#barracoon

[semper-legens]

26. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, by Zora Neale Hurston

Owned: No, library Page count: 164 My summary: The story of one of the last survivors of the last slave ship that came to the Americas, as told to Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

At work a couple of months ago, I did an author spotlight display focusing on Zora Neale Hurston. She's an interesting figure. A black American writer in the early parts of the 20th century, focused on collecting black American stories and folktales alongside some fiction writing. This is a work that went unpublished in her time, the stories collected by her from a man named Cudjoe Lewis, or Oluale Kossola, at the time thought to be the last survivor of the last slave ship that came to America, the Clotilda. It finally got a publisher in 2018, the manuscript having lain in Howard University all the while. So how was it? ...odd.

Let me explain. There is more preface and explanation in this book than actual text, at least in my version of it. The pages written by Hurston are actually relatively short, and give more of an overview than an in-depth discussion of Kossola's life. Which makes sense, don't get me wrong - I completely understand why Kossola wouldn't want to discuss the more traumatic things that happened to him, especially as Hurston was a relative stranger and needed to gain his trust before he would open up to her. Nevertheless, the story is more about Hurston visiting Kossola at times than Kossola's actual life and story, which was a little disappointing. One thing I have to praise, however, is that Kossola's words seem to be recorded as he would have spoken them; Hurston uses the vernacular for Kossola's dialogue, rather than transliterating his words into standard English, which is partially the reason this was not published in her lifetime. It's an admirable effort to preserve a piece of American history, but I'm afraid it made for some pretty light reading.

Next up, a question that can be answered in one word.

[southernmermaidsgrotto]

Hoodoo, Rootwork and Conjure sources by Black Authors

Because you should only ever be learning your ancestral ways from kinfolk. Here's a compilation of some books, videos and podcast episodes I recommend reading and listening to, on customs, traditions, folk tales, songs, spirits and history. As always, use your own critical thinking and spiritual discernment when approaching these sources as with any others.

Hoodoo in America by Zora Neale Hurston (1931)

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston (1936)

Tell my horse by Zora Neale Hurston (1938)

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, editors (2003)

Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition by Yvonne P. Chireau (2006)

African American Folk Healing by Stephanie Mitchem (2007)

Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies by Faith Mitchell (2011)

Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System by Katrina Hazzard-Donald (2012)

Rootwork: Using the Folk Magick of Black America for Love, Money and Success by Tayannah Lee McQuillar (2012)

Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant (2014)

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years Of Traditional African American Healing by Michele Elizabeth Lee (2017)

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisa Teish (2021)

African American Herbalism: A Practical Guide to Healing Plants and Folk Traditions by Lucretia VanDyke (2022)

These are just some suggestions but there's many many more!! This is by no means a complete list.

I recommend to avoid authors who downplay the importance of black history or straight out deny how blackness is central to hoodoo. The magic, power and ashé is in the culture and bloodline. You can't separate it from the people. I also recommend avoiding or at the very least taking with a huge grain of salt authors with ties to known appropriators and marketeers, and anyone who propagates revisionist history or rather denies historical facts and spreads harmful conspiracy theories. Sadly, that includes some black authors, particularly those who learnt from, and even praise, white appropriators undermining hoodoo and other african and african diasporic traditions. Be careful who you get your information from. Keeping things traditional means honoring real history and truth.

Let me also give you a last but very important reminder: the best teachings you'll ever get are going to come from the mouths of your own blood. Not a book or anything on the internet. They may choose to put certain people and things in your path to help you or point you in the right direction, but each lineage is different and you have to honor your own. Talk to your family members, to the Elders in your community, learn your genealogy, divine before moving forwards, talk to your dead, acknowledge your people and they'll acknowledge you and guide you to where you need to be.

May this be of service and may your ancestors and spirits bless you and yours 🕯️💀

[cartermagazine]

Today We Honor Oluale Kossola, Renamed Cudjo Lewis

Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin in her book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”

A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast.

There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery, after the “Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves" took effect in 1808 slavery was abolished, 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 1808.

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 owners.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

He and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.

CARTER™️ Magazine

[padawan-historian]

“Happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.”

~ Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo

[lboogie1906]

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early 20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God. She wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

She used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. It is the site of the “Zora! Festival”, held each year in her honor.

She began her studies at Howard University. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. She conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community’s identity.

She wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the African American community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!. She wrote and published her literary anthropology on African American folklore, Mules and Men, and her first three novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Her works concerned both the African American experience and her struggles as an African American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. Her manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, was published posthumously in 2001 after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, about the life of Cudjoe Lewis, was published posthumously in 2018. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #zetaphibeta

[dutzervonmezzenbrau]

a study for barracoon (Helga Testore)

by A͓̽n͓̽d͓̽r͓̽e͓̽w͓̽ ͓̽W͓̽y͓̽e͓̽t͓̽h͓̽ (1976)

[venusinmyrrh]

16, 23, 25!

