Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

Woodson published this material as an article entitled “Communications,” in the October 1927 issue of the Journal. In the same issue, he published Hurston’s Kossola interview as “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.”6 A footnote at the beginning of the article stated that as “an investigator of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,” Zora Neale Hurston had traveled to Mobile to interview Lewis, “the only survivor of this last cargo.” The note states further, “She made some use, too, of the Voyage of Clotilde and other records of the Mobile Historical Society.”7 In reality, Hurston made more than a little use of the society’s records. And though part of the article was “a first-hand report,” the larger portion of the article was secondhand information drawn from Emma Langdon Roche’s Historic Sketches of the South (1914). Emma Roche was a writer, artist, and farmer born in Alabama in 1878. Her book is an account of the origins of slavery in America, couched in proslavery tenets and paternalistic perspectives. Her narrative recounts the history of the Clotilda and follows the fate of the Africans who were stored in its hold. Only decades later would the literary critic and Hurston biographer Robert Hemenway bring the matter of Hurston’s “borrowing” to scholarly attention and discussion. Hemenway credits the finding to the linguist William Stewart, who discerned it in 1972.