Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

“On January 16, 1959, Zora Neale Hurston, suffering from the effects of a stroke and writing painfully in longhand, composed a letter to the ‘editorial department’ of Harper & Brothers inquiring if they would be interested in seeing ‘the book I am laboring upon at the present—a life of Herod the Great.’ One year and twelve days later, Zora Neale Hurston died without funds to provide for her burial, a resident of the St. Lucie County, Florida, Welfare Home. She lies today in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, a resting place generally symbolic of the black writer’s fate in America. “Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America, the author of two minor classics and four other major books.” —Robert Hemenway, “Zora Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology,” from The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps