Barracoon

This is another one that comes down to voice for me: hearing the story of one of the last African slaves to experience the Middle Passage in his own words. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and refocuses the vast and familiar history of the American slave experience to a disarmingly—and powerfully—human scale.

This book is a raw peek into America’s troubled past. It’s a series of interviews that Hurston conducts with a man who was on the last slave ship to make the transatlantic passage. It is a difficult read on two levels: subject matter and English. Hurston presents the words of a man named Cudjo Lewis as authentically as possible. What may seem to some today as parody, is translated to the page with accuracy. For me it communicated first-hand some of the past my main character has lived through. Books like this help to inform my protagonist’s current attitude toward… show more.

In addition to being an extraordinary novelist, Harlem Renaissance luminary Zora Neale Hurston was also an ethnographer, anthropologist, and folklorist. During her PhD studies at Columbia University, she traveled to Alabama to meet a man named Cudjo Lewis, then believed to be the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade. Barracoon captures their conversations. Mr. Lewis recalls in crystalline detail life in his home village in West Africa before he was captured and brutally forced to voyage across the Middle Passage, never to see his homeland again. He tells Hurston of his harrowing arrival on these shores, about all his… show more.