On December 14, 1927, a young, 36-year-old anthropologist named Zora Neale Hurston, boarded a train at Penn Station headed for a certain community on the northern edge of Mobile, Alabama. She was on that train to meet the last living person who could tell the firsthand story of the final transatlantic slave ship.
In Mobile, he was called Cudjo Lewis. But in the village where he was born (around 1841) it was in present-day Benin, his name was Oluale Kossola. Warriors from the Kingdom of Dahomey raided his village when he was a young man and captured him. He spent three weeks trapped in a fortified stockade in the West African port city of Ouidah. Then he was loaded onto an illegal slave vessel called the Clotilda and shipped across the Atlantic.
Cudjo arrived in Mobile in 1860, fifty-two years after the United States Congress had outlawed the international slave trade. He was a slave for five years and six months, finally being freed by Union soldiers on April 12, 1865.
By the time Zora Hurston knocked on his door, he was 86 years old and had been free for sixty-two years. He was the only person alive who could provide a firsthand account of his capture in Africa, the Middle Passage, and chattel slavery in America. No other living soul remained.
Other researchers attempted to interview him over the years, but none had succeeded in getting him to speak at length. Hurston, however, brought peaches, ham, and watermelon, setting them on his porch. Then, she simply asked him who he was and how he had come to be enslaved. This time, he told his story.
Hurston returned to speak to Cudjo again and again over several years. She meticulously recorded a manuscript in his own words, his own voice, and his own English—the unique language of a man who grew up speaking West African dialects and learned Alabama vernacular over nearly seven decades in the United States. She titled it “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo.’”
Hurston submitted the manuscript to several New York publishers in the early 1930s, and every single one of them rejected it. Their rejection wasn’t because her research was inadequate or her writing lacked power. They rejected it because she refused to standardize Cudjo’s English. They wanted her to rewrite his speech in conventional literary prose, claiming readers would find the dialect too difficult to follow. But Hurston flat out refused. She believed that rewriting his words would mean silencing him yet again. She had traveled to Alabama precisely so this man could speak for himself. That was the entire point of her work. Unable to find a publisher, Hurston’s manuscript was placed in a safe deposit box.
Cudjo Lewis passed away in Africatown on July 17, 1935, at 94 years old. Zora Neale Hurston died in a county welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, on January 28, 1960, at 69 years old. The manuscript she had fiercely protected sat in the archives at Howard University for another 58 years.
Then, on May 8, 2018, Hurston’s manuscript was published exactly as Hurston had written it—with Cudjo’s voice fully intact and unaltered. It entered the New York Times bestseller list at number two in its very first week. Zora Hurston had been gone for 58 years; Cudjo Lewis for 83. The publishers who had demanded she silence him were long forgotten. But Cudjo’s voice survived. She had made sure of it. And when the world was finally ready to listen, the world heard him exactly as he had spoken—unchanged, unpolished, and uniquely his own.
Oh, how we so often try to change situations, human resilience, cultural endurance, and the ways societies, and traditions mold our own thoughts of how they should be. Thankfully, Hurston’s manuscript survived the ages so we finally hear Cudjo’s true voice.
Tagged: American history, grief and loss
