Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston (Foreword by Alice Walker)

New York Times Bestseller From the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God comes a landmark publication of the American experience, now in paperback! “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”— New York Times In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to visit eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda, the last slaver known to have made the transatlantic journey. Illegally brought to the United States, Lewis was enslaved fifty years after the transoceanic slave trade was outlawed. At the time, Cudjo Lewis was the only known person alive who could recount this integral part of the nation’s history. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, Hurston was eager to hear about these experiences firsthand. But the reticent elder didn’t always speak when she came to visit. Sometimes he would tend his garden, repair his fence, or be lost in reveries of his homeland. Hurston persisted, though, and during an intense period of about three mon