A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery since it tells the true story of one from the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade-abducted from Africa within the last ‘Black Cargo’ ship to reach in america.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Cell, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. From the about Barracoon: The Story from the Last ‘Black Cargo’ millions of men, women, and kids transferred from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the storyplot of this integral part of the nation’s background. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account from the raid that resulted in his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in america.

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his dispatch. Spending more than 90 days there, she spoken in depth with Cudjo about the details of his lifestyle. During those weeks, the youthful writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the yard and discussed Cudjo’s past-memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors to be captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing connection with the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end from the Civil War.

Predicated on those interviews, offering Cudjo’s exclusive vernacular, and created from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her among the preeminent American authors from the twentieth-century, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and of 1 life forever described by it. Supplying insight in to the pernicious legacy that is constantly on the haunt us all, dark and white, this poignant and powerful work can be an invaluable contribution to your shared background and culture.