16. What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red did not land for me. Based on the tumblr-dot-com-based hype I was led to expect that it would be an incredibly emotionally resonant experience, and I'm sure for some people it is, but for me it ended up reading like pages and pages of artisan gibberish.

23. What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?

I can get through an Agatha Christie mystery in a matter of hours. Outside of that, I devoured Simon Doonan's Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed in a single day because I just physically couldn't put it down.

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

To read more of the books that are actually sitting on my shelf (whoops). I've been meaning to get to Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston for ages, as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and maybe even a reread of James Joyce's Dubliners if I'm feeling seasonal.

[trascapades]

📚#ArtIsAWeapon Remembering author, anthropologist, southern Black life storyteller, trailblazer #ZoraNealeHurston, who was born January 7, 1891.

#ZoraNealeHurstonDay

📷 photograph by #CarlVanVechten .

Caption and images reposted from @thefreeblackwomenslibrary It’s Zora Neale Hurston Day ⭐️🖤⭐️

Are you familiar with the life and writing of this legendary free thinking world traveling rule breaking culture defining Black woman icon?

Which one of her novels have you read and enjoyed?

Today we celebrate the birth of a chosen ancestor, spirit guide and muse of The Free Black Women’s Library, also a quintessential Capricorn and role model for Black girl scholars researchers historians anthropologists story tellers and mean muggers world wide!!

Cheers to the goat!!

🖤🖤🖤 🎂🎂🎂🐐🐐🐐🥂🥂🥂

BTW!!!

for those doing The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge feel free to read

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD for - a book where the characters speak Geechee, Gullah, Creole, patois or AAVE

BARRACOON - a book of history , historical fiction or slave narrative

HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK - collection of stories, poems, letters or prose

DUST TRACKS ON THE ROAD - a memoir

#zoranealehurston

#freeblackwoman

#TFBWL

#tfbwlreads

#tfbwlreadingchallenge

#thefreeblackwomenslibrary #TheirEyesWereWatchingGod #Barracoon #FreeBlackWomensLibrary #HarlemRenaissance #BlackWomenAuthors #BlackGenius

[beardedmrbean]

Hey you can answer this tomorrow, but why women king was made…remember roots? I heard the og mc kunta kenta (Is that a real fucking African name?) didn’t understand what the Europeans was doing on the ports with slaves…even though he would have actually known-ooooh

But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults

Expect meee, god this pan Africa hurt us

Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae

Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it

Roots managed to serve its purpose, at least the original one, suffered from extreme historical inaccuracies in places never saw the remake.

But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults

This is Oluale Kossola, his American name is Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (he chose all but Lewis himself), he's the last known slave with distinct memories of life in Africa before being sold by the dahomey and put on a ship and smuggled into the US, human cargo was illegal by then but greedy and evil people on both sides of the Atlantic kept on doing it anyhow.

You can do some of your own reading if you like, but some highlights from his wiki page are.

In April or May 1860, his village was attacked and Lewis was taken prisoner by female warriors led by King Glele of Dahomey, during an annual dry-season raid for slaves. Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, an American ship recently built in Mobile, Alabama, and owned by businessman Timothy Meaher. The importation of slaves into the United States had been illegal since 1808, but slaves were still routinely smuggled in from Spanish Cuba.

And this is from a article about a book about him

The pathos of the African American experience, told with such tenderness in Barracoon, is matched by its complexity. Hurston herself remarked that in writing Kossola’s harrowing account of how the king of Dahomey profited from raiding and selling members of neighbouring kingdoms, she was deeply affected by the question of African complicity in the slave trade. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw,” Hurston wrote, “was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on – that white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”

One hell of a reality check right there

Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae

ya if they wanted to do a Braveheart comparison they'd need to set it up so that the areas that the dahomey raided set up to fight againt the dahomey

Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it

Based on historical events, but we're not going to tell you that we did a 180 on who was doing what.

Could you imagine the fallout if someone made a accurate movie about that, painting all the perpetrators as what they were.

Wonder if finding out that if their ancestors hadn't been forced onto a boat there's a good chance they would have either been worked until they died or used as a human sacrifice might shift some viewpoints a little.

None of that is me expressing anything other than just curiosity, since this is tumblr and we piss on the poor who just want to read here I figure disclaimer is needed.

[ethicopoliticolit]

In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—‘last night I laid with Dido on the ground’; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic ‘that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with’ in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.

—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)

[olameni]

It occurs to me that books i love the most are also the books that have ruined my life.

I spend a lot of time studying black history and as much as I appreciate knowing the history of my people both in their victories and their suffering, that awareness is largely traumatizing.

