History.com: Interview from last living slave ship survivor (1930)

[BoBurnz]

https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barrac00n-slave-clotilda-survivor

Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurstonmade an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.

Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they are only now being released to the public in a book called Barrac00n: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that comes out on May 8, 2018.

Hurston’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born in what is now the West African country of Benin. Originally named Kossula, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.

The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.

To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).

Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different plantations.

Harrowing. The things our people endured due to the white man's greed are infinite and unfathomably horrendous and repugnant, and may this man and his story remind us that the past must never be forgotten. And that it was not so very far away (Cudjoe Lewis died in 1935, he lived to see the Nazi's come to power).

It's also, as a historian, disgraceful that they would not publish Ms. Hurston's book simply because the man spoke pidgin and she chose to accurately depict and represent the way he spoke. It had nothing to do with c00nery or minstrelry, the man was a slave who had to learn English as a second language through osmosis while being whipped and beaten and worked nearly to death as a laborer, his story and grasp of the tongue should be celebrated not so ashamed and denigrated that it's taken 80 years for us to get this story told.

 

[BoBurnz]

@FAH1223 @tru_m.a.c Yo I missed the thread in The Roots (cause I'm a dumbass and didn't look ) delete this shyt.

 

[Milk N Cookies]

Wait don’t delete the thread just merge it. I want to read this but after work so I won’t go in angry at the colonizers.

Edit: that’s okay, I read it & am depressed now cause it makes me think about how some people write off slavery. Some people even say that black people need to get over slavery... fukk now I’m on edge.

 

[Losttribe]

when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast.