One of the Last Slave Ship Survivors Describes His Ordeal in a 1930s Interview ❗️❗️

Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist, discovered one of the final survivors of the last slave ship to deliver captive Africans to the United States, more than 60 years after slavery was abolished.

Hurston, a well-known Harlem Renaissance figure who would later create the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis) in the early 1930s but failed to get them published as a book. In reality, they were only made public in May of 2018 with the publication of Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo."

The story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African republic of Benin, is told in Hurston's novel. He was just 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe stormed his village, kidnapped him, and marched him and others to the coast. He and about 120 other people were sold into slavery and forced onboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the United States' mainland.The story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African republic of Benin, is told in Hurston's novel. He was just 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe stormed his village, kidnapped him, and marched him and others to the coast. He and about 120 other people were sold into slavery and forced onboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the United States' mainland.
In 1860, barely a year before the Civil War broke out, the Clotilda carried its captives to Alabama. Even though slavery was lawful in the United States at the time, it had been illegal internationally for more than 50 years. The United States had outlawed the practice in 1807, as with many other European countries, but Lewis' expedition is an example of how slave dealers got around the law to keep bringing over human cargo.
Lewis' kidnappers sneaked him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and forced them to hide in a swamp for many days to avoid notice. The 86-foot sailboat was subsequently set ablaze on the banks of the river to cover the evidence of their crime. Delta Mobile-Tensaw (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).
Most tragically, Lewis' story offers a firsthand view of slavery's bewildering agony. Lewis was kidnapped from his house and thrown onboard a ship with strangers. The abductees were separated in Alabama and sent to different owners after spending several months together on the perilous journey to the United States.

"We're really sorry to be apart from one another," Lewis expressed his regret to Hurston. "We've been crossing de water from de Affica dirt for seventy days, and now they've separated us from one another." As a result, we weep. We can't stand our grief because it's so heavy. When I dream of my mother, I worry I might die in my sleep."
Lewis also explains how it felt to arrive on a plantation where no one understood his language and couldn't tell him where he was or what was going on. He said Hurston, "We donan know why we be sent 'way from our country to work lak dis." "Everyone is staring at us strangely." We want to talk to the udder colored people, but they don't understand what we're saying."

Lewis was disappointed to learn that emancipation did not come with the promise of "forty acres and a mule," or any other kind of compensation for being kidnapped and put into slavery. He and a group of 31 other freepeople saved money to buy land in Mobile, which they named Africatown, after being frustrated by the government's refusal to provide him with land to live on after stealing him from his birthplace.

Some black American philosophers at the time claimed that Hurston's use of vernacular language in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was contentious, as it played to white people's stereotypes of black people. Hurston disagreed, and her refusal to modify Lewis' dialect was one of the reasons her work was rejected by a publisher in the 1930s.

Despite the passage of time, her uncompromising position ensures that modern readers hear Lewis' story as he intended.