Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston: book review

Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (2018) is cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s interview in 1931 with the last known surviving African of the last American slave ship, the Clothilda. Remaining unpublished for all this time, the words of Oluale Kossula – called Cudjo Lewis in America – are in his own vernacular, with accompanying notes.

Oluale Kossula, from west Africa, is 95 years old when Zora Neale Hurston interviews him over a period of three months. Captured in 1860 at the age of 19, fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States, Oluale Kossula (Cudjo Lewis) was a slave in Alabama for five and a half years until his emancipation.

From the pre-dawn raid in his village, to incarceration in the barracoon (slave shed) waiting for selection by American slavers, the sea voyage to America on the last ‘Black Cargo’ ship, his time in slavery, to his life after emancipation at the end of the Civil War, Kossula spent much of his life in ‘a sequence of separations.’ He feels more for others – his parents, family, friends, and other slaves – than he feels for himself.

His life as a slave is book-ended by his times of freedom. He tells of his ancestry first, and the Kingdom of Dahomey (present day Benin). And he tells of his freedom, as he begins to create a community and a family after years of slavery. But all the time, he talks of his enduring loneliness for Africa and a true culture.

The transcript of the Kossula interview is surprisingly short, considering that the interviewer spent three months with him. The book is largely the forward and notes. I wanted to know more about him and his family, and his hopes and aspirations, the African and American histories and times he lived in, and his legacy lessons.

His words are important – not only because this work has never been published before, and not only because Kossula was the last surviving slave at the time, but because the account is honest and true, simple and complex, personal and historic, tragic and philosophical, invaluable and powerful.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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