A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of
the American classic Their Eyes
Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror
and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the
last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade--abducted from
Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the
United States.
In 1927, Zora Neale
Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview
eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and
children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then
the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the
nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand
account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years
after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.
In 1931, Hurston
returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from
Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship.
Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo
about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer
and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that
grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his
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 100 other souls aboard
the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the
Civil War.
Based on those
interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from
Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that
have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the
twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the
tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering
insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all,
black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable
contribution to our shared history and culture.