A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of
the American classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which brilliantly
illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story
of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade - illegally smuggled
from Africa on the last Black Cargo ship to America. The never-before-
published work covers the life of Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis, who
in 1927 was one of the last living survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.
Barracoon is phenomenal because Cudjo's story begins when he is free and a
young man living in Africa. It describes the circumstances of his capture
by Dahomian warriors and his detention in a barracoon while awaiting his
trade to slavers. It describes how he was smuggled out of Africa onto the
last Black Cargo ship, the Clotilda, and tells of his journey through the
Middle Passage, to his arrival in the United States on the Alabama River
near Mobile, Alabama. The narrative also recounts Kossola's five and a half
years of enslavement, his freedom, and his role in the founding of
Africatown, the first town established by and continuously controlled by
Africans. In 1927, famed anthropologist Franz Boaz and Carter G. Woodson,
the father of black history, sent writer Zora Neale Hurston to Plateau,
Alabama, to interview eight-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of
men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as Slaves,
Cudjo Lewis was the only survivor of the Clotilda to tell the story of this
essential part of our nation's history. Boas and Woodson wanted Cudjo's
firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage, more
than fifty years after the US Congress officially outlawed the Atlantic
slave trade in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the
African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and
other survivors of the Clotilda. Spending more than three months there, she
conducted in-depth interviews with Cudjo about the details of his life.
During those weeks, the young writer and the elder talked about Cudjo's
memories from his enthralling 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 110 other
souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end
of the Civil War. Based on those interviews that are rendered in Cudjo's
unique vernacular, Hurston presents Cudjo's story with the deftness of the
skilled ethnographer and the compassion and singular style that have made
Zora Neale Hurston one of the most remarkable social scientists and
preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century. Offering insight into
the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, this poignant and
powerful work marks a major literary event and an invaluable contribution
to our cultural history.