A Witness To Slavery Is Finally Heard

IN 1927, A MAN IN ALABAMA—THE LAST SURVIVOR of the last known ship ever to bring enslaved humans from Africa to the U.S.—received a visitor.

- Lily Rothman

A young anthropologist, working on her first big assignment, wanted to hear what he remembered of freedom, of bondage and of what came before. The aspiring scholar’s name was Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston returned several times, aiming to write a book about the man—called Kossola, with a variety of spellings, or Cudjo Lewis—but never found an interested publisher. Even as she became an esteemed writer, his story stuck with her. His yearning for home, undimmed by time, was wedged in her mind. Now, about 90 years later, the book she had wanted, a nonfiction account of her interaction with a man who lived a vanishing history, has finally been released with great fanfare as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”

“There is a willingness of people at this point in time to look at this issue, to interrogate it, to question it, which is what we have to do,” says Deborah G. Plant, the scholar who edited the new volume. “And we have to do it because people are still wrestling with this very fundamental issue about freedom, about humanity, about the right to live a life on one’s own terms.”

Kossola didn’t get much of a chance to do that. He was only a teenager when his village in what is now Benin was raided and he was taken to the barracoon— the stockades in which captives waited for sale. He and more than 100 others were brought onto the schooner Clotilda for the Atlantic crossing, despite the fact that the U.S. had already banned participation in the global slave trade. Upon reaching Alabama in 1860, the Clotilda, now implicated in a crime, was burned after delivering its human cargo. This fact was hardly a secret (the New York Times covered the arrival in Mobile Bay), but the men behind the transaction went essentially unpunished.