From Whitney to Africatown: When Narratives Collide

I just took a short trip along the gulf coast of Alabama in order to have a conversation with a book that’s currently sitting on my nightstand. Several weeks ago I finished Zora Neale Hurston’s newly-published manuscript, “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo”. Sure, all books talk — but this one has been pushing me to talk back. Bear with me as I connect the dots from recent personal experiences.

Within weeks of finishing “Barracoon” I found myself touring The Whitney Plantation, southeast Louisiana’s newly-opened slavery museum. This was my second visit to The Whitney and these tours were dissimilar; each felt handcrafted and experiential. This time our intense guide, Ali, was adamant that we understood the connection between slavery, Capitalism, and regionalism. As we walked towards the Field of Angels, a memorial dedicated to the 2200 enslaved children that died in St. John the Baptist Parish, Ali discussed the Industrial revolution as one reason why slavery was “no longer needed”. The North industrialized faster which decreased the demand for a massive labor force. Machines could accomplish in one day what it would take one hundred enslaved men to do in a week — or something like that. Ali’s point was that the North was not anti-slavery due to a sense of morality, but instead out of economic incentive. It was hard for me to hear. Having grown up in New England, I considered how I was taught about slavery as a child. It was over there - below us [both figuratively as well as on the map] — something “our people” would never do. There was this underlying Yankee moral superiority to it all and it took 17 years of living in the South to really get that.

I also started to think about my Lithuanian immigrant family and surrounding hometown community. How many of my people worked in those small Massachusetts settlements that developed around textile factories manufacturing cotton & wool products? As far as I know, most of them worked at the wool factory. Those were simply the jobs available to them from the mid-19th century, through the Depression, and well into the 1950's — they had no knowledge of relational power, stakeholder decision-making, or of any harmfulness flowing between the states. Yet until recently it had honestly never occurred to me that New England mill towns were complicit in the economic slave trade. New England isn’t off the hook. Where did I think they found all that cotton to manufacture as industry commenced?

Before you get to my photos below and the whole point of my short Alabama day trip, let this jot your memory: The International slave trade and the Domestic slave trade were two distinct overlapping eras with a notable transition. The International Slave trade was outlawed in 1807 which deliberately left a door open for the Domestic Slave trade to thrive. The wording printed in 1807 never stopped slavery — it simply said “no new slaves were permitted to be IMPORTED into the United States.” After this act of prohibition, slaves were bred like cattle on Plantations simply for the purpose of creating additional sources of labor and currency. This was the continuation of domestic slavery, not the end of it. Humans as currency.

Decades later, the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud, but it was a piece of paper that the South ignored — a speech from the Union, not a law that the Confederacy would take seriously. “One of the most common misconceptions,” said Ali (our Whitney guide), “is that Africans were freed when Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation.” The South snubbed it and kept right on doing what they were doing for a few more years. If you ever visit The Whitney, you’ll learn that the small slave jail currently on site was built in 1868 — in Pennsylvania — which might confuse the hell out of folks who think a specific date or battle ended the horrors within the Confederacy. Plantation owners had no intention of listening to the Union, even when they were losing, or had already lost, the fight. They were hopeful that their way of life would continue long after the “Northern Aggressors” left town. They’re still hopeful today as evidenced by the increase in confederate militiamen wrapped in rebel flags guarding our local statuary.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s follow my synapses a few hours East of The Whitney. If you’re heading East on I-10 from New Orleans, just past Mobile is Exit 27 towards Battleship Park. The off-ramp veers to the right after crossing a beautiful modern suspension bridge and I couldn’t help but imagine the stories I had read in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon” because most of it took place right off Exit 27. I couldn’t help but imagine the Clotilda*, a small two-masted schooner, sneaking through this quiet Gulf inlet in the late summer of 1860. The Clotilda, as it turns out, was the very last slave ship arriving from Benin several decades after the International Slave trade had been outlawed, and those at the helm were trying to sneak past the authorities to drop off their cargo: 100+ men and women that had been captured and sold by a West African King from a neighboring village. The entire journey was a dare between two douchebag brothers from Mobile. Could they get to Africa and back without detection? They had a lot of land to farm and it was much cheaper to buy humans on the Gold Coast than it was on the Auction Block in New Orleans. The Alabama boys’ intention was to keep most of ‘the cargo’ for themselves if they were successful, and that’s exactly what they did.

