Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave – Zora Neale Hurston
- Olivia Davies
- Jul 24, 2018
- 8 min read
Africa, captivity, slavery, freedom and tragedy; Hurston’s unpublished biography is released almost ninety years after it was written to critical and public acclaim.
The life story and memories of Oluale Kossula – a name which his slave owner found unable to pronounce, hence ‘Cudjo Lewis’ – are “told by himself” but transcribed onto the page by the Harlem Renaissance author, anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston during their numerous conversations in his garden in Africatown, near Mobile, Alabama.
Kossula had an incredible memory, was held in an esteemed position by his local community and, since he had never learned how to read or write, was an oral storyteller who was often asked to speak, by those around him, in parables. These three character traits evoke the West African griot of his homeland: a societal leader, historian, storyteller, poet and/or musician. This is the true intellectual and spiritual capacity of the man who was glad when ‘Somebody [finally] come ast about Cudjo!’ as Hurston did, between 1927 and 1928.
The publication of Kossula’s biography is culturally and historically significant because it illuminates the transatlantic slave trade from the perspective of the trafficked. Symptomatic of the violence with which millions of Africans were denied personal autonomy, the voices of the people who were sold into slavery have largely been erased from historical accounts; as such, personal accounts of the slave trade are monopolised by Europeans.
Kossula himself was captured and stowed on the last (known) U.S. slave ship (the Clotilda) to bring African captives to America in 1860. At ninety years of age upon meeting Hurston, it is completely feasible that Kossula was the last African in America to remember his tranquil childhood on the African continent.
In her foreword, Alice Walker (of Pulitzer Prize fame) calls this “a grisly story from one of the last people able to tell it”. Grisly is the perfect adjective; it conjures up synonyms such as ‘horrific’, ‘hideous’ and ‘appalling’ which – as a personal biography and cultural history detailing the slave trade – it most certainly is. However, Kossula’s life-story is also tightly bound with affectionate and loving memories of family, friends and (his deep longings for and creation of a new) home. Therefore, ‘grisly’ somehow provides space for this more rounded understanding of his personal history than words such as ‘horrific or ‘appalling’ may directly attest.
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On a literal level, the largest section of Cudjo’s biography is devoted to the first nineteen years of his life spent in Bantè, the village where he was born. The pride he has for his family, customs and landscape is tangible seventy years later to the extent that, despite spending the vast majority of his adult life in America, Kossula’s soul remains in ‘de Afficky soil’.
What is particularly revealing about Kossula’s biography is the breadth of social injustice late 19th century African slaves faced from three sources: white Americans, second or third generation African Americans and African ethnic groups (in this instance, the Dahomey from modern day Benin) who first captured young people from different ethnic groups and held them in barracoons on the African coast ready to be sold to European slave traders.
The demonisation of Kossula and his children as the African ‘Other’ by more ‘neutralised’ African Americans raises, Afua Hirsch argues, difficult questions about the extent to which ““victims of slavery internalised the attitudes of their oppressors”. This seems the case when we are told that “Dey callee my chillum ig’nant savage and make out dey kin to monkey… It hurtee dey feelings.”
In reference to the role of the Dahomey in the Atlantic slave trade, Deborah G. Plant explains how Kossula’s testimony demonstrates the nuances in identity politics whereby “People on the African continent did not self identify as Africans; instead there was a self identity in relation to specific ethnic groups and specific kingdoms, religions or language”. This is important, she argues, because “we don’t have these nuances about our history” from European sources.
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In conversation with her editor, Hurston described Kossula as a “poetical old gentleman… who could tell a good story”. If this was the case, he is both master storyteller and hero protagonist. However, at times Zora had to rely on her own skill as a charming conversationalist when – on some days – Kossula’s mental wounds proved too harrowing for discussion; ‘Cudjo feel so lonely, he can’t help he cry sometime. Whut you want wid me?’.
One stark similarity between Hurston and Kossula, which perhaps made their relationship stronger, was their shared experience of all-black American townships.
We know that Hurston moved to ‘Eatonville’, Florida as a young child – one of the first self-governing municipalities in the United States – and her father was elected as mayor in 1897. In his discussions with Hurston, Kossula reveals that, along with a group of other first generation African slaves, after emancipation he built his own house in newly created ‘Africatown’ to symbolise his desire to return back to his birthplace.
Although both Eatonville and Africatown were designed as havens from Southern white supremacy, especially police brutality, Sylviane Diouf points out that the former was rooted in ‘blackness’ and the latter in ‘Africanness’. This is important because ‘the survivors of the Clotilda [specifically decided they] would work together to create a community that embedded the ethos and traditions of their homeland’.
When Hurston’s black characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God visit a local white town in the Deep South, they remark that: ‘It’s bad bein’ strange niggers wid white folks. Everybody is against yuh’. Nevertheless, while Tea-cake and Janie are able to return to their fictional haven largely unscathed, Kossula and his family experience wave after wave of brutal Jim Crow-era racism to the point of near complete annihilation.
