I’ve loved Zora Neale Hurston since I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in High School. I went to Barnard in part because she went there. I taught Their Eyes in an English 2 course on the 80th anniversary of its publication. It was just as powerful all those years later. I’ve also taught her essays, including “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” which highlights her ambivalent feelings about segregation. Hurston grew up in an all-black community in Florida, and like bell hooks reminiscence of her pre-integration schooling, segregation meant freedom from white racism and paternalism.
Barrocoon is the edited record of her conversations with Cudjo Lewis, the man thought to be the only living survivor from the Clotilde, the last slave ship to bring Africans to America. He tells the story of his early childhood, his capture, the middle passage, his forced acclimation to slavery, and his freedom. As Hurton writes in the introduction, there have been numerous writings about the slave trade from the perspective of the slave trader, but “the thoughts of the "‘black ivory,’ the ‘coin of Africa,’ had no market value.”
We talk about this a lot in World Literature and in English 1 - the people whose stories are told and retold are not necessarily the best storytellers, nor are their versions of events the best - whatever we take that to mean. There are hidden stories, lost stories, and stories that have been forcibly erased. Hurston dedicated her life to saving those stories.
Hurston gives us not only Cudjo, whose Yoruba name is Kossula, but her with him. We only get his story because of her patience and care in listening. The purpose of her interviews is to learn about his experience, but when she tries to focus his narrative on just him he resists. In order to explain the Maafa, the Black African Holocaust, he has to tell the story of his grandfather and father before he gets to the gruesome telling of his capture, his days in the barrocoon, the journey to the sea, and his short time as a slave.
Most of the narrative deals with his life as a free man, and the creation of Africa Town (now Plateau, Alabama). As cargo on the last slave ship, he arrived shortly before the Civil War began, which means he was suddenly free, “but we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan.’” Unable to afford a ticket back to Africa, Cudjo describes himself as being trapped between two worlds. Hurston quotes him saying, “‘Edem etie ukum edem etie upar’: The tree of two woods, literally two trees that have grown together. One part ukum (mahogany) and one part upar (ebony). He means to say, ‘Partly a free man, partly free.’”
In his own words, he later describes his particular double-voicedness: “I been a member of de church a long time now, and I know de words of de song wid my mouth, but my heart it doan know dat. Derefo’ I sing inside me, ‘O todo ah wah n-law yah-lee, owrran k-nee ra ra k-nee ro ro.’” Though he learns the language, religion, and law of America, he never stops longing for his home.
In all of Hurston’s work, but particularly here, her craft combines the anthropologist’s capacity to listen with the storyteller’s ability to raise the voices of others into song.