Barracoon (11 page)

Might Hurston have attempted to avoid “the inescapable fact” of that dimension of African humanity that was motivated by “the universal nature of greed and glory”?
²⁶
Could it be that the woman and social scientist whose objectives entailed the discovering and uncovering of African cultural retentions in America was blindsided by Kossola's
recollection of the inhumanity that was integral to his delivery at the port of Ouidah? Perhaps, rather than force herself to deal with such disorienting facts that stuck in her craw, Hurston chose, in the moment, to submit a narrative about the raid that had already been penned.

“Although justifying plagiarism is impossible,” Hill writes, “the reasons for it should be scrutinized in light of its being, to date, a one-time occurrence in the long, productive career of a prolific and widely published author.”
²⁷
Hill's perspective is an important one, especially given the fact that Hemenway levels a similar charge, condemning and dismissing
Barracoon
, as though the manuscript were but an extension of the earlier published Cudjo Lewis piece. It is not. Hemenway proclaims that the article published in the
Journal
was an anomaly and reports that Hurston returned to Mobile to interview Kossola anew and did so with greater success.
Barracoon
, the book-length work, was the result of her efforts.

“Yet, even this unpublished manuscript, written in 1931,” writes Hemenway, “makes extensive use of Roche and other anthropological sources; although it skillfully weaves together the scholarship and Hurston's own memories of Cudjo, it does not acknowledge those sources, and it is the type of book that Boas would have repudiated.” Hemenway writes further, “The book purports to be solely the words of Cudjo; in fact, it is Hurston's imaginative recreation of his experience. Her purpose was to recreate slavery from a black perspective . . . but she was doing so as an artist rather than as a folklorist or historian.”
²⁸

Although the journal article and the book manuscript
have a common subject in Kossola, they are two distinct works. And where the charge of plagiarism is reasonable with the first, it is unfounded with the second. Hurston does draw on Roche's work in
Barracoon
, and she acknowledges it only indirectly. In her preface to
Barracoon
, she writes, “For historical data, I am indebted to the
Journal of Negro History
, and to the records of the Mobile Historical Society.”
²⁹
In her introduction, Hurston describes her interviews with Kossola and states, “Thus, from Cudjo and from the records of the Mobile Historical Society, I had the story of the last load of slaves brought into the United States.”
³⁰

In her use of Roche's work, as with her use of other secondary materials, Hurston makes a good-faith effort in
Barracoon
to document her sources. She does
paraphrase
passages from
Historical Sketches
, and she places direct quotes within quotation marks, though in the manuscript draft she is inconsistent in this. And some sources are actually documented within the text of the introduction and others are footnoted within the body of the narrative.

The historian Sylviane Diouf states that Hemenway's characterization of Hurston's manuscript was “uncalled for.” “She may have conflated some of what Cudjo said with some of what she knew as a scholar, but she made a genuine effort at separating the two. With few exceptions, the information provided in
Barracoon
is confirmed by other sources. Witnesses, experts in Yoruba cultures, contemporary newspaper articles, and abundant archival material corroborate the various events in Cudjo's life as described in
Barracoon
.”
³¹

Far from being a fictionalized re-creation, Diouf writes, “Cudjo's story, as transmitted by Hurston, is as close to veracity as can possibly be ascertained with the help of other records.” She states further that Hurston “had produced an invaluable document on the lives of a group of people with a unique experience in American history.”
³²
Rather than repudiate her, Boas might well have been pleased and encouraging, as Hurston, in this early phase of her professional writing, endeavored to utilize historical records to support her folklore findings—just as both Boas and Woodson had instructed. What is more significant is that Hurston was struggling to appease neither Boas nor Woodson, but was engaged in the process of actualizing her vision of herself as a social scientist
and
an artist who was determined to present Kossola's story in as authentic a manner as possible.

HISTORIC DOCUMENT

From the earliest known “slave narrative” to the postbellum oral histories collected in works like George P. Rawick's
The American Slave
, one glimpses the vicissitudes and the interior lives of a people forced to exist in and toil under inhumane circumstances. Few of these narratives recount the incidents that preceded disembarkation and the holding pens and auction blocks of America. There are the journals of captains and manifests of ships, and there are the letters, diaries, bills of sale, and estate wills of the merchants and rulers of plantocracies who trafficked
in African lives. As Hurston bemoaned in her introduction to
Barracoon
, “All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the ‘black ivory,' the ‘coin of Africa,' had no market value. Africa's ambassadors to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no recorded thought.”
³³

The subject of capture in Africa and transport through the Middle Passage is not the experience of those who were born into the condition of servitude on American soil. Narratives like Kossola's, of which there are but a few, describe the Maafa, the violent uprooting of bodies, the devastation of societies, and the desolation of souls. Rather than chart the journey from slavery to freedom in America, Kossola's narrative journeys back to Africa and gives us a glimpse into the collective black experience as seen through the openings in the barracoons that lined the African coasts of the Atlantic world.

Barracoon
differs from classic slave narratives in a number of ways. The
Barracoon
narrative is not a conventional bid for freedom and it chronicles no harrowing tales of escape or trials of self-purchase. Unlike the authors of conventional narratives, Kossola was born in Africa. And because he was not born in the United States, he had to obtain citizenship through the naturalization process. Where narratives like those penned by Frederick Douglass speak to the cause of abolition, racial equality, and women's rights,
Barracoon
does not articulate an explicit political agenda. And it does not speak with the kind of
heroic, self-possessed, and self-realized voice associated with black autobiography.

