Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears. Alice Walker March 2018

King Ghezo of Dahomey renounced his 1852 treaty to abolish the traffic and by 1857 had resumed his wars and raids. Reports of his activities had reached the newspapers of Mobile, Alabama.

And in September 1931, Hurston contemplated Viking’s proposal: “The Viking press again asks for the Life of Kossula, but in language rather than dialect. It lies here and I know your mind about that and so I do not answer them except with your tongue.”

Zora Neale Hurston was not only committed to collecting artifacts of African American folk culture, she was also adamant about their authentic presentation.

Even as Hurston has her own idea about how a story is to be told, Kossola has his.

All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.

Sometime we holler back and forth and find out where each other come from. But each nation in a barracoon by itself.

from the body of the book

“‘Well den,’ I say, ‘You see Ole Charlie dere. S’pose he stop here on de way to church. He got de parasol ’cause he think it gwine rain when he leave de house. But he look at de sky and ’cide hit ain’ gwine rain so he set it dere by de door an’ go on to church. After de preachin’ he go on home ’cause he think de parasol at Cudjo house. It safe. He say, “I git it nexy time I go dat way.” When he come home he say to one de chillun, “Go to Cudjo house and tellee him I say sendee me my parasol.” “‘De parasol it pretty. I likee keep dat one.’ But I astee dem all, ‘Is it right to keep de parasol?’ Dey all say, ‘No it belong to Charlie.’ “‘Well,’ I say, ‘my wife, she b’long to God. He lef’ her by my door.’

from the body of the book

I am sure that he does not fear death. In spite of his long Christian fellowship, he is too deeply a pagan to fear death. But he is full of trembling awe before the altar of the past.

from the body of the book

Rather, improperly documented paraphrased passages and near-verbatim appropriations from Roche’s work constitute the larger part of the article.

This refers to an earlier paper Hurston published about her meetings with Kossula

Boyd wondered whether Hurston’s submission of material that contained only 25 percent of her original work might have been Hurston’s “way of getting back at Woodson for arbitrarily slicing her pay and cutting into her research time by having her do his dreck work.”

reminds me of quote in dust appendix which went something like "she wrote poorly when she was paid poorly"

The body of lore Hurston gathered was an argument against such notions of cultural inferiority and white supremacy, and it defied the idea of European cultural hegemony as it also questioned the narrative of white nationalism.

The March 1807 Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves declared all participation in international trafficking to be illegal and abolished the importation of Africans into the United States.

The 1820 act charged participants in the traffic with piracy, which carried a penalty of death. Although international trafficking had been deemed illegal or “illegitimate,” proslavery adherents continued to engage in it. The United Kingdom also abolished trans-Atlantic trafficking in 1807.

Portuguese colonists, settled in the island of Madeira, had begun experimentation with the cultivation of sugarcane. Initially, they imported eastern Europeans and Africans to perform this labor. However, Constantinople’s fall to the Turks in 1453 closed the “slave ports” of the Black Sea to western Europeans seeking eastern European slaves. In the aftermath of this turn of events, the majority of the laborers in the cane fields of Madeira came from the African continent. The Portuguese replicated this model of cultivating sugarcane with the labor of Africans in the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas. Other European nations, England, and the English colonies in North America emulated the Portuguese.