by Casey N. Cep
Captain William Foster left Mobile
in secret and returned the same way. On July 8, i860, he dropped anchor in the
waters off the coast of Mississippi, hid his cargo below deck, slipped ashore,
and travelled overland to fetch a tugboat from Alabama. By then, Foster and his
ship had survived a hurricane, a mutiny, an ambush, and a transatlantic
journey, but late that Sunday night, after the tug carried him up the Mobile
River to Twelve Mile Island, the Captain emptied his hold, dismissed his crew,
and set fire to his ship. The Clotilda, Foster would forever after complain,
was worth more than his share of what it had smuggled.
Although the international slave
trade had been outlawed in America more than half a century earlier, Foster and
three co-conspirators, a trio of brothers by the name of Meaher, had purchased
a hundred and twenty-five men, women, and children, from Benin and Nigeria, to
traffic them into the United States. The plan had been hatched a year before,
when one of the Meahers got into an argument: a New Yorker insisted that slaves
could no longer be transported across the Atlantic, a Louisiana planter wagered
a hundred dollars that it could be done, and Timothy Meaher bet a thousand that
he could be the one to do it.
The market for slaves had grown
tremendously in the previous five decades. Absent imports, slavers relied on
reproduction and relocation for their supply, and, as labor-intensive
agriculture shifted to the Deep South, more than a million enslaved people were
forced there by ship, rail, and sometimes by foot, in coffles. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, domestic slave prices were so high that many planters
had begun lobbying to reopen the global trade.
Among them were the Meahers, who
had moved from Maine to Alabama, where they owned sawmills, steamboats,
plantations, and people. To increase their holdings and "win the bet, they
recruited Foster, a Nova Scotian shipbuilder, and chose the Clotilda from among
his ships. Although the schooner was fast enough to evade capture, it had to be
refitted as a slave ship, with a false deck to conceal the necessary barrels of
water, rice, beef, pork, sugar, flour, bread, molasses, and rum. Foster sailed
from Mobile Bay with papers that claimed he was delivering lumber to St. Thomas,
and eleven crew members who had not been told of their real mission. The nine
thou sand dollars in gold stashed on board to pay for the slaves played havoc
with the ship's compass, taking it off course; after that, a hurricane caught
it just north of Bermuda. While repairing the ship, Foster's men discovered the
hidden deck, and threatened to alert the authorities.
Captain and crew negotiated a
compromise, and reached Ouidah, on the west coast of Africa, a few weeks later.
After eight days of discussion, Foster traded his rum and gold for more than a
hundred slaves from the barracoons, as the holding pens were called. He loaded
them onto his ship, and crossed the Atlantic in forty-five days. An estimated
two million Africans died in the Middle Passage during the slave trade, but all
the men and women on the Clotilda made it to Alabama alive. Neither the Meahers
nor Foster were ever competed of any crime, and, after five years of slavery,
the survivors of the last transatlantic run were liberated by the Union Army.
Free, but unable to raise the funds to return to Africa, many of them banded
together to form Africatown, a settlement of their own just outside Mobile.
In the subsequent years and
decades, the survivors of the Clotilda gradually died, until only one man
answered the door in Africatown when a student from Barnard College came
knocking, in 1927. The survivor's name was Kossola; the student's name was Zora
Neale Hurston. Their first visit went badly, but Hurston wrote an article about
Kossola's life for the Journal of Negro
History anyway. After that false start, she returned to Alabama several
times to talk with Kossola, trying to learn, in her own words, "who you
are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong,
and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man."
Hurston spent four years turning
what Kossola shared with her into a longer work of nonfiction, but no pub
lisher wanted the resulting book—not then, not when the publication of
"Jonah's Gourd Vine," in 1934, made her a celebrated novelist, and
not even post humously, after "Their Eyes Were Watching God" had sold
more than a million copies. Hurston's manuscript languished for nearly nine
decades. Now HarperCollins has published "Barracoon: Cargo.'" Why it
was rejected in Hurston's lifetime, and how the residents of Africatown faded
from her history and our own, is a story almost as plaintive as the one the
book itself records.
