Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston talks with the last American slave brought from Africa.

Book Review: Barracoon, subtitled The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," couldn't find a publisher almost 90 years ago when Zora Neale Hurston completed it, her first book. Finally rescued from an archive at Howard University, the now-published manuscript is horrific, disturbing, and profoundly sad, but also a testimony of almost inhuman strength and resilience by Oluale Kossola, a man who is all too human, becomes all too real. The name given him in the United States was Cudjo Lewis.

The manuscript of Barracoon was difficult to sell as Kossola's tale revealed that he had been sold by black Dahomians to white slavers. Alice Walker notes, "One understands immediately the problem many black people, years ago, especially black intellectuals and political leaders, had with it. It resolutely records the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented, starved, arrived on ships as "black cargo" in the hellish West."  As Hurston (known for being politically incorrect) says in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: "The white people had held my people in slavery here in America. They had bought us, it is true, and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me." Problematic at the time was that Kossola reported that when brought to the Southern United States the Africans were mistreated and abused by native-born slaves. Another difficulty was that it was written in dialect, which Hurston refused to change. I'm always suspicious of the use of dialect as it can feel demeaning or condescending, but Hurston was an anthropologist and believed it her scientific duty to preserve Kossola's speech. His language actually became hypnotic, absorbing my mind and my thinking. For the curious, a "barracoon" is a type of structure built on African coast to hold future slaves until enough are gathered to fill a ship for transport to the Americas. How horrible to have such a word.

But the birth of Barracoon is not the strength and heart of this account of a life. That is the voice of Kossola, his humanity, vitality, and personality searing through his words into the reader's mind. Hurston devotes five pages in Dust Tracks on a Road to her interviews with Kossola. She notes he was "a cheerful, poetical old gentleman in his late nineties, who could tell a good story." He married his wife, Seely, and they had six children, but all predeceased him, leaving him alone. He still equally missed his family in Africa. "I lonely for my folks. They don't know. Maybe they ask everybody go there where Kossola. I know they hunt for me."  Huston concludes her pages with: "After seventy-five years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation." Barracoon is a difficult but necessary book. What is revealed is the life story of a person, a human being, which makes all the more challenging, impossible actually, the belief in the right to enslave a human being.  [5★]