Barracoon

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A major literary event emerges with a newly published work from the author of the American classic *Their Eyes Were Watching God*, featuring a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. This book illuminates the horrors and injustices of slavery through the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—Cudjo Lewis, abducted from Africa on the final "Black Cargo" ship to the U.S. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to interview the eighty-six-year-old Cudjo, the only living person able to recount this critical part of American history. Hurston sought to document Cudjo’s firsthand account of his capture and bondage, fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed. She returned in 1931 to spend over three months in Plateau, where she engaged deeply with Cudjo about his life, from his childhood in Africa to the harrowing Middle Passage aboard the Clotilda, and his years in slavery until the Civil War's end. Based on these interviews and written in Hurston’s compassionate style, this work powerfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and one life shaped by it. It offers profound insights into the enduring legacy of this history, making it an invaluable contribution to our shared cultural narrative.