#but captain crow is living in classic tragedy

[sneepity-snoop-snorpity-sneep]

honestly, I’m not sure he *was* supposed to be a bad character. like he’s definitely an antagonist after a certain point in the movie, but beating him is never how the Maisie and Jacob win - cuz he’s not the problem.

He’s a really interesting take on a captain-ahab-type-of-character, consumed by hatred for one specific sea creature due to how many lives have been lost fighting it, and that he himself lost an eye in one of those fights. but the worldbuilding of The Sea Beast gives some more dimensionality to him, enough that i think the revenge-against-the-Red-Bluster part of the character is actually not at all the most important part - just the part of Captain Crow that pits the protagonists against him

its emphasized a few times just how long this whole con-people-into-hunting-sea-beasts scheme has been going - so long that people can’t even remember any other account of how the age of hunters started besides the made-up one! On the palace floor, and on the crew’s maps, there’s art of the Red Bluster - you get the impression that Red has been around for a long time - and this especially is important to Captain Crow

He’s not just a highly competent Hunter who became the captain of the most lauded hunter’s ship at the time - this has been the job of his family for at least two generations, probably more. In the scene where he’s talking with Jacob and pulls out the Inevitable’s old log, wondering what will become of the Inevitable, its pretty clear how personal hunting itself is to him, not just getting that one beast (although he is obsessed with it). His entire identity revolves around standing in opposition to what he believes are these evil monsters, and that was probably true even before he had a personal bone to pick with the Red Bluster. And the story points out pretty clearly that none of this is any hunter’s fault - the monarchy has been lying their royal asses off for years and years.

He’s definitely a very flawed man - Jacob and his crew are apprehensive to approach him after he’s disappointed that they couldn’t pursue the Bluster at the start of the movie, he’s obsessive and he really does have a nasty temper - first refusing to cut the lines on the Bluster even when its clear that would lead to the ship going down with all hands aboard, and then screaming at Maisie, pointing a gun at Jacob when he tries to talk him down from taking it out on her after she cut the lines. Also knocking Jacob around when Jacob actually confronts him with this new perspective on the sea beasts and tries to make him stop - and he cares for Jacob!

like he calls him his son, and I don’t think he was just saying it because Jacob was loyal to him at the time, he really looks at this guy and goes “this is my kid, and I’m gonna do what my dad did for me - teach him to be a hunter and pass on the legacy.” The conversations he has with Jacob, where he talks about the legacy of the Inevitable and offers it to Jacob, and later, when he offers Jacob advice when he’s frustrated by Maisie being a really exuberant kid he wasn’t prepared for - the line about “the code connects us to all who came before, and all who come after” - he might be looking at human’s relations with sea creatures as completely black-and-white (and also how other people’s actions regarding that), but he also highly values the connections that narrative has built for the hunters, and where he and his crew fit into that tradition

In the palace scene, when the Admiral-whose-name-I-don’t-recall is being a snooty prick and shows off this new warship that’s supposed to punt all current hunters out of their jobs, using this (really pretty telling) line of “its the most heavily armed ship ever to set sail”, Captain Crow immediately sizes it up and is like “Nah, this thing wasn’t built to kill monsters, it’ll kill it’s crew first,” and gruffly appeals to the Admiral and the royals not to send men out on it because it’ll get them killed - even assuming it had a competent captain in hunting

I really liked how they introduced the two conflicting parts of this guy’s character at the start; he initially orders his crew not to help the other captain - seemingly both because he really really REALLY wants to get the Bluster, and it’s right there, and because the other guy, from remarks made by him and Sarah, isn’t much of captain, or at least he’s not seen as very capable by the crew of the Inevitable. Captain Crow initially seems to see this as a justifiable excuse to leave him to the Brickleback so he can finally confront the Red Bluster, but when reminded of the Code that’s so important to him and his fore-bearers, quickly switches gears even as he’s vocally angry about it

It’s so well-shown how this guy’s core traits, what you immediately know is gonna make him an antagonistic force, is that he’s this guy whose sense of responsibility, legacy, and connections with those he respects and cares about is set to collide with his need to kill this one specific sea beast

And when he thinks he sees Jacob, who’s been with him since Jacob was a boy and who he sees as a son, get eaten alive in front of him, that need and obsession that was already lowkey out of control, goes fully out of control - cuz a: that was his kid!!! and b: Jacob was supposed to be the guy carrying the legacy of the Inevitable after Crow stepped down or died. He just loses the plot completely

But it’s really interesting how this wasn’t a fatal flaw; like I fully expected him to go down swinging from this refusal to change his POV, but nope! He lives to see the end of the movie, and also the presumed end of the tradition of the Hunters...and of Jacob’s close relationship with him...and possibly the trust of his crew....and get the lies which led to this life he values so much get shoved in his face

 which honestly is a much more heartbreaking “it’ll cost you everything” kind of deal than just dying a pointless death from stubbornness- like damn, he’s pushed away his adopted kid, dented his crew’s trust in him, compromised the code, and now he has to live with that plus the new knowledge that his reasons for all that can’t be justified anymore - it makes me both upset and relieved that we didn’t see how he ended up at the end of the story, cuz ain’t no way it wasn’t rock bottom and then some

I get that Captain Crow was supposed to be a bad character, but can you blame him? He grew up, lived his whole life, did everything in the belief that what he did was saving humanity.

[blackchristiannewswire]

Zora Neale Hurston's Nonfiction Account of Cudjo Lewis, the Last Black Man to Leave the Slave Ships, is Finally Being Published

[caption id="attachment_429915" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Cudjo Lewis (left); Zora Neale Hurston in the early 1930s, around the time she interviewed Cudjo Lewis. (Photo: Courtesy of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust)[/caption] Six years before Zora Neale Hurston published the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, she was trying to publish Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave. Barracoon tells the tale of Cudjo Lewis (original name Kossula) who was the last living person to walk off a slave ship and onto American shores. Vulture has the fascinating story of how Hurston, who was a trained cultural anthropologist before she became a novelist, got Cudjo to tell her his story after she was sent to the South in the 1930s to interview former slaves.

Plying him with peaches and Virginia hams, watermelon and Bee Brand insect powder, Hurston drew out his story. Kossula had been captured at age 19 in an area now known as the country Benin by warriors from the neighboring Dahomian tribe, then marched to a stockade, or barracoon, on the West African coast. There, he and some 120 others were purchased and herded onto the Clotilda, captained by William Foster and commissioned by three Alabama brothers to make the 1860 voyage.

After surviving the Middle Passage, the captives were smuggled into Mobile under cover of darkness. By this time, the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States for 50 years, and the venture was rumored to have been inspired when one of the brothers, Timothy Meaher, bet he could pull it off without being “hanged.” (Indeed, no one was ever punished.) Cudjo worked as a slave on the docks of the Alabama River before being freed in 1865 and living for another 70 years: through Reconstruction, the resurgent oppression of Jim Crow rule, the beginning of the Depression.

You can read the full article from Vulture, including excerpts from Barracoon, here. Below is the description of the book which will be released on May 8, 2018. [caption id="attachment_429920" align="alignright" width="331"] Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston[/caption]

A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

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

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

--Gregory Leo