Happy Belated Birthday
January 7 was author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday. She died in 1960 in a welfare home in Florida and was buried in an unmarked grave nearby. She wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, but her work was not well received by Black critics at the time. Her best known novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937 but had gone out of print by the time Alice Walker found Hurston’s grave in the early 1970’s. Walker wrote an article for Ms. Magazine that featured Hurston’s literary contributions and the fact that her work had not been properly recognized. Their Eyes Were Watching God was reissued in 1978. The book is widely read by high school students now because it paints an accurate picture of what life was like for Blacks in the South after the Civil War. What seems like a simple story is actually very complex with many literary elements, thus making the book an excellent novel study.
One of Hurston’s most interesting and informative books was not published until 2018. The following is a remarkable story (taken from an A&E Network publication) of how Hurston found Cudjo Lewis and interviewed him for his biography Barracoon. Africatown, founded by Lewis and others whom slave traders brought from Africa on the last slave ship, is located near Mobile, Alabama. A recent episode of 60 Minutes featured the current townspeople, descendants of the original founders. The 60 Minutes story centers around the descendant’s efforts to preserve their history and tell their story.
UPDATED:MAR 23, 2020ORIGINAL:MAY 3, 2018
The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
Zora Neale Hurston’s searing book about the final survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, Cudjo Lewis, could not find a publisher for nearly 90 years.
Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they were only released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that came out on May 8, 2018.
Hurston’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born in what is now the West African country of Benin. Originally named Kossula, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.
The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.https://www.history.com/player/1435178563573?autoplay=true
To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).
Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different plantations.
“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”
As for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.
Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.
My Atlanta book club read Their Eyes Were Watching God soon after it came out in the late 70’sand it was very interesting and well written. I still remember some of Hurston’s images and turns of phrase. Barracoon is a compilation of her interviews with Cudjo and does not read like a novel, but as an historical document it is very interesting and I’m glad I took the time to read it.
Margaret Boone