Ba
acoon
Dedication
To
Charlotte Mason
My Godmother, and the one Mother of all
the primitives, who with the Gods in Space is
concerned about the hearts of the untaught
Epigraph
But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white
people had bought me… . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Definition
Ba
acoon: The Spanish word ba
acoon translates as “ba
acks” and is derived from
a
aca, which means “hut.” The term “ba
acoon” describes the structures used to detain
Africans who would be sold and exported to Europe or the Americas. These structures,
sometimes also refe
ed to as factories, stockades, co
als, and holding pens, were built
near the coast. They could be as insubstantial as a “slave shed” or as fortified as a “slave
house” or “slave castle,” wherein Africans were forced into the cells of dungeons beneath
the upper quarters of European administrators. Africans held in these structures had been
kidnapped, captured in local wars and raids, or were trekked in from the hinterlands o
interior regions across the continent. Many died in the ba
acoons as a consequence of
their physical condition upon a
ival at the coast or the length of time it took for the
a
ival of a ship. Some died while waiting for a ship to fill, which could take three to six
months. This phase of the traffic was called the “coasting” period. During the years of
suppression of the traffic, captives could be confined for several months.
Contents
Cove
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Definition
Foreword:
Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief: Reading Ba
acoon: The Story of
the Last “Black Cargo” by Alice Walke
Introduction
Editor’s Note
Ba
acoon
Preface
Introduction
I
II: The King A
ives
III
IV
V
VI: Ba
acoon
VII: Slavery
VIII: Freedom
IX: Ma
iage
X: Kossula Learns About Law
XI
XII: Alone
Appendix
Takkoi or Attako—Children’s Game
Stories Kossula Told Me
The Monkey and the Camel
Story of de Jonah
Now Disa A
aham Fadda de Faitful
The Lion Woman
Afterword and Additional Materials Edited by Deborah G. Plant
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Founders and Original Residents of Africatown
Glossary
Bibliography
Notes
About the Edito
About the Autho
Also by Zora Neale Hurston
Copyright
About the Publishe
Foreword
Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief
Reading Ba
acoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound,
they reveal they have the medicine. Ba
acoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a perfect
example of this.
I’m not sure there was ever a harder read than this, for those of us duty bound to ca
y the
ancestors, to work for them, as we engage in daily life in different parts of the world where they
were
ought in chains. And where they, as slaves to cruel, or curious, or indifferent, white
persons (with few exceptions) existed in precarious suspension disconnected from their real life,
and where we also have had to struggle to protect our humanity, to experience joy of life, in spite
of everything evil we have witnessed or to which we have been subjected.
Reading Ba
acoon, one understands immediately the problem many black people, years
ago, especially black intellectuals and political leaders, had with it. It resolutely records the
atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill,
disoriented, starved, a
ived on ships as “black cargo” in the hellish West. Who could face this
vision of the violently cruel behavior of the “
ethren” and the “sistren” who first captured ou
ancestors? Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs
deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in
order to capture for the slave trade people—men, women, children—who belonged to Africa?
And to do this in so hideous a fashion that reading about it two hundred years later
ings waves
of ho
or and distress. This is, make no mistake, a ha
owing read.
We are being shown the wound.
However, Zora Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece. What is a
Maestrapiece? It is the feminine perspective or part of the structure, whether in stone or fancy,
without which the entire edifice is a lie. And we have suffered so much from this one: that
Africans were only victims of the slave trade, not participants. Poor Zora. An anthropologist, no
less! A daughter of Eatonville, Florida, where truth, what was real, what actually happened to
somebody, mattered. And so, she sits with Cudjo Lewis. She shares peaches and watermelon.
(Imagine how many generations of black people would never admit to eating watermelon!) She
gets the grisly story from one of the last people able to tell it. How black people came to
America, how we were treated by black and white. How black Americans, enslaved themselves,
idiculed the Africans; making their lives so much harder. How the whites simply treated thei
“slaves” like pieces of machinery. But machinery that could be whipped if it didn’t produce
enough. Fast enough. Machinery that could be mutilated, raped, killed, if the desire arose.
