Precolonial black history is often reduced to a troubling binary: Africans as a uniformly subservient arm of the triangular trade and Africa through the lens of monarchies like ancient Egypt and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Consider Nas’s 2003 song “I Can” (his highest-charting single to date), which was widely lauded for its uplifting message. To open his last verse, he pleads with black children to look to the distant past for inspiration: “[Before] we came to this country / We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys.” Incomplete and romanticized readings of history have resulted in a fanatical, monolithic image of Africa, or worse, a dismissal of the rest of the continent as a backwards land that colonizers rightfully raided. Both myopic narratives prevent people from exploring the continent’s full range of societies—not only spurring resentment among African Americans and African and Caribbean immigrants, but also promoting ignorance of the shared cultural elements that survived the journey across the Atlantic.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon widens the scope of this default, reductive rendering of history through form and function. After being kept in the Alain Locke Collection at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center for more than half a century, Barracoon was released to the public in May. Hurston experienced considerable difficulty in getting the book published in 1931, and in 2016, Lois Hurston Gaston, the author’s grandniece, announced on behalf of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust that releasing the book publicly was “especially timely given that our country is continuing to focus on our racial divide and the consequences of slavery.”
Read Melinda D. Anderson on what American students are really learning about slavery.
The book is a culmination of three months’ worth of conversations between Hurston and Cudjo Lewis, née Oluale Kossola, the last living survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1860, at the age of 19, Kossola was kidnapped by inhabitants of the Dahomey kingdom and brought to the barracoons(barracks used to temporarily hold enslaved Africans) in Ouidah, a city on the coast of modern-day Benin. Though the slave trade in the United States was officially outlawed in 1808, Kossola and about 110 others were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama, on Captain William Foster’s ship Clotilda. (Their captors were prosecuted and later had their charges dropped.) Less than five years after landing in Alabama, emancipation arrived as the Confederate army surrendered in Virginia. Once he’d saved enough money to buy a land parcel, Kossola—with the assistance of another freedman and former Dahomey nobleman—founded Africatown, Alabama, an isolated community of former slaves that sought to preserve their roots and culture. His story, as told by Hurston, illuminates the alienating and lonesome existence of freed slaves during Reconstruction.
[For more on this story by TORRY THREADCRAFT, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/en...es-barracoon/571789/]
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