For example, reading Patterson discuss missing nuance in the discussions about manumission used to valorize the humanity of a slave owner and learning even a freed slave is still a slave. Because that “freedom” is guaranteed not by an acknowledgment of the humanity of the slave but by prestige of former owner. Freedom as reward and dangled carrot to the still enslaved. Freedom as a flex tantamount to making it rain at the strip club.

Or in Hurston’s Barracoon reading Oluale Kossola describe the raid on his home and subsequent trafficking into slavery.

Such things demand unpacking and processing. Instead it just sits in journal pages and in the back of your mind in an attempt not to come off weird to people.

It changes you and blowing the world up starts making a modicum of sense.

[shochet]

Tagged by @bawnjourno thank u :3

last song:

As i type this i am actively listening to Ain't No Rest for the Wicked Cage the Elephant

favorite color:

Green :-)

currently watching:

Houusee MD 🦧 (that's wilson)

last movie:

STALKER 1979, showed my pal :3

currently reading:

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" - Zora Neale Hurston

sweet/spicy/savoury:

Savoury👍

relationship status:

Single and ready to settle 🤰🧑‍🍼😊🙌

current obsession:

Looking at every single individual moment in life from a cultural anth point of view and then exploding :(

last thing i googled:

"Can praying mantis hurt me" cause of this guy

currently working on:

My got-damn site reporrrtt 😭😭😭😭

[blueiight]

I love the brunt of zora neale hurston’s work but she so wrong for lying about the dahomey & lying on cudjoe lewis like dat .

and idk how much of it is hurston& moreso the presumption ppl have made about barracoon being some sort of history… bc it was published at the time in new ebony mag as fictional. and theres this remark on her work (which definitely maps onto barracoon’s prose.. passages about heathens and all)

[tostudyadragonfly]

Yesterday I watched the documentary Descendant (Netflix) and I won’t make a whole post (bc I need to sleep) but I think it’s one of those stories that need to be heard. Thank God for Zora Neale Hurston for capturing so much of that story. In much of the film they read from Barracoon, and this tied the story of Cudjo Lewis, to his lineage, to the current struggle and work of Africatown in Alabama quite beautifully. It really made me want to know so much more about what else has been done since it’s release

[johannacantsing]

six sentence sunday-23 feb 2025

brooooooo it's been a rough fucking february i gotta be real:

i've been pretty nauseated lately which is a fun little escher piece in my body bc my nausea makes me not want to eat which makes me more nauseated and then bc i haven't eaten my teeth start to hurt (i don't know science-that's just what happens) and bc my body's all out of whack, i got an insane eczema flair up, which makes everything else really inflamed including the acid reflux, nausea, and tooth pain ;-;

good news-i've been lost in the nonfiction sauce again lately: i read king leopold's ghost (wish it had more of the effects, ie the ghost but still good) and am almost done with chernobyl: the history of a nuclear disaster (basically the only thing i learned at school was "communism bad=chernobyl" which is insane considering three mile island [another book i need to get from the library lol]) and i have like two other nonfictions read to go in the library app (barracoon and the lumumba plot)

i came up with an idea for another book (kinda short novel/novella length, high-concept litfic), so that's cool

i'm getting close to finishing the first draft of my first book and there's so many structural things i need to fix that i can already tell but that's not my problem rn and also trying to fix it now would be stupid as hell bc there's gonna be things i don't even know about bc i don't have fresh eyes lol

this part will need to be reworked bc it's kinda clunky, but it gets the job done for a first draft lol. main character collapsed from blood loss and one of his little brothers is watching him fall apart:

Pain shot and splintered through my skull. I let out an involuntary, pained noise, like a prey animal with three broken legs. 

“You’re alive! Grayson!” Noah had been fumbling for my pulse and slammed his panicked hand into my broken nose.

I heaved and heaved and rolled to the side of Noah and vomited everywhere. My nose was still broken, still blocked. Spitting the remnant acid onto the sidewalk, my cheek burned and itched. My shaky hand came away bloody.

“You got road rash. When you collapsed. Grayson,” Noah’s voice wobbled like a little kid, “What the fuck is going on?”

[thoughtportal]

Many writers have wondered, when embarking on a new project, what might happen should Fate intervene and prevent them from finishing. This isn’t the most pleasant thought, however, and for this reason some of us have yet to make provisions for what should be done with our work after we die. Perhaps this is because we the living tend to assume there will always be more time.