Machinery that could be cheated, cheerfully, without a trace of guilt.
And then, the story of Cudjo Lewis’s life after Emancipation. His happiness with “freedom,”
helping to create a community, a church, building his own house. His tender love for his wife,
Seely, and their children. The ho
ible deaths that follow. We see a man so lonely for Africa, so
lonely for his family, we are struck with the realization that he is naming something we ourselves
work hard to avoid: how lonely we are too in this still foreign land: lonely for our true culture,
our people, our singular connection to a specific understanding of the Universe. And that what
we long for, as in Cudjo Lewis’s case, is gone forever. But we see something else: the nobility of
a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present,
giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo’s wisdom becomes so apparent,
toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does.
Offering peace.
Here is the medicine:
That though the heart is
eaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the
moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and
often is, that every person we hold dear is taken from us. Still. From moment to moment, we
watch our beans and our watermelons grow. We plant. We hoe. We harvest. We share with
neighbors. If a young anthropologist appears with two hams and gives us one, we look forward
to enjoying it.
Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Ca
ying our wounds and our medicines as we
go.
Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only
e thankful for it, biza
e as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the
extraordinary wonder of life that su
ounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the
thickest of tears.
Alice Walke
March 2018
Introduction
On December 14, 1927, Zora Neale Hurston took the 3:40 p.m. train from Penn Station, New
York, to Mobile, to conduct a series of interviews with the last known surviving African of the
last American slaver—the Clotilda. His name was Kossola, but he was called Cudjo Lewis. He
was held as a slave for five and a half years in Plateau-Magazine Point, Alabama, from 1860
until Union soldiers told him he was free. Kossola lived out the rest of his life in Africatown
(Plateau).1 Hurston’s trip south was a continuation of the field trip expedition she had initiated
the previous year.
Oluale Kossola had survived capture at the hands of Dahomian wa
iors, the ba
acoons at
Whydah (Ouidah), and the Middle Passage. He had been enslaved, he had lived through the Civil
War and the largely un Reconstructed South, and he had endured the rule of Jim Crow. He had
experienced the dawn of a new millennium that included World War I and the Great Depression.
Within the magnitude of world events swirled the momentous events of Kossola’s own personal
world.
Zora Neale Hurston, as a cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, and folklorist, was eager to
inquire into his experiences. “I want to know who you are,” she approached Kossola, “and how
you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave,
and how you have managed as a free man?” Kossola abso
ed her every question, then raised a
tearful countenance. “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody
who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody say,
‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’”2
Over a period of three months, Hurston visited with Kossola. She
ought Georgia peaches,
Virginia hams, late-summer watermelons, and Bee Brand insect powder. The offerings were as
much a cu
ency to facilitate their blossoming friendship as a means to encourage Kossola’s
eminiscences. Much of his life was “a sequence of separations.”3 Sweet things can be palliative.
Kossola trusted Hurston to tell his story and transmit it to the world. Others had interviewed
Kossola and had written pieces that focused on him or more generally on the community of
survivors at Africatown. But only Zora Neale Hurston conducted extensive interviews that would
yield a comprehensive, book-length account of Kossola’s life. She would alternately title the
work “Ba
acoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” and “The Life of Kossula.” As with the
other interviews, Kossola hoped the story he entrusted to Hurston would reach his people, fo
whom he was still lonely. The disconnection he experienced was a source of continuous distress.
ORIGINS
Kossola was born circa 1841, in the town of Bantè, the home to the Isha subgroup of the Yoruba
people of West Africa. He was the second child of Fondlolu, who was the second of his father’s
three wives. His mother named him Kossola, meaning “I do not lose my fruits anymore” or “my
children do not die any more.”4 His mother would have four more children after Kossola, and he
would have twelve additional siblings from his extended family. Fondlolu’s name identified he
as one who had been initiated as an Orìs.à devotee. His father was called Oluale.5 Though his
father was not of royal heritage as Olu, which means “king” or “chief,” would imply, Kossola’s
grandfather was an officer of the king of their town and had land and livestock.
