Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to interview Oluale Kossola, known as Cudjo Lewis. He was the final living survivor of the Clotilda, the last ship to transport kidnapped Africans to the United States in 1860. The narrative preserves Kossola’s specific dialect to recount his life in West Africa, his capture during a Dahomian raid, the confinement within the barracoons, and the Atlantic crossing. He details the labor he performed while enslaved and his eventually successful efforts to establish African Town alongside fellow survivors following the Civil War.

Historians and students of the African diaspora read this account to gain a firsthand perspective on the Middle Passage that bypasses academic interpretation. The text functions as a primary source for those measuring the lasting psychological impact of displacement and the loss of one's original culture and language. Readers finish the book with a technical understanding of the illegal slave trade’s final years and a specific portrait of how communal identity survived through memory and settlement.

Balanced in tone; a moderate read.

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