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston
Hughes were undergraduates when they ran into each other on the streets of
Mobile, in the summer of 1927. Hurston was thirty-six, but still a semester shy
of becoming the first black graduate of Barnard College; she was down below the
Mason-Dixon Line to collect folklore and oral histories for the American
Folklore Society and for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History. She had been sent to tour Fort Mose, a black settlement founded by
runaway slaves in Florida, and to talk with Kossola, but hadn't got enough
material "to make a flea a waltzing jacket." Hughes was twenty-five
and between semesters at Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania; he had gone South
to read his poetry at Fisk University and at the Tuskegee Institute. Although
Hughes and Hurston had crossed paths a few limes in New York, they met in
Alabama entirely by chance: when he got off the train at the M. & O.
Railroad Terminal, Hurston happened to be walking down the street.
They went to lunch, then Hurston
offered Hughes a ride home. Driving a Nash that she called Sassy Susie and
carrying a chrome-plated pistol in her suitcase, Hurston was formidable even in
her failures. She'd made a disastrous marriage two months earlier. Now, with
her scanty research, she was courting the wrath of the professor who had
arranged her travels: the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. It was her
"Barnardese," Hurston said, that was alienating would-be subjects
like Kossola. Hurston was born in the tiny Alabama town of Notasulga, and
brought up in the all-black Florida town of Eatonville, which, like Africatown,
was founded by former slaves in the years after the Civil War. But she no
longer sounded like the daughter of a share cropper turned Baptist preacher,
much less like someone who had once earned her living as a waitress, a
manicurist, and a maid. Her airs, she feared, were not only put-on but
off-putting. Still, never one to acquiesce to circumstances, she cadged what
she could from the records of the Mobile Historical Society to embellish what
little Kossola had told her, and headed north with Hughes.
The two writers took the long way
home, stopping to talk with conjurers, tramps, convicts, arid back woods
preachers all over the South. Harlem Romantics, their Lake District was Dixie,
and their lyrical ballads were the songs, stories, and tales they gathered —
Hurston compiling transcripts for her academic work, Hughes jotting down
phrases in his notebook He didn't have a license, so Hurston drove: from Mobile
to Montgomery, from there to Tuskegee to meet with students, and then to
Georgia, where they encountered Bessie Smith in Macon and toured the plantation
where Jean Toomer gathered his material for "Cane." They stopped on
the way to South Carolina to meet with a root doctor, got a flat tire in
Columbia, and then scooted up the coast. By September, they had returned to New
York, where Hurston settled down to write her article on Kossola, who was then
known mainly by his American name, Cudjo Lewis.
Most of what Hurston published in
"Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" was cribbed from other
people who had interviewed him; by one biographer's count, forty-nine of the
essay's sixty-seven paragraphs were plagiarized, the bulk of them from Emma
Langdon Roche's "Historic Sketches of the Old South." Not many
noticed the transgression, least of all the wealthy white widow Charlotte
Osgood Mason, a financial backer of Hughes, Alain Locke, and other Harlem
Renaissance artists, who decided to offer Hurston a camera, a car, and two
hundred dollars a month to collect more oral histories and folk stories down
South.
Papa Franz, as Hurston called her
supervisor, and Godmother, as she would come to call her patron, were impressed
by how much she learned on her sub sequent trips to Africatown. With each
visit, she became less hurried, and Kossola grew more forthcoming. She brought
him gifts—Georgia peaches, a Virginia ham. Bee Brand insect powder to ward off
mosquitoes—and he allowed her to take pictures of him in his family cemetery
and to make a short film of him chopping firewood. With Mason paying her
salary, Hurston could take her time, coming and going as Kossola wanted,
meeting his grandchildren, visiting his family's graves, going with him to the
church where he was sexton, and, in between, honoring the days he did not want
to speak of his life in slavery, or of anything else.
