A Book Discussion for Juneteenth: Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston
Date: 06/18/2024
Time: 5:30 pm-6:30 pm
Sitting on his porch in 1928, under the Alabama sun, snacking on peaches, Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola) recounted to his guest his life story: how he came from a place in West Africa, then traversed the Middle Passage in cruel and inhumane conditions on the famed Clotilda ship, and saw the founding of the freedman community of Africatown after five years of enslavement. After two months of listening to Kossola’s tales, his interlocutor asked to take his picture. Donning his best suit, but slipping off his shoes, Kossola told her, “I want to look lak I in Affica, cause dat where I want to be.”
His listener, companion and scribe was Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She poured his story, told mostly in his voice and dialect, into Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” After eight decades, the manuscript was published in 2018. The title comes from the Spanish word for an enclosure where slaves were kept before the Middle Passage journey.
With a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. We will discuss this book in advance of the Juneteenth holiday on June 19. The first ten people to register for this discussion will receive a copy of Barracoon to keep. The book is also available at the Library and from other libraries through inter-library loan. Please register below.
Barracoon was recently adapted by Ibram X. Kendi as a book for middle grade readers, making this first hand account of the transatlantic slave trade accessible to young people.