Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Zora Neale Hurston
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Zora Neale Hurston
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
She renders Kossola’s story as he told it, not only linguistically, in his dialect, but narratively, in his own wandering way—sending readers into sad silences and on distracted errands of the sort she’d shared with him, closing the garden gate on them the way he’d closed it on her. Barracoon does not so much shape Kossola’s story as transcribe it.
Zora Neale Hurston’s recovered masterpiece, Barracoon, is a stunning addition to several overlapping canons of American literature.
Barracoon, in many ways, pursues the slavery narrative in the same manner as the book and film 12 Years a Slave: it tracks slavery’s violence and aftermath through the words, memories, and history of a single person who survived it.
Hurston herself is present only at the edges of the narrative, but she is unmistakable. She is most beloved for her novels, but she was also a gifted folklorist, and the qualities that distinguished her are on display in this early work: her patience, persistence and charisma; her ability to read her subjects; her tact.
The eye-opening, terrifying and wonderful Barracoon demonstrates an intimacy and immediacy that some of those interview-based [slave] narratives lack.
For skeptics who believe that all the archives have long been plundered and all the literary treasures of the past have already been published, Barracoon will be a conversion experience. It's a monumental work, not 'merely' because it describes aspects of the slave trade that largely went unrecorded, but also because it vividly dramatizes two extraordinary voices in conversation.
Lewis’ dialect does require some patience from the reader, but it soon becomes familiar. And the story he tells Hurston rewards that patience, although it’s often horrifying and heartbreaking. Hurston doesn’t subtract herself from the narrative; she recounts how she develops a relationship with her sometimes resistant subject, bringing him peaches and hams, helping him work in his garden on days he doesn’t feel like talking. It’s a technique that brings both of them to life in all their humanity, etching all the more sharply the cruelties inflicted on Lewis and all of the enslaved..
With Barracoon, she put both her literary and her anthropological skills to work to create a unique and harrowing slave narrative, the story of the last known survivor of Middle Passage.
In Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston challenges the American public’s narrow view of the African continent, the transatlantic slave trade, and the diasporic cultures that came as a result of it.
Barracoon, a work unpublished in Hurston’s lifetime, captures both her anthropological spirit and her capacity for storytelling and narrative.
Though the story is recounted from Hurston’s own perspective, she inserts very little of herself into the narrative, letting it be driven by Lewis. Through the retelling of her interviews, she captures the complexity of Lewis’s loss of his native culture and family, the harrowing journey to the US, his time as a slave, and his role in establishing African Town.
While Hurston acknowledges that her account 'makes no attempt to be a scientific document, but on the whole is rather accurate,' Kossola’s story—in the vernacular of his own words—is an invaluable addition to American social, cultural, and political history..