When Hurston finally started
writing, she dedicated "Barracoon" not to its subject but to Mason,
and acknowledged in its preface what her earlier article had buried in a
footnote—namely, her debt "to the records of the Mobile Historical
Society." In the introduction, she sketched the history of the Clotilda
and the geography and the economics of the brutal trade that had ripped Kos
sola from his home. "Of all the millions transported from Africa to the
Americas only one man is left," she wrote—a man whose voice was crucial
because the burgeoning body of literature on the African slave trade contained
endless "words from the seller, but not one word from the sold."
Hurston framed Kossola's testimony
as the last opportunity to reduce that deficit, and the twelve chapters that
follow her introduction consist almost entirely of his words. She renders
Kossola's story as he told it, not only linguistically, in his dialect, but
narratively, in his own wandering way—sending readers into sad silences and on
distracted errands of the sort she'd shared with him, closing the garden gate
on them the way he'd closed it on her. "Barracoon" does not so much
shape Kossola's story as transcribe it.
Kossola was only nineteen when the
Army of Dahomey raided his in land village of Bante, beheading his king and
countless others, and kidnapping for the slave trade anyone who wasn't elderly
or injured. "I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run
'way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey
head," he told Hurston, before recalling the way the heads of his
neighbors came to smell days after their decapitation. That stench followed him
all the way to Abomey, where the palace was decorated with skulls and guards
carried pikes topped with bleached bones. It was at Abomey that Kossola and the
other prisoners were allowed to rest before being marched another sixty miles
to Ouidah.
One of the great virtues of
Hurston's book is that it returns the wound of slavery, even in her time
considerably calloused over on this country's consciousness, to its raw and
bloody state. Kossola could recall with great specificity the actions of
Captain Foster, who tore him away from the African continent and made him into
an American slave: "De white man lookee and lookee. He lookee hard at de
skin and de feet and de legs and in de mouth. Den he choose." Kossola
recalled the horror of separation, first from his tribal family in Bante, then
from his companions in the barracoon. "Den we cry," he said, "we
sad 'cause we doan want to leave the rest of our people in de barracoon. We all
lonesome for our home. We doan know whut goin' become of us."
Foster's prisoners were loaded onto
the Clotilda, shaved, stripped naked, and locked in darkness below deck for
twelve days. On the thirteenth day, they were allowed into the light, and men
and women who had never before seen the ocean could suddenly see nothing else.
"I so skeered on de sea," Kossola recalled. "De water it makee
so much noise! It growl lak de thousand beastes in de bush." Whenever
other ships approached, the captives were hustled back into the hold, hidden
from the American, British, Portuguese, and Spanish patrols enforcing the
prohibitions on the slave trade.
In Alabama, the Africans were unloaded
and spirited off to another boat for the trip to a plantation upriver. Captain
Foster refused to pay his crew the double wages he had promised them under the
threat of mutiny, and the sea men were hurried North to prevent them from
revealing the slaves' whereabouts to the authorities. But the Africans were
already the talk of Mobile, and a few days after their arrival they had to be
moved again so that federal officials could not seize them. Once the proverbial
and actual coasts were clear, the Africans were divided among the men who had
planned the transatlantic run.
"Cap'n Jim he took me,"
Kossola said of James Meaher, who started calling the teen-ager Cudjo, and put
him to work on a steamship, chopping wood to fuel its trips from Mobile to
Montgomery. He labored that way, gruellingly and without pay, for five years
and six months. Finally, on April 12, 1865, Union soldiers picking mulberries
along the shoreline saw Kossola and the other slaves on Meaher's steamboat and
hollered a message at them: "You free, you doan b'long to nobody no
mo'."
Sixty-two years later, when Hurston
met Kossola, many other men and women liberated by the war were still alive.
Not long after she recorded Kossola's story, she and other writers with the Works
Progress Administration's Federal
Writers' Project dispersed around the South, compiling the stories that would
fill the seventeen volumes of "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery
in the United States." Almost all of those stories progressed from
captivity to emancipation, but Kossola's account both began and ended in
freedom: even in the final years of his life, he considered himself more
African than American, and he could remember clearly an earlier, unquestioned
liberty in his homeland.
