Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

Over a period of three months, Hurston visited with Kossola. She brought Georgia peaches, Virginia hams, late-summer watermelons, and Bee Brand insect powder. The offerings were as much a currency to facilitate their blossoming friendship as a means to encourage Kossola’s reminiscences. Much of his life was “a sequence of separations.”3 Sweet things can be palliative. Kossola trusted Hurston to tell his story and transmit it to the world. Others had interviewed Kossola and had written pieces that focused on him or more generally on the community of survivors at Africatown. But only Zora Neale Hurston conducted extensive interviews that would yield a comprehensive, book-length account of Kossola’s life. She would alternately title the work “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” and “The Life of Kossula.” As with the other interviews, Kossola hoped the story he entrusted to Hurston would reach his people, for whom he was still lonely. The disconnection he experienced was a source of continuous distress.