Thursday, April 15, 2021

A Final Link to the Past: A Review of Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon: The Story of the Last
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At the dawn of the 20th century, historians, sociologists, and folklorists fanned out across the country to gather up the stories of people across America who had lived through dramatic times, particularly the Civil War. The narratives of formerly enslaved African-Americans were especially prized. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston, not quite yet the author and oral historian people would remember her to be, interviewed an African by the name of Cudjo Lewis, who at the time was the last surviving African to be captured in Africa, sold into slavery, and shipped across the “Middle Passage” to America. Through these interviews, Ms. Hurston retells Cudjo Lewis’s life to modern readers in this fine, but short book.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was officially abolished in 1808, but that did not stop white enslavers from trying to ship new cargo loads of enslaved Africans to these shores.  The Clotilda was one of the last slave ships to make the journey, carrying over 100 Africans into slavery in America in 1860, on the very eve of the Civil War.  Cudjo Lewis, or Kossula as he was known in Africa, was one of those enslaved Africans and when Ms. Hurston began to interview in the late 1920s, he was the last survivor from that ship.  Mr. Lewis describes his life in Africa, from his tribe to his father’s esteemed position as a royal bodyguard, in idyllic terms.  In contrast, his description of the massacre of his tribe by another African tribe, which led to the beheading of his king right in front of him and his subsequent life in slavery, is horrifying.  Once he is freed by Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War, his life as a free man in the segregated South is just as tragic.  Mr. Lewis relates how nearly all of his children were murdered by white supremacy in one way or another by the dawn of the 20th century.  It is an absolutely heartbreaking story.

That said, the actual narrative of Cudjo Lewis’s life is rather short.  For a story that covers well over 60 years, Ms. Hurston manages to fit his life story into less than 100 pages, with about another 20 or so pages dedicated to some miscellaneous tales Mr. Lewis told.  Though Ms. Hurston may have been restricted by what Mr. Lewis relayed to her, and though Ms. Hurston tried to supplement his recollections with outside sources, this story goes by way too fast.  I would not have minded if Ms. Hurston had lingered on certain parts of Mr. Lewis’s narrative either with her own thoughts or with some supplemental materials.

One other thing that made this book difficult to love was Ms. Hurston’s use of dialect.  This book written early in her career, Ms. Hurston tries to capture exactly what Cudjo Lewis was saying and how he said it through the use dialect.  The idea, from my little bit of research, is that the characters like Cudjo Lewis are suppose to feel more real and alive than if Ms. Huston had tried to translate his dialect into plain language.  But, to me, dialect just makes it more difficult to understand what is being said and, thus, there were a few things I had missed that needed to be pointed out to me in the afterword by this book’s editor, Deborah G. Plant.  Ms. Hurston proved in her later novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Serpah on the Suwanee (which I am currently making my way through in the Library of America’s great collection of her novels & short stories) that it is possible to relay the flavor of dialect without actually writing in dialect.  To me, the use of dialect here does not make Cudjo Lewis’s story more real, it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity.  

I must commend the editor though for including two things in particularly that make this book a little better.  First, her own afterword where she reviews some of the key points of the tale was critical.  For example, I did not fully understand what had happened to Cudjo Lewis’s children while reading his account, so the afterword helped to clear up some confusion that I had.  Second, the inclusion of Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” at the back of the book was fascinating.  If you have not read that essay, then you should, even if you have already read and loved Zora Neale Hurston’s works.

Overall, this book is fine, but it is a little short and, due to Ms. Hurston’s use of dialect, difficult to read at times.  But, Cudjo Lewis’s tale is a necessary reading as a reminder of the oppressive systems created in America that enslaved and terrorized Africans and African-Americans for centuries.  This is a book not just for fans of Zora Neale Hurston, but for people who are also interested in the history of both Antebellum and Jim Crow oppression Africans and African-Americans faced during the 19th century.

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