By age fourteen, Kossola had trained as a soldier, which entailed mastering the skills of
hunting, camping, and tracking, and acquiring expertise in shooting a
ows and throwing spears.
This training prepared him for induction into the secret male society called oro. This society was
esponsible for the dispensation of justice and the security of the town. The Isha Yoruba of Bantè
lived in an agricultural society and were a peaceful people. Thus, the training of young men in
the art of warfare was a strategic defense against bellicose nations. At age nineteen, Kossola was
undergoing initiation for ma
iage. But these rites would never be realized. It was 1860, and the
world Kossola knew was coming to an a
upt end.
TRANS-ATLANTIC TRAFFICKING
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Atlantic world had already penetrated the African hinterland.
And although Britain had abolished the international trafficking of African peoples, or what is
typically refe
ed to as “the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” in 1807, and although the United States
had followed suit in 1808, European and American ships were still finding their way to ports
along the West African coast to conduct what was now deemed “illegitimate trade.” Laws had
een passed and treaties had been signed, but half a century later, the deportation of Africans out
of Africa and into the Americas continued. France and the United States had joined forces with
British efforts to suppress the traffic. However, it was a largely British-led effort, and the US
patrols proved to be ambivalent and not infrequently at cross-purposes with the abolitionist
agenda.6
Habituated to the lucrative enterprise of trafficking, and encouraged by the relative ease with
which they could find buyers for their captives, Africans opposed to ending the traffic persisted
in the enterprise. The Fon of Dahomey was foremost among those African peoples who resisted
the suppression. Not only was the internal enslavement of their prisoners perceived as essential
to their traditions and customs, the external sell of their prisoners afforded their kingdom wealth
and political dominance. To maintain a sufficient “slave supply,” the king of Dahomey instigated
wars and led raids with the sole purpose of filling the royal stockade.
King Ghezo of Dahomey renounced his 1852 treaty to abolish the traffic and by 1857 had
esumed his wars and raids. Reports of his activities had reached the newspapers of Mobile,
Alabama. A November 9, 1858, article announced that “the King of Dahomey was driving a
isk trade at Ouidah.”7 This article caught the attention of Timothy Meaher, a “slaveholder”
who, like many proslavery Americans, wanted to maintain the trans-Atlantic traffic. In defiance
of constitutional law, Meaher decided to import Africans illegally into the country and enslave
them. In conspiracy with Meaher, William Foster, who built the Clotilda, outfitted the ship fo
transport of the “contraband cargo.” In July 1860, he navigated toward the Bight of Benin. Afte
six weeks of surviving storms and avoiding being overtaken by ships patrolling the waters,
Foster anchored the Clotilda at the port of Ouidah.
BARRACOON
From 1801 to 1866, an estimated 3,873,600 Africans were exchanged for gold, guns, and othe
European and American merchandise. Of that number, approximately 444,700 were deported
from the Bight of Benin, which was controlled by Dahomey.8 During the period from 1851 to
1860, approximately 22,500 Africans were exported. And of that number, 110 were taken aboard
the Clotilda at Ouidah. Kossola was among them—a transaction between Foster and King Glèlè.
In 1859, King Ghezo was mortally shot while returning from one of his campaigns. His son
Badohun had ascended to the throne. He was called Glèlè, which means “the ferocious Lion of
the forest” or “te
or in the bush.”9 To avenge his father’s death, as well as to amass sacrificial
odies for certain imminent traditional ceremonies, Glèlè intensified the raiding campaigns.
Under the pretext of having been insulted when the king of Bantè refused to yield to Glèlè’s
demands for corn and cattle, Glèlè sacked the town.
