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Barracoon

the Story of the Last "black Cargo"
Oct 01, 2019DorisWaggoner rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Zora Neale Hurston was both an anthropologist and a fiction writer of short stories at the time she wrote "Barracoon," her first book length nonfiction work. No publisher would touch it in her lifetime, mostly because she wrote it in dialect. In the 1920s, Kussola, to use the African name she calls him, was the last person to remember his life in Africa, what it was like to be captured by another tribe for the purposes of being sold as a slave, the Middle Passage, slavery, and "freedom." Hurston spent three months interviewing him, getting to know him as a person, helping him when he asked for help, leaving him alone when he told her to leave him with his pain. However painful his life, this is a story all Americans of all races need to read. While I've read her famous "Their Eyes were Watching God" more than once, I had no idea this book existed until I came across it in the bibliography for another book and knew I needed to read it. He was one of the last group stolen long after the slave trade was declared illegal in the US. Recently I read in an archaeology magazine about the boat that brought him having been found burned and scuttled in a river near Mobile. This book personalizes everything that was terrible about the slave trade, and helps explain why race is still a problem in the US today.