In 1927 Hurston began interviewing Oluale Kossola — known as Cudjo Lewis — in Plateau, Alabama, one of the last known survivors of the transatlantic slave trade, brought to America in 1860 aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship. Barracoon records his account, in his own dialect, of his capture in West Africa, the Middle Passage, enslavement, emancipation, and the founding of Africatown. Publishers rejected the manuscript in 1931 in part because Hurston refused to render his speech in standard English; it was published for the first time in 2018.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston; edited by Deborah G. Plant · Original publisher: Amistad (New York), 2018 (manuscript written 1931)