One of the enslaved men brought to Mobile Bay on the Clotilda was Kossula “Cudjo” Lewis, who happened to be the main subject of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon”. In their interviews, Cudjo recalls working on a boat when some northerners called out, “You don’t have to work anymore. You’re free now!” Cudjo and his fellow enslaved men and women had no idea what to do, especially once they begged and were refused repatriation. After some time, they devised a plan: the entire group stuck together and spent years working for peanuts and eating molasses to buy a small plot of land.They called their land Africatown, and it was one of the few communities in the U.S. that retained West African customs and language well into the 20th century. Don’t worry, this is where my Alabama day trip comes in. Having read about Cudjo’s life in his own words and dialect, I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

I have no doubt that local and regional travelers pass through Africatown every day without having a clue that it exists. There is a graveyard, a Baptist church with a beautiful memorial of Cudjo on top of a pyramid of bricks, a small plot of land with some broken busts, and the remnants of a wheelchair ramp that may have once had a building attached.

The bricks that make up this small pyramid as the base of Cudjo’s memorial were found on the site grounds, and were believed to be made by slaves from the Clotilda.

The original plot doesn’t seem to be taken care of today, though it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2012. Symbols of White Supremacy still haunt the acreage: signs are old and tattered with the promise of a future Welcome Center on a hill guarded by a black iron fence that is falling off its frame.

The grounds are overgrown, and the busts gifted to commemorate the space have been vandalized.

While walking through the Africatown Graveyard, I couldn’t help but notice that the original plots on the hilly northern end were aligned so closely that they resembled being packed in like sardines — much like human cargo packed into the Clotilda. It wasn’t possible to walk between the rows of graves in this section, so I found myself apologizing every time I accidentally stepped on a concrete slab. The newer side of the graveyard, conspicuously speckled with European last names, was well-spaced and the grass was mowed.

We found Cudjo’s grave site, commemorated with a marker donated by Delta Sigma Theta in 1990.

We also found the headstone of Cudjo’s son David, who was hit by a train in 1903.

In Zora Neale’s manuscript, Cudjo recalls that day. David wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the railroad tracks and Cudjo didn’t believe a word of it when neighbors came frantically knocking at his door. It was hours later when David didn’t return home that Cudjo went downtown and found his son laying on the train tracks. David was one of six children. Cudjo saw five of them die in his lifetime, one at the hands of a local [black] sheriff.

My travel partner slipped some cash and a note through the mail slot of the church.

You’ll notice I deliberately left out a summary of the book in this post. I want you to seek it out because Cudjo clearly wanted others to hear his story. Zora Neale wrote of Cudjo, “His head was bowed for a time. Then he lifted his wet face: “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 dere say, “Yeah I know Kossula.”

Thanks for reading through and connecting these dots with me. This story is in my mind, and now I’ve walked both on the land that Cudjo worked and the land that he purchased. I live in New Orleans where nearly every historic building and walkway has an economic link to the slave trade, and where due to the diligence of a tiny group of scholars, we are just beginning to see commemorative plaques like these. I had to step outside my city to let this particular story slap me in the face. I’ll use this knowledge to remember Cudjo, to remember that academics can be flat-out wrong (if you get a moment, read about why it took so long for ZNH’s manuscript to see the light of day), but also to remember the blurred battle lines of history. Very often dates and laws and proclamations we read about in history books mean absolutely nothing to those under the knife of white hegemony. Just ask Cudjo.

*Clotilde/Clotilda — both are used interchangeably in books/articles