An African Voice in Alabama-Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 8, 2018 by Zora Neale Hurston with foreword by Alice Walker

Reviewed by Doc Lawrence

I visited Africatown two decades ago during a press trip to Mobile, Alabama’s charming port city. While I was fascinated by the history, a mixture of the tragedy of slavery and the power of human determination to survive, I left unaware of Cudjo Lewis who lived there and is buried in the community cemetery. With the publication recently of Zora Neale Hurston’s stunning Barracoon, a book she wrote from around 1927 to 1931, but was rejected by publishers until 2018, we are beginning to learn first-hand Cudjo’s story of childhood in Africa, his kidnapping by slave traders, a  nightmarish journey to Alabama where he was sold into slavery. 

A strange word, Barracoon was the infamous holding facility for kidnapped Africans awaiting a trans-Atlantic journey.

What makes Hurston’s interviews spellbindingly original is best described in Barracoon by the author.  “Of all the millions transported from Africa to the Americas, only one man is left. The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has 67 years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.” 

Cudjo with Grandchildren

The  recently discovered slave ship believed to be the Clotilda has rested underwater in Mobile Bay and was the transport for Cudjo’s harrowing middle passage into bondage. He remembered the ship, its human cargo and the recalled the suffering endured as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. 

Zora Neale Hurston

During Hurston’s visits with Cudjo, they established a friendship while regularly enjoying peaches and watermelons from his garden. Cudjo's name from birth was African, Kossola. When she first spoke his name, he tearfully told her, “Nobody don’t callee me my name from cross de water but you.” 

Cudjo spoke in a unique vernacular which Ms. Hurston respectfully records but which was, according to many accounts, one of several reasons publishers didn’t want to take a chance on the book for decades. Contrast this rejection with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Stories, where African vernacular interpreted by the white author was a commercial success.

Alice Walker’s introduction is a tutorial on Zora Neale Hurston as well as a reminder that the legacy of slavery and the sting of its painful progeny racial segregation have not slipped into the dustbin of antiquity. One of the most gifted members of the Harlem Renaissance, Ms. Hurston’s books, particularly the American classic, These Eyes Were Watching God, have only recently garnered well-deserved acclaim. The isolated world of her childhood, not too much different from Cudjo’s, is on display in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a black city founded by former slaves who  have maintained much of their culture. 

Hurston, who died impoverished, was buried in a pauper’s grave near Fort Pierce, Florida. A giant among American authors, she was cleaning houses when she died. Alice Walker located her grave and placed an appropriate headstone. Africatown was added to the National Register of Historic of Historic Places in 2012. Cudjo is buried in the cemetery.