Hearing Voices: Thoughts After Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Come August, I’ll feel my body and brain buckling down to the business of writing and research. I’ll take an inexplicable break mid-October and feel deeply resentful when I have to work in December. But for now it’s summer, and all I want to do is travel. It’s been five years since the last time I lived on the academic calendar, but its rhythms still tick inside me like an alternative circadian clock.
If I could design the next six weeks, it would be one long road-trip. This dream vacation wouldn’t be some chi-chi, visually-curated, Instagram-ready expedition but a hot and gritty and undirected one instead. I would leave without knowing what destination would mark my turnaround point. Its aimlessness would be the entire reason for the venture.
My only rule for the road would be to follow John Steinbeck’s lead in Travels with Charley, I would avoid interstates and always choose the backroads. I’d stop whenever I felt the urge, exploring churches and fields and fishing holes and lunch spots. I’d never worry whether I’d gone far enough for the day or learned anything fruitful, though I would (try to) pause each night to journal the past day’s misadventures. Much of the time, I’d open the windows of my Prius and let the noise of the highway be my soundtrack, but when I needed a break from the South’s heat, I’d turn on my AC and replace the cicadas with audiobooks, letting the stories unfold as the miles passed by.
My parents taught me to love audiobooks during our long-ago family road trips to the beach or the mountains. When I was little, my favorite was a recording of the Wind and the Willows. Middle-school me, however, preferred Spunk, a collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories. The best of them, I thought, was “The Gilded Six-Bits” about a marriage that falls apart and then back together again.
I can’t hit the road this summer, but I’ve still been able to indulge in some new writing from Hurston. In 2018, HarperCollins finally published her Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
This nonfiction narrative is the biography of Oluale Kossola(renamed Cudjo Lewis). Kossola spent the first nineteen years of his life living in Africa before being kidnapped by a rival tribe. After a short stay in the barracoons, or the seaside prison where the captives were held, he was sold to the next round of slave traders. The American sea captain who purchased Kossola loaded him and 109 other human captives onto a ship, the Clotilda. The Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay, Alabama, on July 9, 1860, fifty-two years after the trans-Atlantic slave trade became illegal in the United States; the Clotilda was the final such vessel to make the journey. Kossola endured five years of slavery in America. After Emancipation, he and some of the other members of the Clotilda’s cargo tried to return to their homeland, but they discovered they did not have enough money for the voyage. Instead, they banded together to found a new village on the outskirts of Mobile. They called their settlement Africatown.
Zora Neale Hurston came to Africatown to interview Oluale Kossola in 1927. She believed he was the last Clotilda survivor (historian Hannah Durkin has recently proved there was another as well, Redoshi/Sally Smith; she outlived Kossola by two years). For this project, Hurston married her two identities, the writer and the anthropologist. She spent several months chatting with Kossola, accompanying him as he tended his vegetables, cleaned the church, shelled peas and fought off the mosquitos who had invaded his house. Hurston finished Barracoon in 1931, but no publisher wanted it. Eighty-seven years later, it was finally sent to press.
I devoured Alice Walker’s brilliant, thought-provoking, informative foreward “Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief.” I flew through the requisite introduction and editor’s note and Hurston’s account of how she landed in Kossola’s front yard. I finally reached the meat of the story, Oluale Kossola’s own account of his life.
“I hailed him by his African name as I walked up the steps to his porch,” Hurston writes. “Then tears of joy welled up. ‘Oh Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me my name from cross de water but you. You always callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!’”
I stopped and reread it.
When I was a kid, I thought nothing of Hurston’s decision to write in dialect. When Missie May teasingly asked “Who dat chunkin’ money in mah do’way?” in the “Gilded Six-Bits,” I heard it as a faithful representation of the way some folks raised a few hundred miles south of me talked. I wondered what adjustments a writer might make to recreate the Tennessee twang my relatives had.
Then I became an oral historian. I learned about the power hidden in the ways interviewers represent narrator’s speech. I learned that sometimes a transcriber doesn’t even hear a person’s actual cadence; they hear what they think the interviewee sounds like. I learned that for that reason, I — a white, educated, middle-class American woman — could never trust myself to recreate what another person’s tongue did. I could capture the rhythm of their words by recording exactly what a narrator said, but I should never transform that to dat or doorway to do’way.
Now, I need to clarify, I’m not second-guessing Hurston’s use of dialect. For her, it was a considered political choice, one designed to force her readers to wrestle with Kossola’s identity and his dignity, and it made some of her editors so uncomfortable that Viking asked her to rewrite the narrative “in language rather than in dialect.” She refused, which is part of the reason it sat unpublished for so many decades.
But when I read Hurston’s version of Oluale Kossola’s voice, did I hear what she wanted me to hear, or was I still hearing my assumptions about him? Could I find a trace of Benin in his words, or was I leaving him trapped in the Deep South. I dove back into the narrative to wrestle with these questions.
I also thought about my own writing and research. Sure, I’ve long since stopped trying to use dialect in my work, but have I gone far enough? How often do I walk into a project and find what I’m expecting to see? Am I self-critical enough about the ways my own assumptions tint the experiences I have, the conversations I record, the sources I chase, the photos I take, the stories I tell?
Those questions feel especially relevant this summer. Since I can’t spend the next six weeks re-enacting Travels with Charley — I lack both the funds and the Charley — I’m using them to re-imagine two projects. First, is Out of the Silence, the Clinton High School desegregation story. This is also known as the Vampire Project because it never lives, it never dies and it sucks my heart’s blood.
I’ve worked on this bloody project on-and-off for almost fifteen years now. But how much have my own assumptions about the way this story plays out stymied my attempts to tell it? How do the conclusions I drew in the first few years of the project limit my later work? What about my personal feelings toward some of the townspeople of Clinton? What would I find if I dove back into the original research? Is there something new here, or does this vampire just need a stake? Another recently published book has given me a new take on how to tackle it … maybe. More on that in an upcoming post.
My other summer visioning project is Some Folks Stay about the people who remain on utopias and communes after the communities fail. Earlier this year, I thought this undertaking was ticking right along, then I hit a snag.
The next community I wanted to profile looked like a perfect fit. I saw them as an extension of the work Martin Luther King Jr. was beginning to undertake at the time of his death; they were a new version of the Beloved Community in the tradition of Resurrection City. The protest might have failed, but they were reviving the idealism of that moment. There was just one problem: they didn’t want to talk to me. They didn’t like my use of the word failed.
I explained that I didn’t mean they had failed; I meant that they were picking up the work an earlier generation had dropped.
Yes, that’s the problem, I was told. I was insisting that when Resurrection City disbanded, the work had been abandoned or gone underground or gone back to the local level or stopped. From their perspective, that wasn’t what had happened. And they wanted nothing to do with an undertaking that argued it was.
I didn’t know what to say. The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 was a beautiful dream with significant potential, but the campground on the National Mall met an ignoble end forty-two days after its birth. When police evicted the final protestors and razed their wood dwellings, the Poor People’s Campaign disappeared for almost fifty years.
Or so I’ve read.
What messages am I missing because I accept only what I expect to see?
