Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Summary: Zora Neale Hurston, in 1927, interviewed Cudjo Lewis, then 86 years old. He was one of a group of 110 people captured and brought to the US and enslaved just before the start of the Civil War. 

Barracoon is a short manuscript, only about 100 pages, including the introduction. As an appendix, Hurston recounts some folk tales Cudjo Lewis told his children.

Barracoon is a tragic story that is worth reading, especially because it is relatively short. Cudjo Lewis was captured at 19 and brought to the US on an illegal slave ship, the Clotilda. There were many others, but this was likely the last illegal slave ship to the US, landing in 1860. He was enslaved for five years, working for a riverboat captain both on the boat and at other tasks.

The book is a good reminder that post-slavery, there were no reparations,. For all of the complaints about it being too long ago for reparations, there was not a national effort at either reparations or transitioning the formerly enslaved to a self-sustaining life at the time either. Instead, the formerly enslaved were abused in other ways; and the Jim Crow social systems perpetuated the racial hierarchy. Cudjo and others worked to establish Africatown, a small independent black community.

Cudjo Lewis married and had six children. A daughter died as a teen from some type of sickness. A sheriff's deputy killed one son. Then in 1902, Cudjo was hit by a train which left him with lifelong injuries and destroyed his wagon. Cudjo hired a lawyer and sued the railroad for negligence (not using whistles and signals properly), but the lawyer took the money. A second son was then killed in a train accident after his own accident. A third son disappeared, and the insinuation is that he may have either committed suicide or may have been lynched, but Cudjo did not know. Eventually, all of his children died, only one of whom had married and had children. His daughter-in-law and grandchildren lived on the family land, and eventually, the daughter-in-law remarried and continued to live in a cabin next door to Cudjo. The grandchildren are mentioned as characters in Hurston's recounting of her meeting with Cudjo.

I would recommend listening to this as an audiobook because Hurston wrote this in dialect, so it can be a challenge to read the dialect, especially if you have not had experience doing that previously. But the audiobook is well narrated and clear, still with dialect, but perfectly understandable to modern readers that may not be familiar with reading dialect. The introduction is roughly an hour of the not quite four hours audiobook. And nearly an hour at the end is the appendix that has folk tales.

Barracoon did not find a publisher during Zora Neale Hurston's lifetime. She reworked the manuscript several times and attempted to find a publisher, and at least one publisher wanted the book rewritten without the dialect, which Hurston refused to do. Eventually, in 2018 the book was published, after receiving attention when excerpts were published in 2003 as part of a biography of Hurston.

I glanced around at reviews on Audible, and there are a number of reviews that complain about the introduction. It is probably too long. And probably would have been better to split the introduction into two parts. The main complaint is a long discussion of Hurston's plagiarism in introducing the Clotilda and the background before the interview with Cudjo. You can read more about that here. I do think that this needed to be discussed. It was 49 of 67 paragraphs in that introduction section that were plagiarized.

Hurston was young (27) and a recent college graduate. She spent three months living in Africantown interviewing Cudjo Lewis and other people in the community. But her youth and the era she was writing in were not excuses for the plagiarism and from what I can tell, there do not seem to be other accusations of plagiarism in her later writing. But splitting the introduction to have a discussion of the book and its history and then a second section, maybe a postlude that discussed the plagiarism might have been another way to handle the plagiarism. I do not think it should be ignored or glossed over. But potential readers may want to skip the introduction and come back to it later after listening to the rest of the audiobook.