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 ... [Alice] 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.
Zora Neale Hurston’s recovered masterpiece, Barracoon, is a stunning addition to several overlapping canons of American literature ... Kossula’s homesickness is vast and seems to have no bottom. Hurston, renowned for her joie de vive, is restrained as she coaxes this story from the loneliest man in the world. The woman who famously wrote, 'I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife,' makes herself almost invisible in this book, dedicating entire chapters to Kossula’s monologues, with few authorial interventions ... Kossula’s understanding of his own life does not center on his experience in bondage — and in this, perhaps, he and Hurston are kin. Instead, he focuses on the life he lived in West Africa and his life in Africatown, a settlement of emancipated persons. This may be the most surprising aspect of his recounting. While technically Barracoon can be categorized as a slave narrative, Kossula tells the story of his life as a free man.
Barracoon, in many ways, pursues the slavery narrative in the same manner as the book and film 12 Years a Slave: it tracks slavery’s violence and aftermath through the words, memories, and history of a single person who survived it ... Holding the book and reading it now, Barracoon seems ahead of its time, largely due to how it makes the story of slavery both intimate and viscerally visual, as Roots did most notably several decades after this manuscript was created ...Hurston writes Cudjo’s voice as it was spoken out loud to her. Her strength in articulating dialogue is something that shines in her later work, but it is seen brilliantly here...Hurston lets his language exist, trusting readers to find their way through it ... Barracoon is a difficult read, harsh and brutal at times, with just enough levity to help push a reader through. Cudjo ends his story as a full human, beyond the terrors he endured. Hurston’s book is about a person surviving, despite every attempt made for him not to. It seems triumphant, I’m sure. Until you remember what you’re celebrating the triumph over.
Hurston herself is present only at the edges of the narrative, but she is unmistakable. She is most beloved for her novels, but she was also a gifted folklorist, and the qualities that distinguished her are on display in this early work: her patience, persistence and charisma; her ability to read her subjects; her tact ... The details he shared with Hurston are indelible ... There is, in Hurston’s attentive gaze, not restitution but the consolations of kinship and witness, the sweetness of clingstone peaches, of the life built within the constraints.
The eye-opening, terrifying and wonderful Barracoon demonstrates an intimacy and immediacy that some of those interview-based [slave] narratives lack ... Hurston's use of vernacular might be a stumbling block for the modern reader, but it was the accepted professional approach of the day...The reader who commits to that vernacular is richly rewarded for persistence ... Short enough to be read in a single sitting, this book is one of those gorgeous, much too fleeting things. An introduction by literary critic Deborah Plant gives welcome context for Hurston's journey of discovery, while an appendix showcases additional folk tales from Kossula's African past. Brimming with observational detail from a man whose life spanned continents and eras, the story is at times devastating, but Hurston's success in bringing it to light is a marvel.
For skeptics who believe that all the archives have long been plundered and all the literary treasures of the past have already been published, Barracoon will be a conversion experience. It's a monumental work, not 'merely' because it describes aspects of the slave trade that largely went unrecorded, but also because it vividly dramatizes two extraordinary voices in conversation ... He told Hurston: 'When de earth eats, it doan give back.' True enough. But in writing Barracoon, Hurston found a way to ensure that the earth didn't swallow Cudjo Lewis' precious words.
Lewis’ dialect does require some patience from the reader, but it soon becomes familiar. And the story he tells Hurston rewards that patience, although it’s often horrifying and heartbreaking. Hurston doesn’t subtract herself from the narrative; she recounts how she develops a relationship with her sometimes resistant subject, bringing him peaches and hams, helping him work in his garden on days he doesn’t feel like talking. It’s a technique that brings both of them to life in all their humanity, etching all the more sharply the cruelties inflicted on Lewis and all of the enslaved.
With Barracoon, she put both her literary and her anthropological skills to work to create a unique and harrowing slave narrative, the story of the last known survivor of Middle Passage ... Barracoon is both a historical document and an astonishing literary accomplishment, an unapologetic rendering of a voice that shows us the wound and does not hide from it ... Baracoon breathes life into those memories — of the horrors of abduction, of Middle Passage, of slavery, of the Jim Crow South — and makes them so real and so present that they would trouble anyone’s sleep.
In Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston challenges the American public’s narrow view of the African continent, the transatlantic slave trade, and the diasporic cultures that came as a result of it ... Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon widens the scope of this default, reductive rendering of history through form and function ... Kossola’s story broadens the popular narrative, showing that the lust for dominance that sparked the slave trade wasn’t endemic to colonizers, and that West African societies were often active participants ... Barracoon shines largely due to Hurston’s theory that when it comes to African subjects in America, objectivity has been permanently compromised ... Hurston gives him space to be subject, narrator, and protagonist alike. The complete work produces a harrowing image of a man ... In Barracoon, Hurston illuminates his resilience without romanticizing it as necessary in the search for self-realization.
Barracoon, a work unpublished in Hurston’s lifetime, captures both her anthropological spirit and her capacity for storytelling and narrative ... Kossula’s story reminds us that Emancipation did not end those assaults on the communities and families of African Americans, but rather enabled their continuation through other means. A combination of xenophobia and police impunity led to the death of one of Kossula’s sons. A railroad company killed another without making the slightest effort at compensation. Poor medical care guaranteed the death of several other children. And grief likely killed his wife. An assault on African families was not just foundational to the black presence in America during the long era of slavery; it continued in the years after Emancipation.
Though the story is recounted from Hurston’s own perspective, she inserts very little of herself into the narrative, letting it be driven by Lewis. Through the retelling of her interviews, she captures the complexity of Lewis’s loss of his native culture and family, the harrowing journey to the US, his time as a slave, and his role in establishing African Town ... Hurston['s] study of Lewis reveals the deep wounds that being forced to leave one’s country and the bonds of slavery inflict on a person ... Hurston’s Barracoon asks us to examine the present even as it explores the past through the experiences of Lewis, the last-known survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in his day.
While Hurston acknowledges that her account 'makes no attempt to be a scientific document, but on the whole is rather accurate,' Kossola’s story—in the vernacular of his own words—is an invaluable addition to American social, cultural, and political history.