He could not, however, return to
it. Emancipation freed slaves only from bondage, not from destitution; the
Clotilda survivors had no way of paying for their passage home. When they
resolved, instead, to build a village of their own, it was Kossola who was
tasked with asking one of their old slavers to provide the land for it, and he
made a passionate speech to Timothy Meaher calling for reparations. When Meaher
refused, Kossola and his former shipmates went back to work in sawmills and
powder mills, on farms and railroads, and as domestic help, until they had
saved enough money to buy the land that became Africatown.
Kossola moved there and married
another survivor, a woman named Abile. They had six children, all of whom died
in one tragedy after another—illnesses, a train accident, an unexplained
disappearance, a police shooting. By the time Hurston arrived, Kossola had
outlived his wife and children by almost two decades and was only a few years
away from his own death. He was, Hurston wrote, "the only man on earth who
has in his heart the memory of his African "Enhanced branding metrics
drive robust solutions for scalable monetization of jargon." home; the
horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; die Lenten tones of slavery, and who
has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land."
"Only" and
"last" are siren songs for writers, alluring but dangerous. Meaning
does not always, or even often, consolidate in sole survivors—and certainly it
is not absent from those who perish—yet the temptation to imbue temporal
accidents with surplus significance skews many accounts of history. Kossola did
not necessarily possess greater knowledge or insight or wisdom about slavery or
the slave trade than those who died before him, but Hurston was drawn to him
because he was known near and far as the last living survivor of the Clotilda.
As it turns out, though, even that
wasn't true, and Hurston knew it. Almost a year after her adventures with
Hughes in Sassy Susie, she wrote a letter to him from Alabama. "Oh!"
she exclaimed toward the end, "almost forgot": she had found another
survivor of the Clotilda living on the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles north
of Africatown. The woman was older than Kossola, and, according to Hurston, a
better storyteller. But there can't be two lasts or more than one only, so
Hurston, perhaps believing that Kossola's story would be more valuable if
people thought it was unique, told Hughes that she planned to keep this other
survivor secret: "No one will ever know about her but us."
Tragically, that proved true.
Abandoning her training by Boas, and ignoring the dictates of both honesty and
history, Hurston forsook the opportunity to record the story of another
survivor. Later scholars have determined that the person Hurston "almost
forgot" was most likely a woman named Allie Beren, but no film footage
records her face, no known photographs document her home, no oral histories
capture her memories. Instead of gathering any of that, Hurston returned to New
York, and spent years shaping the transcripts of her many talks with Kossola
into a book. When she finally finished, no publisher wanted it. Two houses
rejected it outright, while another was interested only if Hurston was willing
to render Kossola's story "in language rather than dialect," which
she was not.
It is true that the long vernacular
passages sometimes make "Barracoon" difficult to read. Yet, in
retrospect, it seems probable that the book was rejected as much for the voice
that isn't in it as for the one that is. Contemporary readers who pickup
"Barracoon" because it was written by Zora Neale Hurston will fail to
find much of her in it. As flashy as fireworks in her own lifetime and bright
as neon in ours, Hurston is barely visible in "Barracoon";
aesthetically as well as intellectually, she absents herself almost entirely
from its pages. That's admirable for an anthropologist, but grievous for a
stylist as talented as Hurston. The novelist who would later summon a hurricane
in her fiction and suspend readers above her naked body on the altar of a
hoodoo priest in her nonfiction resigned herself to the role of scribe in
"Barracoon." Like Hurston herself, in those years, the book stalled
out somewhere between academia and art.
Characteristically impervious to
failure, Hurston responded to the rejection of her manuscript by going to work
on "Jonah's Gourd Vine." With its publication, the very thing that
had troubled at least one publisher about "Barracoon" became one of
the most celebrated features of Hurston's fiction: her ear for black vernacular
speech. Affirmed by her success, she became a more confident writer, and began
giving her own voice as much expression as the voices of her subjects. When
editors clamored for more, she raided her cabinets and turned her earlier field
work into a book called "Mules and Men," which returns to the
storytellers and singers of her childhood. A second collection of folk lore,
"Tell My Horse," goes gonzo into the spiritual beliefs and practices
of Haiti and Jamaica. Those books have more "I"s on single pages than
entire chapters of the book she wrote about Kos sola. Where
"Barracoon" suffers from the lack of a guide, it is clear, in these
narratives, that Hurston's voice could lead the Minotaur off Crete.
