Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

“Of the sixty-seven paragraphs in Hurston’s essay,” Hemenway relates, “only eighteen are exclusively her own prose.”9 Hemenway speculates that Hurston found her interview with Kossola lacking in original material and therefore resorted to the use of Roche’s work to supplement it. He supposes, too, that Hurston, writing at the outset of her career, suffered a quandary of purpose, direction, and methodology: How, exactly, was she to introduce the world to African American folklore, which she perceived to be “the greatest cultural wealth on the continent”?10 Hemenway observed that Hurston, as one of the folk herself, struggled to negotiate the sociocultural chasm between her rural hometown of Eatonville, Florida, and the wealthy enclaves of New York City. He believed that her frustration with the academic study and presentation of the African American folk and folk culture was a reflection of the same struggle. Hurston had imbibed Boas’s theory of cultural relativity and understood that there were no superior or inferior cultures; she understood that cultures were to be assessed and evaluated on their own terms. But were the methods of Boas and Woodson conducive to her purposes? Was it possible that “the reportorial precision” of Western scientific investigation could be the means by which she would document and celebrate African American genius and, thereby, challenge European imperialism and Euro-American cultural hegemony? Or, did she believe, as did poet Audre Lorde, that...