New York Times Bestseller 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.