Good Reads / Community Library Notes
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Review by Priscilla Comen
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Review by Priscilla Comen
Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston, is the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last African to be kidnapped and sold to America. His real name was Kossula and Hurston calls him this when she goes to interview him for his story. Author Hurston documents how the King of Dahomey captured thousands of Africans, drove them to the “barracoons” and later sold them to African slave merchants.
Hurston finds him in his garden. He has a friend who brings him food and tea and helps him to walk. She asks about his days as a slave and how it feels to live as a free man. She writes this in his dialect, as he speaks, with no corrections or interpretations. We understand it and feel the power of Cudjo’s words. His family was not rich, although his father worked for the African King and was given many cows, goats, and land in return for his labors. At age fourteen, Cudjo was trained for war, how to hide in the bush, how to mark their passage by breaking a tree branch. Another King had cut off the heads of the captured people. Cudjo could still smell the stench of cooked heads.
After capture he was put on a ship that sailed for seventy days. When ashore, they were sold to different owners. They worked hard and Cudjo was tired all the time. The year was 1865, and at the end of the Civil War, Yankee soldiers came to tell him and his pals that they were free. He tells Hurston how they bought land, built houses, and called their land African Town. They built a church and made rules to be obeyed. Cudjo married and his wife bore five children, four boys, one girl. As they grow older, they die; one is shot by a sheriff, one kills himself, another is run over by a train The death of his wife devastates him. He says she was his eyes; he can’t live without his eyes. Hurston tells this in his own words, making it all the sadder.
There is a long afterward with many stories and parables told by Cudjo. Author Hurston was born in 1891 and graduated from Barnard College in 1927. Alice Walker calls her “a genius of the south.” Find this fascinating book on the new non-fiction shelf of your Mendocino Community Library.
Hurston finds him in his garden. He has a friend who brings him food and tea and helps him to walk. She asks about his days as a slave and how it feels to live as a free man. She writes this in his dialect, as he speaks, with no corrections or interpretations. We understand it and feel the power of Cudjo’s words. His family was not rich, although his father worked for the African King and was given many cows, goats, and land in return for his labors. At age fourteen, Cudjo was trained for war, how to hide in the bush, how to mark their passage by breaking a tree branch. Another King had cut off the heads of the captured people. Cudjo could still smell the stench of cooked heads.
After capture he was put on a ship that sailed for seventy days. When ashore, they were sold to different owners. They worked hard and Cudjo was tired all the time. The year was 1865, and at the end of the Civil War, Yankee soldiers came to tell him and his pals that they were free. He tells Hurston how they bought land, built houses, and called their land African Town. They built a church and made rules to be obeyed. Cudjo married and his wife bore five children, four boys, one girl. As they grow older, they die; one is shot by a sheriff, one kills himself, another is run over by a train The death of his wife devastates him. He says she was his eyes; he can’t live without his eyes. Hurston tells this in his own words, making it all the sadder.
There is a long afterward with many stories and parables told by Cudjo. Author Hurston was born in 1891 and graduated from Barnard College in 1927. Alice Walker calls her “a genius of the south.” Find this fascinating book on the new non-fiction shelf of your Mendocino Community Library.