a book
Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’
Zora Neale Hurston · 2019 · 224 pages
New York Times Bestseller
Amazon's Best History Book of the Year 2018
TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018
New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018
NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018
Economist Book of the Year
SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018
Audible’s Best of the Year
BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018
The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018
The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018
Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of the Year
“A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times
“One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison
“Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker
A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.
In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.
Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
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Isabel Wilkerson
“Zora Neale Hurston’s account of the last cargo of enslaved Africans to the United States had been buried for 70 years. Now we get to witness the country’s most celebrated folklorist interview the only person then alive to tell of his capture, of the conditions of the Middle Passage, how he, Cudjo Lewis, was secreted into Alabama, and his ever-present longing for home. I loved seeing Hurston in action, loved how she brought him Georgia peaches and sat down to plates of blue crab with him and how he, in his wisdom, redirected her initial wish to hear about rather than his father. ‘Where is de house where de mouse is de leader?’ he asked her, saying he couldn’t tell of the son before telling of the father. In her Introduction, Hurston wrote of her motivations: ‘All these words from the sellers, but not one word from the sold.’ The belated publication of Barracoon was a major step toward correcting that omission.”↗