Kossola described to Hurston the mayhem that ensued in the predawn raid when his
townspeople awoke to Dahomey’s female wa
iors, who slaughtered them in their daze. Those
who tried to escape through the eight gates that su
ounded the town were beheaded by the male
wa
iors who were posted there. Kossola recalled the ho
or of seeing decapitated heads hanging
about the belts of the wa
iors, and how on the second day, the wa
iors stopped the march in
order to smoke the heads. Through the clouds of smoke, he missed seeing the heads of his family
and townspeople. “It is easy to see how few would have looked on that sight too closely,” wrote
a sympathetic Hurston.10
Along with a host of others taken as captives by the Dahomian wa
iors, the survivors of the
Bantè massacre were “yoked by forked sticks and tied in a chain,” then marched to the stockades
at Abomey.11 After three days, they were incarcerated in the ba
acoons at Ouidah, near the
Bight of Benin. During the weeks of his existence in the ba
acoons, Kossola was bewildered and
anxious about his fate. Before him was a thunderous and crashing ocean that he had never seen
efore. Behind him was everything he called home. There in the ba
acoon, as there in his
Alabama home, Kossola was transfixed between two worlds, fully belonging to neither.
KOSSOLA, HURSTON, CHARLOTTE MASON, AND “BARRACOON”
In September 1927, Hurston had met and come under contract with Charlotte Osgood Mason, a
patron to several Harlem Renaissance luminaries. Mason funded Hurston’s return to Alabama fo
the extended interviews with Kossola, and she supported Hurston’s research efforts while
preparing Ba
acoon for publication. In a March 25, 1931, letter to Mason, Hurston writes that
the work “is coming along well.” She reported that she had to revise some passages, but that she
was “within a few paragraphs of the end of the whole thing. Then for the final typing.” She
described the revisions and related her new research findings: “I found at the li
ary an actual
account of the raid as Kossula said that it happened. Also the tribe name. It was not on the maps
ecause the entire tribe was wiped out by the Dahomey troops. The king who conquered them
preserved carefully the skull of Kossula’s king as a most worthy foe.”12
Hurston and Mason conversed about the potential publication of Ba
acoon over a period of
years. In her desire to see Hurston financially independent, Mason encouraged Hurston to
prepare Ba
acoon, as well as the material that would become Mules and Men, for publication.
Charlotte Mason considered herself not only a patron to black writers and artists, but also a
guardian of black folklore. She believed it her duty to protect it from those whites who, having
“no more interesting things to investigate among themselves,” were gra
ing “in every direction
material that by right belongs entirely to another race.” Following the suggestions of Mason and
Alain Locke, Hurston advised Kossola and his family “to avoid talking with other folklore
collectors—white ones, no doubt—who he and Godmother felt ‘should be kept entirely away not
only from the project in hand but from this entire movement for the rediscovery of our folk
material.’”13
Mason’s support of Hurston’s efforts with Ba
acoon extended to monetary contributions to
Kossola’s welfare. Mason and Kossola would eventually communicate directly with each other,
and Kossola would come to consider Mason a “dear friend.” As one letter suggests, Kossola was
struggling financially. It had come to Mason’s attention that Kossola had used excerpts from his
copy of Hurston’s na
ative to gain financial compensation from local newspapers. Kossola
dictated a letter to Mason in response to her concern:
Dear friend you may have seen in the papers about my History. But this has been over three years since I has
let anyone take it off to copy from it. I only did that so they would help me. But there is no one did for me as you
has. The lord will Bless you and will give you a long Life. Where there’s no more parting, yours in Christ.
