A review by relf
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

The story of one of the last enslaved people to arrive in the U.S. from Africa, on the Clotilda, in 1859, told mostly in his own words as transcribed by Zora Neale Hurston. Kossulo (American name Cudjo Lewis) was born about 1841 in what is now Benin, captured by the king of Dahomey, sold to a (by then illegal) slave trader, and smuggled to Mobile, Alabama. He was enslaved for 5+ years, until the end of the Civil War, and became a founder of Mobile's Africaville. His story is horrifying and moving, and shocked me with its immediacy--I have a great-grandfather who was born about the same time as Kossulo. And his life after slavery indicates how little has changed: his life as a "free" man included, among other tragedies, the shooting of one of his sons by a sheriff and a white lawyer who defrauded him. This was one of Zora Hurston's first works, but, because she would not permit publishers to change Kossulo's dialect (as she had heard and transcribed it) into standard English, it was not published until 2018. It's a short book, and I recommend the audiobook, beautifully and movingly narrated by Robin Miles.
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