Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston

 

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I have had this book on my list since it was published in 2018. It came up as available on audiobook before our recent camping trip, so I grabbed it. 

 

How, one might ask, did a book written by Hurston, who died in 1960, end up being published in the 21st Century? Well, the story of the book is part of the book itself, and it is fascinating. 

 

I will start with the fact that out of a 4 hour audiobook, nearly the first hour was introductory material. I have mixed feelings about this. On the good side, the history of the book is interesting, and does help in understanding the work itself. On the other hand, the introductory material feels like it has some repetition, and it is fairly dry writing. (Quite the contrast to Hurston’s writing, and the crazy tale it recounts.) In audiobook format, particularly, having to endure all the prefaces was less than engaging. 

 

So, then, Barracoon is a work of non-fiction. In 1927, Hurston, at the time a rather unknown writer and historian, interviewed Oluale Kossola (commonly known in the US as Cudjoe Lewis), believed at the time to be the last survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Subsequently, two women were discovered, but they had lost any meaningful memories of Africa by that time. Kossola’s account therefore remains the best available. 

Oluale Kossola around the time Hurston interviewed him 

Hurston interviewed Kossola over the course of a number of months, and she interweaves the account of these interviews throughout - they are important, because the time they spend together is spent on more than just talking - they go to town to get groceries (he can no longer drive), he works in his garden, and so on. 

 

So, why was this work neglected for so long? Hurston was unable to find a publisher during her lifetime, essentially for two reasons. The first is that she wrote the book in dialect: Kossola’s words are transcribed as they sounded to Hurston. This would not have been a problem at an earlier time: dialect was considered perfectly acceptable in the 19th Century. By the 1930s, however, it was considered to be condescending, reinforcing the “standard” of white educated speech while looking down on those who sounded different, whether poor whites, immigrants, or especially African-Americans. Arguably, the critics have a point on this score. In any case, dialect wasn’t marketable, so it wasn’t published. 

 

The other reason, however, looks as backwards as the use of dialect. Hurston wrote down the story as Kossola told it, and didn’t excise the parts that painted Africans in a bad light. These days, we place more of a premium on the complexity and nuance of human behavior, but at the time, there was a bit of a backlash against the portrayal of Africans as “savages,” and thus the role of Africans in the slave trade was whitewashed. 

 

The unfortunate result of this was to give white supremacists ammunition: “hey, the liberals won’t even admit that Black people enslaved themselves…” This is to miss several important points, not least of which is the sheer size of Africa, and the political divisions by tribe and ethnicity which are lost on many white folks. And likewise, to fail to see the vast economic power of the white empires which transformed normal tribal warfare into an economic powerhouse fueled by the bodies of the enslaved. It is all too easy to distract away from the big picture by blaming individual actions. 

 

One more controversy is mentioned in the introduction. Hurston wrote a short article on the same subject before expanding it to a book. For that article, she borrowed extensively from a white source, and didn’t attribute it. This included the prior author’s interviews with Kossola. When the book was written, there is some attribution, but not at the level that we would demand now. However, Hurston did her own interviews this time, and used the prior source mostly for background on the voyage.  

 

Kossola’s story is quite a tale. He tells of his youth in Africa. But then, there is a war with the neighboring kingdom. His village is leveled, most of the residents beheaded (by female warriors, no less), and the rest sold into slavery. He and his fellows were transported across the Atlantic, and quietly kept enslaved by the owners of the ship. 

 

This happened in 1860, by the way, decades after the slave trade was supposedly outlawed. It still happened, and it happened all the way up until the Civil War, which broke out not long after Kossola came to the United States. 

 

The ship Kossola came in on, the Clotilda, was scuttled, and only recently rediscovered, reigniting interest in Kossola’s story. 

 

The story follows Kossola through the time of the interview. He had six children, all of whom had died by the time of the interview, as had Kossola’s beloved wife. Most died of disease, but one was murdered by a cop, and another was struck by a train. His life was a bit of a tragedy, but he remained surprisingly optimistic about things.  

 

One of the most fascinating parts of the story was after the end of the Civil War, those who came over on the Clotilda found it difficult to assimilate with the other African Americans. A language barrier was eventually overcome, but the native-born Blacks considered the new imports to be “savages” and subhuman, in part because they weren’t raised in Christianity. That Kossola would eventually become a devout Christian, and even serve as sexton at the local church didn’t change that. Prejudice follows weird paths, to be sure. 

 

Because their community stayed mostly intact - the enslavers couldn’t sell them because it was illegal and occasionally prosecuted - they decided to form their own community. The captain who enslaved them refused their request for land, so they saved up and bought a parcel themselves, forming “Africatown” on the outskirts of Mobile. 

 

I think that Barracoon is a fascinating book not least because of its nuance. There isn’t a clear black and white line between good people and bad people, but rather a continuum. There are certainly bad white people in the book: the enslavers, the cop who murders Kossola’s son. But there are also bad black people: the raiders who murder and enslave in order to profit and gain status and fame, the kids who bully Kossola’s children for being born in Africa. But the reverse is true as well. There are white Union soldiers who free the enslaved, various white folk who befriend Kossola and his community, and Charlotte Osgood Mason, who learned of Kossola from Hurston, and used part of her fortune to help out their community. 

 

Perhaps the biggest change that Hurston made from the prior work about Kossola is that she rendered him as fully human and equal in a way that the prior - white and condescending - accounts did not. Hence why the time they spend together doing mundane activities adds so much to the story. She has tried to replace that dehumanizing voice with a humanizing one. She also took pictures and video of him, which were rare back then. 

 

What is apparent is that systems affect everyone caught up in them. The vast machine of enslavement drove violence in Africa, made monsters of sea captains and sailors, corroded the souls of even the best of plantation owners, and degraded those enslaved. A century and a half later, our nation is still paying the price for this evil, and still doing its best to hide from the truth. 

 

For Zora Neale Hurston herself, this early effort became the springboard to two careers. She is best known these days for her fiction, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God, but she also wrote extensively about folklore - sponsored in that case by Mason. I am planning to read Mules and Men for Black History Month this year, so stay tuned for that. 

 

I want to say a word about the audiobook, because reading Hurston’s dialect has to have been a serious challenge. The publisher went the right direction by hiring Robin Miles for the job. Although she has an extensive resume on the small screen and stage, Miles is best known for her voice work, particularly her astonishing ability to work with dialect, accents, and other quirks of speech. She can sound like anyone, apparently. 

 

For this audiobook, her version of Kossola is breathtakingly good. The dialect is rendered not merely literally and consistently, but humanly. She sounds like you expect Kossola to sound, but also he becomes a person you can see as well as hear in your head. Miles is now on my list of the best audiobook narrators I have experienced. Apparently there is a version of Charlotte’s Web she narrated, and I would recommend seeking that one out.