Cudjo Lewis.14
As Mason was protective of Hurston’s professional interests, both women remained
concerned about Kossola’s welfare. Having discovered that Kossola was not receiving money
that Mason had mailed to him, Hurston looked into the matter. She updated Mason accordingly:
I have written to Claudia Thornton to check up on Kossula and all about things. I have also asked the Post
Office at Plateau to check any letters coming to Cudjoe Lewis from New York.15
As Hurston checked on Kossola, she continued revising the manuscript. “Second writing of
Kossula all done and about typed,” she wrote Mason on January 12, 1931. On April 18, she was
enthusiastic: “At last ‘Ba
acoon’ is ready for your eyes.”16 Appreciative of Mason’s support,
Hurston dedicated the book to her and began submitting it to publishers. In September 1931, she
contemplated Viking’s proposal: “The Viking press again asks for the Life of Kossula, but in
language rather than dialect. It lies here and I know your mind about that and so I do not answe
them except with your tongue.”17 The dialect was a vital and authenticating feature of the
na
ative. Hurston would not submit to such revision. Perhaps, as Langston Hughes wrote in The
Big Sea, the Negro was “no longer in vogue,” and publishers like Boni and Viking were
unwilling to take risks on “Negro material” during the Great Depression.18
THE GRIOT
There seems to be a note of disappointment in the historian Sylviane Diouf’s revelation that
Hurston submitted Ba
acoon to various publishers, “but it never found a taker, and has still not
een published.”19 Hurston’s manuscript is an invaluable historical document, as Diouf points
out, and an extraordinary literary achievement as well, despite the fact that it found no takers
during her lifetime. In it, Zora Neale Hurston found a way to produce a written text that
maintains the orality of the spoken word. And she did so without imposing herself in the
na
ative, creating what some scholars classify as orature. Contrary to the literary biographe
Robert Hemenway’s dismissal of Ba
acoon as Hurston’s re-creation of Kossola’s experience,
the scholar Lynda Hill writes that “through a deliberate act of suppression, she resists presenting
her own point of view in a natural, or naturalistic, way and allows Kossula ‘to tell his story in his
own way.’”20
Zora Neale Hurston was not only committed to collecting artifacts of African American folk
culture, she was also adamant about their authentic presentation. Even as she rejected the
objective-observer stance of Western scientific inquiry for a participant-observer stance, Hurston
still incorporated standard features of the ethnographic and folklore-collecting processes within
her methodology. Adopting the participant-observer stance is what allowed her to collect folklore
“like a new
oom.”21 As Hill points out, Hurston was simultaneously working and learning,
which meant, ultimately, that she was not just mi
oring her mentors, but coming into her own.
Embedded in the na
ative of Ba
acoon are those aspects of ethnography and folklore
collecting that reveal Hurston’s methodology and authenticate Kossola’s story as his own, rathe
than as a fiction of Hurston’s imagination. The story, in the main, is told from Kossola’s first-
person point of view. Hurston transcribes Kossola’s story, using his vernacular diction, spelling
his words as she hears them pronounced. Sentences follow his syntactical rhythms and maintain
his idiomatic expressions and repetitive phrases. Hurston’s methods respect Kossola’s own
storytelling sensibility; it is one that is “rooted ‘in African soil.’” “It would be hard to make the
case that she entirely invented Kossula’s language and, consequently, his emerging persona,”
comments Hill.22 And it would be an equally hard case to make that she created the life events
chronicled in Kossola’s story.
Even as Hurston has her own idea about how a story is to be told, Kossola has his. Hurston is
initially impatient with Kossola’s talk about his father and grandfather, for instance. But
Kossola’s prove
ial wisdom adjusts her attitude: “Where is de house where de mouse is de
leader?”23
Hurston complained in Dust Tracks on a Road of Kossola’s reticence. Yet her patience in
getting his story is quite apparent in the na
ative. She is persistent in her returning to his home
even when Kossola petulantly sends her away. He doesn’t always talk when she comes, but
ather chooses to tend his garden or repair his fence. And sometimes her time with him is spent
driving Kossola into town. Sometimes he is lost in his memories.