Where conventional slave narratives speak of conversions to Christianity, Kossola's narrative does also, but it does so while simultaneously expressing the spiritual traditions and customs of his homeland. He hadn't built up his hope on a future heavenly glory, but rather on a return to his people, a vision that speaks to the centrality of ancestral reverence. Kossola's nineteen years of life in Africa were more real to him than a declaration of independence in America. His narrative does not recount a journey forward into the American Dream. It is a kind of slave narrative in reverse, journeying backward to barracoons, betrayal, and barbarity. And then even further back, to a period of tranquility, a time of freedom, and a sense of belonging.

The African diaspora in the Americas represents the largest forced migration of a people in the history of the world. According to Paul Lovejoy, the estimated number of Africans caught in the dragnet of slavery between 1450 and 1900 was 12,817,000.
³⁴
The Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dedicated her novel
Beloved
to “the 60 million and more,” a number inclusive of the “disremembered and unaccounted for” in the Middle Passage.
³⁵
Millions suffered capture and survived the passage across the Atlantic, but only a small number of Africans recounted their experiences.

As Sylviane Diouf points out, “Of the dozen deported Africans who left testimonies of their lives, only
[Olaudah] Equiano, [Mahommah Gardo] Baquaqua, and [Ottobah] Cugoano referred to the Middle Passage.”
³⁶
Eight of the ten narratives collected in Philip Curtin's
Africa Remembered:
Narratives by West Africans From the Era of the Slave Trade
(1967) recount experiences of the Middle Passage. “They give us some notion of the feelings and attitudes of many millions whose feelings and attitudes are unrecorded,” writes Curtin. “Imperfect as the sample may be, it is the only view we can recover of the slave trade as seen by the slaves themselves.”
³⁷
Ten years after Curtin's work, the scholar Terry Alford would exhume from the bowels of oblivion the events of the life of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, published as
Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South
. His narrative, too, recalls capture and deportation.

A few enslaved Africans like Olaudah Equiano, who experienced the Passage, acquired the skills to write their own narratives. Others like Kossola, who never learned to read or write, utilized the as-told-to mode of narration. Through this publication,
Barracoon
extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor,
Barracoon
speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.

THE MAAFA

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked,” says the narrator in
Beloved
. “Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
³⁸
It settles into the disjointedness of lives torn asunder by “a sequence of separations”; into the woundedness of a radical and “unbearable dislocation” from home and kin to an estranged place on foreign soil. The loneliness that attends such disruption infuses Kossola's narrative. It cannot be rocked. “After seventy-five years,” writes Hurston, “he still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation.”
³⁹
It is the existential angst that is consequent to deracination.

Maafa
is a Ki-Swahili term that means disaster and the human response to it.
⁴⁰
The term refers to the disruption and uprooting of the lives of African peoples and the commercial exploitation of the African continent from the fifteenth century to the era of Western globalization in the twenty-first century. Conceptually, the phenomenon of the African Maafa is comprehensive in that it recognizes the extensive and continuous devastation of the African continent and its inhabitants and the continuous plundering that extends the trauma brought about via trans-Atlantic trafficking. For “illegitimate trade” was su
perseded by the European “scramble for Africa” and colonization of the continent, just as the “Peculiar Institution” of slavery in America was reformulated as the convict-leasing system, an earlier form of the Jail-Industrial Complex. And just as Kossola was ensnared in the institution of slavery in America, his son, Cudjo Lewis Jr., who was sentenced to five years of imprisonment for manslaughter, was handed over to the convict-leasing system in the state of Alabama.

Oluale Kossola could never fathom why he was in “de Americky soil.” “Dey bring us 'way from our soil and workee us hard de five year and six months.” And once free, he says, “we ain' got no country and we ain' got no lan'.”
⁴¹
And in postbellum America he was subject to the exploitation of his labor and the vagaries of the law, just as he was in antebellum America. He remained confounded by this cruel treatment for the rest of his life. Kossola's experience was not anomalous. It is representative of the reality of African American people who have been grappling for a sense of sovereignty over their own bodies ever since slavery was institutionalized.

THE AMERICAN DREAM/DREAMS DEFERRED

The American Dream is a major theme in the narrative of racial difference. The shadow side of that dream, which is not talked about, entails the plundering of racial “Others.”

It was this dreaming that inspired both William
Foster and Tim Meaher to flout the law of the US Constitution, steal 110 Africans from their homes, and smuggle them up the Mobile River and into bondage. Though Foster and Meaher were charged with piracy, neither was convicted of any crime. No one was held responsible for the theft of Kossola and his companions and their exploitation in America. Of the thousands of Africans smuggled into America after 1808, only one man was held accountable and hanged, and even he died proclaiming his innocence.

Folklore had it that Tim Meaher decided to smuggle Africans into Alabama on a bet. In April of 1858, while traveling aboard the
Roger B. Taney
, Meaher boasted to fellow passengers that he could bring Africans into the country in spite of the ban against trans-Atlantic trafficking. He bet “any amount of money that he would ‘import a cargo in less than two years, and no one be hanged for it.'”
⁴²
It was Meaher's dream to own land and become wealthy and to use slave labor to do it. He believed it was his birthright.