Barracoon

Barracoon; The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston, 171 pages.

Hurston, the famed author and folklorist, died in 1960 without ever publishing this account. which she wrote based on interviews with Cudjo Lewis in 1931. Lewis, born Kossolla, had been enslaved and brought to the United States in 1859 on the ship Clotilda. The importation of slaves had been outlawed in the United States fifty years before. In a series of interviews, Hurston gains Lewis's trust and talks to him about what her remembers of the country of his youth, his years as a slave, and how he has lived since the Civil War.