Photo: Courtesy of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust Zora Neale Hurston in the early 1930s, around the time she interviewed Cudjo Lewis. There, he and some 120 others were purchased and herded onto the Clotilda, captained by William Foster and commissioned by three Alabama brothers to make the 1860 voyage. Kossula had been captured at age 19 in an area now known as the country Benin by warriors from the neighboring Dahomian tribe, then marched to a stockade, or barracoon, on the West African coast.

Plying him with peaches and Virginia hams, watermelon and Bee Brand insect powder, Hurston drew out his story. The book is based on three months of periodic interviews with a man named Cudjo Lewis - or Kossula, his original name - the last survivor of the last slave ship to land on American shores. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive … The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance, that is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out.”īarracoon is testament to her patient fieldwork. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. (Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, which wasn’t the “black backside” of a white town, she once observed, but a place wholly inhabited and run by black people - her father was a three-term mayor.) She proved adept at the task, but, as she noted in her collection of folklore, Mules and Men, the job wasn’t always straightforward: “The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, usually underprivileged, are the shyest. He sent his student back south to interview people of African descent. Before she turned to writing novels, she’d trained as a cultural anthropologist at Barnard under the famed father of the field, Franz Boas. Six years earlier, Hurston had tried to publish another book in dialect, this one a work of nonfiction called Barracoon. The hater-in-chief was no less than Richard Wright, who recoiled as much at the book’s depiction of lush female sexuality and (supposedly) apolitical themes as its use of black dialect, “the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” It’s been canonized by Harold Bloom - even credited for inspiring the tableau in Lemonade where Beyoncé and a clutch of other women regally occupy a wooden porch - but Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel was eviscerated by critics when it was published in 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God is required reading in high schools and colleges and cited as a formative influence by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.

Zora neale hurston barracoon