Zora neale hurston immigration biography book

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Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston is an interesting nonfiction piece from a voice that’s rare in our literature.

Cudjoe Lewis aka Kazoola at the time was considered the sole survivor of the slave ship Clotilda, which brought 150 people in 1860 from around Benin in Africa after the ban on ships from going to the continent. Because of the secretive act, the slaves worked on the Alabama coastline. Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjoe while a graduate student of anthropology in the late 1920s. She would go to his home and discuss his life, where he vividly recalls his life in Africa.

The book is mostly his folktale-sounding true stories from his native land involving how the king interacted with the people and how his father worked for the king. He talks about how he was brought to the king with the others and corralled onto the ship. He shudders at the horrendous journey to America, a strange place where he said it took him and the others from his homeland awhile to learn how to tend to the land, especially the sugarcane. He’s a slave for five years until the Union soldiers arrive in town and tell him he’s free. He asks where does he go now, and the soldiers don’t know. The community settles in what they call Africatown, modern-day Plateau, Alabama, where most of the descendants are African-born from the Clotilda. Cudjoe talks about the family he started and how they were gone by the time he’s speaking with Zora, even mentioning how one of his sons was shot dead by a police officer and how he had to look at his son’s disfigurement to understand what had happened.

It’s a quick read that made me research more on Cudjoe – there’s not enough of his story there, yet it’s there. It’s an interesting journey from living a regular life in Africa to adjusting to a new life in America he did

I first read about Zora Neale Hurston while indulging in one of my favourite pastimes: browsing through the online catalogue of the Library of America, a state-affiliated non-profit publisher which is one of the few things the USA does better than other countries. (Probably because literature is enjoyed by rich people – like opera, visual arts, ballet etc – so thus is eligible for government funding.)

Hurston was an African-American writer born in 1891 who came to prominence in her late thirties, on the tail end of (or just after, depending on sources) the Harlem Renaissance. Having read a little about her (and conscious of how much I’d enjoyed the Black American writers of that period I’ve encountered before (for example Jean Toomer, Richard Wright and – many years ago now – Ralph Ellison), I kept my eyes peeled for Hurston in the bookstores and “little free libraries” (or as I call them, “little free bookstores” haha) of Toronto, eventually stumbling on this pair of books in the bookshop directly over the road from my workplace. Unintentionally, I had acquired two of Hurston’s seminal works, both of which had titles that seemed far more familiar than I had expected.

And Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

This is a really interesting novel, from a literary historical perspective, though I don’t know if I would necessarily consider it “good”, though I don’t know how much my post-reading opinions of this are influenced by the inexplicably negative Maya Angelou foreword included at the start of Dust Tracks On A Road, which I began reading between finishing the novel and typing this blog (which I’m doing as I travel across the city on the morning of July 19th to go and have a 90 minute medical to see if I’m eligible for permanent residency in Canada and tho (other than the post-COVID, pre-reopened gyms, weight gain) I’m in reasonable physical healt