The sections of the biography which discuss the impact of racism on Kossula’s children prove the most harrowing moments of his difficult life because they are expressed with the anguish of a loving father. Overall, what emerges from this text is profound; we are shown a glimpse into the “nobility of a soul who has suffered nearly to the point of erasure… [yet] life, inexhaustible, goes on”.
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The stories of both Hurston and Kossula were close to extinction due to resistance on behalf of the publishing industry in accepting Hurston’s fierce commitment to writing in the dialect of the African American South. Viking Press, for example, wrote back to Hurston’s draft of Barracoon in 1931, asking that it be written in “language” rather than Kossula’s idiom if she wanted the book to make print. She refused.
However, Hurston’s public obscurity during the latter stages of her life and the decades after, is also due to criticisms made by her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940) wrote in The New York Masses in October 1937 that;
‘Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes…. [she] voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh.’
For Cheryl Wall, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English at Rutgers University, “this impatience with Hurston’s determination to transcribe Kossola’s speech faithfully is enormously frustrating”. It was “part of the pattern of Hurston’s life that she had to fight so hard to have her voice heard, and the voices of those whose stories she wanted to tell.”
Hurston’s literary success was tarnished by the criticisms of publishers and peers; without any of her seven books in print, she died penniless in 1960, unable to pay for the medical treatment necessary to treat her heart disease.
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Famously, novelist Alice Walker unearthed Hurston’s unmarked grave in 1973 and – recognising the value in her work – set out to restore her legacy to black folklore, anthropology and the African American canon.
Hurston’s first publication on Southern folklore was called Mules and Men and contained slave tales, songs and conversations with notable African American community members from Eatonville and New Orleans. This text was quickly followed by Tell My Horse, in which she presented two spiritual and healing practices with a shared connection to West African paganism; Obeah in Jamaica and Voodo in Haiti. Hurston was determined to depict – what had in the past been rejected as “black magic” and “devil worship” – fairly and respectfully in the anthropological community.
Deborah G. Plant carefully reminds us, in her Afterword to Barracoon, that we should not just view Hurston’s commitment to chronicling ‘black folk genius’ as an end in itself, but that her decision to collect “the greatest cultural wealth on the continent” was to purposefully challenge and reject racist epistemologies (such as social Darwinism and eugenics) which propped up the white nationalism inherent in the American Dream.
This ideological commitment sheds light on why Zora refused to write in American English – even when this meant that her livelihood and health suffered as a consequence. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist – Janie – has been said to be a fictional representation of Zora herself. Therefore, it is symbolically important that Janie rejects her first husband (a man who symbolically paints their house white in his subconscious striving for ‘white’ success) for Tea-Cake, an emblematic Blues folk figure who Janie falls madly in love with.
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Fifty years after Hurston’s death, Their Eyes Were Watching God now sells nearly 500,000 copies annually and holds a firm position in the African American literary canon. When literary agent Joy Harris began representing Hurston’s trust two years ago, she searched for any works which had not been published. With the help of Paul Beatty, Booker Prize winner of The Sellout, and Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, Barracoon has finally been published to a receptive audience. It has spent the first four weeks of its publication on the New York Times bestseller list.
“I do think one of the reasons that the book is so attractive right now is that there is this longing for African Americans to have access to a pre-US life – a connection to Africa,” says Autumn Womack, an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. “If nothing else, Barracoon announces the desire for this kind of connection, even if it’s never really fulfilled. People are searching for a vocabulary to make sense of that.”
This ‘searching for a vocabulary’ has burst into public discourse and cultural forms in the years since Hurston was alive. For example, films such as Twelve Years A Slave, documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro, books written by a range of authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power and popular music such as Beyonce’s album ‘Lemonade’ or Childish Gambino’s song “This is America”, offer powerful commentaries on American race relations. They have opened up a space to discuss connections between contemporary Americans and their ancestors, whilst demonstrating how much progress still must be made in order to achieve any semblance of racial equality.
Arguably, the shocking length of time it has taken for Kossula’s biography to be published dramatically symbolises the battle Africans Americans continue to face in getting their personal traumas heard and understood by the public and mainstream institutions. Although neither Kossula nor Hurston displayed any interest in economic reward or social recognition; it is emblematic of the systematic racism they both faced that they were denied both these markers of white success – the “American Dream” – in their lifetime.
Kossula’s dream, in speaking to Zora and sharing his life – was that by “tellee somebody who I is […] maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.'” Without the economic means to return to the Isha community he was ripped away from as a nineteen year old boy, he was left with the radiant image of soldering together this distressing wound with a story that might fly across borders and confirm his existence to those he left behind seventy years ago.
While this right was denied him at first, his story is now being celebrated in the country he was forcibly trafficked to. It is both tragic and hopeful that America is now more willing to accept Kossula’s voice as a fragment of the social whole than they were when he was alive and well, proudly showing off his two granddaughters to Zora Neale Hurston in his sun-drenched garden in Africatown.
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