Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston knew this. She did not perceive Barracoon as another cultural artifact illustrating the theoretical characteristics of Negro expression but as one, singular, portrait of black humanity. “Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes.47 It is a particular and specific woman or man. It is Kossola, and his wife, Abilé, their six children, the host of Africans who founded Africatown, and their shipmates who survived the Clotilda