Join us for a conversation and book signing with celebrated Zora Neale Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, who edited Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” posthumously.
Barracoon is the riveting story of 86-year-old Cudjo “Kossola” Lewis, a survivor of Clotilda, the last slave ship known to have made the Middle Passage. Hurston recounts Lewis’ time in the barracoon, the underbelly of the ship where he was transported as human cargo. She then focuses on his five years working on an Alabama plantation and his role as a founder of Alabama’s historic Africatown, where he lived out his post-Emancipation life. The story is all told in Lewis’ authentic voice, a mix of his native West African tongue and African American Southern dialect.
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