Recording such moments within the body of the na
ative not only structures the overall
na
ative flow of events but reveals the behavioral patterns of her informant. As Hurston is not
just an observer, she fully participates in the process of “helping Kossula to tell his story.” “In
writing his story,” says Hill, “Hurston does not romanticize or in any way imply that ideals such
as self-fulfillment or fully realized self-expression could emerge from such suffering as Kossula
has known. Hurston does not interpret his comments, except when she builds a transition from
one interview to the next, in her footnotes, and at the end when she summarizes.”24 The story
Hurston gathers is presented in such a way that she, the interlocutor, all but disappears. The
na
ative space she creates for Kossola’s unburdening is sacred. Rather than insert herself into
the na
ative as the learned and probing cultural anthropologist, the investigating ethnographer,
or the authorial writer, Zora Neale Hurston, in her still listening, assumes the office of a priest. In
this space, Oluale Kossola passes his story of epic proportion on to her.
Deborah G. Plant
Editor’s Note
Zora Neale Hurston’s introduction to Ba
acoon has been edited to align with the conventions
of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage. Contemporary spelling and usage have also been
applied to names and places. In composing the introduction to her work, Hurston made a good-
faith effort to document the source material she used to set the context for the Ba
acoon
na
ative. As she states in her preface, “For historical data, I am indebted to the Journal of Negro
History, and to the records of the Mobile Historical Society.” She reiterates this acknowledgment
in her introduction and alludes to the use of other “records.” Hurston drew from Emma Langdon
Roche’s Historic Sketches, but she references this work indirectly, and her citation from this
ook, as well as the other sources she utilized, was inconsistent. Wherever there is a question
egarding her use of paraphrase and direct quotation, I have revised the passage as a direct quote
and have documented it accordingly.
Regarding the actual na
ative, I have read the original typescript in relation to earlier typed
and handwritten drafts to produce a definitive text. Minor edits to the text were made in relation
to the mechanics of typography, for purposes of clarity, or in the co
ection of apparent typos.
Otherwise, the text remains as Hurston left it. I have made notations in the endnotes to present
explanations or to provide full bibliographic data for sources Hurston used in her own notes.
Such explanatory entries are labeled “Editor’s note” and are
acketed. All other notes are
original to the manuscript. Hurston’s citations and footnotes have likewise been edited to align
with conventional documentation style.
D.G.P.
The “Door of No Return” at La Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) at Gorée Island in Senegal, West Africa.
Above the entryway: “Lord, give my people, who have suffered so much, the strength to be great” (Joseph Ndiaye).
Preface
This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself. It makes no attempt to be a scientific
document, but on the whole he is rather accurate. If he is a little hazy as to detail after sixty-
seven years, he is certainly to be pardoned. The quotations from the works of travelers in
Dahomey are set down, not to make this appear a thoroughly documented biography, but to
emphasize his remarkable memory.
Three spellings of his nation are found: Attako, Taccou, and Taccow. But Lewis’s
pronunciation is probably co
ect. Therefore, I have used Takkoi throughout the work.
I was sent by a woman of tremendous understanding of primitive peoples to get this story.
The thought back of the act was to set down essential truth rather than fact of detail, which is so
often misleading. Therefore, he has been permitted to tell his story in his own way without the
intrusion of interpretation.
For historical data, I am indebted to the Journal of Negro History, and to the records of the
Mobile Historical Society.
Zora Neale Hurston
April 17, 1931
Introduction
The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence. Therefore
a great literature has grown up about it. Innumerable books and papers have been written. These
are supplemented by the vast lore that has been blown by the
eath of inarticulate ones across
the seas and lands of the world.
Those who justified slaving on various grounds have had their say. Among these are several
slave runners who have boasted of their exploits in the contraband flesh. Those who stood aloof
in loathing have cried out against it in lengthy volumes.
All the talk, printed and spoken, has had to do with ships and rations; with sail and weather;
with ruses and piracy and balls between wind and water; with native kings and bargains sharp
and sinful on both sides; with tribal wars and slave factories and red massacres and all the
machinations necessary to stock a ba
acoon with African youth on the first leg of their journey
from humanity to cattle; with storing and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence
and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes
efore the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses.
All