicit in slavery, New England mariners).

After crossing the Atlantic, dodging British patrols, the slaves were divided up, a few sold but most held by the Meahers or the ship's captain. Kossola was held by the captain, and cut sugarcane on his new plantation, as well as performing other menial tasks involved in shipping on the river, from 1860 until the Civil War ended in 1865. Following this, and his former owner's refusal to give any land to his freed slaves, he and the other Clotilda survivors purchased the land to form Africatown, a small community of former Africans near Mobile. This is covered in a couple of brief chapters.

Kossola, now called Cudjoe Lewis by those who couldn't pronounce his name, narrates his marriage and the eventual death of his wife and all of his children. His children were combative as a result of bullying for their African origins, and were often in fights with others in the larger African American community. One was indicted and imprisoned for manslaughter, though this is a fact that Hurston provides later in her notes. One of his other sons disappears, one dies after being hit by a train (a common danger apparently, as Lewis was himself hit by a train, though after a lawsuit his white lawyer made off with his settlement money), and a son and a daughter each died of illness, as did his wife. He lived alone until his fame brought interviewers in his last decade.

Kossola/Lewis' story has a lot of interesting or even incongruous moments, some of which are passed by in a sentence and leave me wanting more information. These include how he was almost left behind in an oversight when the slave ship was being loaded, but spoke up because he didn't want to be separated from a friend. Another example is how he and his fellow Africans quickly put a stop to whipping by an overseer early in their enslavement by overpowering him, and this apparently went unpunished. Additionally, after emancipation, they all hoped to return to Africa, but were unable to raise the funds for this, and decided to settle. Hurston opens each section with her visit to Lewis to hear his story; he was often eager to talk, though other times he shooed her away in favor of doing yard work, or had her run errands for him.

The book contains several afterwords and appendices to provide additional context to the fairly brief narrative, and these cover Hurston's rebellions against her white patrons and academics who worked with her to collect folklore (including coverage of the controversy around a lack of citation for historical context in her original article). They cover how this report and others told of how Lewis/Kossala was considered a great storyteller and griot in his community, often called upon for parables, some of which are included in an appendix.. They discus Hurston herself and her anthropological and folklore work, which used historical research as a supplement, and not a way to coax memories in the interviews. They also cover themes from the story itself, such as how Kossola identified as African, to the point where he told Hurston that someone returning to where he came from in West Africa should use his given name, as that is what people would remember him under; or how he and the other Africans converted to Christianity, but still had world-views from their original religious beliefs. They talk about the manifestation of the American Dream found in setting up Africatown and getting it the resources to thrive; but also how the Meaher brothers executed a quintessential American Dream as well, embarking on a dangerous voyage to set themselves up in business. That business just happened to be the enslavement of other human beings.

Another of these addendums is a story by writer Alice Walker, about how she traveled to Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston lived and wrote about, to learn about the later period of her life, contradictory accounts of her death, and to put a tombstone on her neglected grave. This poignant story was from the '70s, and I am glad that Hurston has found more recognition and a deserving place in the American canon since then, and that her anthropological work to "celebrate black folk genius" to "present to the world 'the greatest cultural wealth on the continent,' while simultaneously contradicting social Darwinism, scientific racism, and the American pseudoscience of eugenics" and defying "the idea of European cultural hegemony as it also questioned the narrative of white nationalism." (Afterword by Deborah G. Plant).