What is not clear is why Hurston
never returned to her earliest anthropological subject. Although she was obviously
comfortable repurposing older work, she never rewrote Kossola's story, or tried
again to publish it as a stand alone book. In the handful of pages devoted to
Africatown in her autobiography, "Dust Tracks on a Road," Hurston explains
how her time with Kossola had "impressed upon me the universal nature of
greed." She knew before going South that Captain Foster had purchased the
Africans, but learned from Kossola that the King of Dahomey had sold them:
"My own people had butchered and killed, exterminated whole nations and
torn families apart, for a profit before the strangers got their chance at a
cut. "It's impossible to know if she abandoned "Barracoon"
because of that uncomfortable fact, because of her own academic misdeeds,
because of her failure to record the testimony of another survivor, or for some
other rea son or for none at all. The manuscript went into Hurston's archives
and, for the better part of a century, stayed there.
"Lost" is as alluring an
idea as "last," but what happened to "Barracoon" is more
complicated than mere disappearance. The manuscript was never missing. It is
mentioned by all of Hurston’s biographers, including Robert Hemenway, Valerie
Boyd, and Deborah G. Plant (who wrote and edited the introduction to this new
publication), and Hurston's time in Africatown was detailed more than a decade
ago in Sylviane A. Diouf's excellent and haunting book "Dreams of Africa
in Alabama." Yet the astonishing historical confluence of one of the last
African slaves in America and one of the great American writers was somehow
shrugged off by posterity. When the story of Africatown is told, Hurston is not
always a part of it; when her anthropological work is read, Kossola is often
left out of it. Many people have watched Hurston's footage of him without
knowing that she was the one behind the camera, an experience akin to reading
the work of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and only later learning
that it was translated by George Eliot.
Still, if "Barracoon" was
never actually lost, Hurston was. By the fifties, her writing had fallen out of
favor, and when the sales stopped so did the fellowships, grants, and stipends
that had supported her early work. Meanwhile, her politics, like her
circumstances, grew dire—she opposed everything from the New Deal to the
Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education—until she was estranged
from the black intellectual circles that had once embraced her. She left New
York after being falsely accused of molesting the son of a landlord in 1948;
the trial attracted more attention than her acquittal, and those lurid
headlines were among the last that she made in her lifetime. She went home to
Florida, where she once again found work as a maid, while laboring tirelessly
on a quixotic biography of King Herod. She died in 1960, in a county welfare
home. During that time, Africatown suffered a similar decline—its founders long
deceased, their descendants struggling to preserve the settlement as paper
mills and oil-storage tanks staged a toxic encroachment on its borders.
What rescued Hurston from obscurity
was an act of pilgrimage not un like the one that she had made to Kossola three
decades earlier. In 1973, Alice Walker went looking for Hurston’s unmarked
grave. When she found it, she paid for a tombstone; more important, for
generations of readers, she brought Hurston back to life. Walker offered no
apologies for Hurston’s dishonesty and disastrous acts of self-sabotage, but in
an article that appeared in Ms., "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,"
she made the case for Hurston’s place in the canon.
Thanks to Walker, we now have
multiple editions of Hurston’s novels, autobiography, and other nonfiction,
including "Every Tongue Got to Confess," a posthumous collection
compiled from her field notes. But "Barracoon" arrives decades late,
Hurston’s very first work transformed into her very last—a coda to her career,
yet vital to our ongoing conversation about race and reparations. Walker has
written a foreword, in which she speculates that resistance to the book over time
has stemmed from what Hurston herself found shocking: Kossola's frank account
of "the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before
shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented, starved, arrived on ships as
'black cargo' in the hellish West." One of the virtues of
"Barracoon," then, is that it may help teach us to live with
uncomfortable truths, not only about the complicated and terrible story it
records but also about the complicated and tremendous author who recorded it.
The New Yorker magazine, May 14, 2018.