The Life of Herod the Great will be published by Amistad in January.   (Credit: Barbara Hurston Lewis, Faye Hurston, and Lois Gaston)

The writer, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was likely no different. Hurston spent nearly fifteen years conducting research for The Life of Herod the Great, which will be published by Amistad in January. In one letter to an editor, Hurston called the novel her “great obsession” and described the work she was undertaking to translate conflicting historical accounts into a fictional narrative “the most formative period of [her] whole life.” If not for her failing health, surely she intended to continue the painstaking process many writers know well: writing and revising, then submitting and revising anew if the book failed to find a home. She had queried editors (and unfortunately, received their rejections) up until a year before her death in 1960. Versions of the manuscript were found among her belongings, eventually making their way into the University of Florida archives and the hands of Deborah G. Plant, the editor of The Life of Herod the Great as well as Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Amistad, 2018).

What might Hurston have thought about readers receiving this new novel in its current form? And, more important, what does The Life of Herod the Great tell us about the writer who authored it and her vision for her life’s work?

The novel, which will be published on Hurston’s 134th birthday, is a fictionalized biography of Herod, a Rome-appointed ruler of Judea during the first century BCE. In a preface that will be published with the book, Hurston writes that she chose his story because “the West, whose every nation professes Christianity, should be better acquainted with the real, the historical Herod, instead of the deliberately folklore Herod.”

Hurston is right: Herod’s legacy in the modern world is fraught, dominated by claims in the Gospel of Matthew that he personally ordered the deaths of Bethlehemite male children ages two years and younger around the time of the birth of Jesus. However, her research and that of later scholars suggest that Herod’s paranoia about being overthrown by an infant Messiah was unlikely, and among his subjects he was a popular and progressive king (albeit sufficiently brutal for his time and the mores of Roman rule). Yet instead of focusing on Herod’s anti-Christian infamy, Hurston turns to his shrewd manipulation of family, friends, subjects, and foes. She is meticulous in her re-creation of his inner life, describing everything from his private musings about love to the bejeweled embellishments of his tunics. In this melding of fact, fiction, and fable, we see Hurston in her finest form: a well-versed cultural historian who has done her research and grapples with archival inconsistencies, reconstructing a narrative that approaches the truth in a fascinating new way.

And, still, what we have received is not as complete as Hurston might have intended. As an editor’s note explains at the front of the book, the triple asterisks that become increasingly more frequent in later chapters denote missing sections and pages, some of which were likely lost in a fire set by workers clearing Hurston’s belongings from the welfare home where she was living at the time of her death. Other sections might have simply not yet been written. For instance, the final full chapter of the novel reads more like a summary than anything, and the book itself ends with snippets from Hurston’s letters, in which she outlines her intentions for writing Herod’s peaceful death, a marked contrast to historical accounts of his suffering from phthiriasis, a putrefying illness caused by lice. This detail is interesting because, unlike the discrepancies surrounding Herod’s rule and its potential overlap with the life of Jesus, nearly all historical accounts agree that he died a painful death. Hurston’s decision to write Herod’s death this way raises some interesting questions. Is it, in part, due to her lifelong commitment to bucking the status quo and disrupting preconceptions of what it means to be an artist—and a Black one at that? Should we think of the book as “unfinished,” or consider its truncated state emblematic of Hurston’s ever-evolving and still-unfolding legacy?

By all accounts Hurston was a mythic iconoclast. At my alma mater, Fisk University, a small, historically Black college founded in part with help from the American Missionary Association, stories abound about her time on campus in the 1930s. According to lore she raised eyebrows by wearing pants and smoking cigarettes on school grounds, and according to her own letters she once told Fisk’s then-president Thomas Jones that he “ran his school like a Georgia plantation” filled with “good n⸺ s.” She consistently thwarted expectations and ruffled a few feathers in the process. The Life of Herod the Great stands squarely in the ethos of Hurston’s life and work, from her depiction of Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Janie Crawford, who walks away from one marriage and is relieved when the next husband dies of old age (allowing her to meet her true love, Tea Cake Woods), to what is considered the prequel to The Life of Herod the Great, a retelling of the Book of Exodus titled Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which Hurston suggests the titular character was Egyptian—in essence, an African. In these and her other books, Hurston challenges readers to set aside what they have been told to believe—that women must settle for their lovers and their lives, or that our culture’s greatest heroes are white—and asks us to reconsider our received truths. In the case of Herod the Great, she raises questions that were undoubtedly on her mind during the decades she worked on this book, which spanned the wake of the Harlem Renaissance to the cusp of the civil rights movement, one of the most violent eras in American social history. Those questions persist today: Who gets to tell the story of who we were, how we lived, and what we did? And who will be brave enough to refute it if the full story isn’t told the first time? The answers to these questions are as complex as the central figure in Hurston’s new novel and are, in some ways, as incomplete as the text we have now received. But that reality is not a shortcoming. It’s an exhortation to continue this asymptotic work of trying to perfect the art we make about an imperfect world, imperfect people, and our imperfect selves. And to keep at it, whether we are destined to finish the task or not.

Destiny O. Birdsong is the author of the poetry collection Negotiations (Tin House, 2020) and the triptych novel Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central, 2022). She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.