Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon (eBook, ePUB)

The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

From the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God comes a landmark publication  a never-before-published work of the American experience.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to visit eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda, the last slaver known to have made the transatlantic journey. Illegally brought to the United States, Cudjo was enslaved fifty years after the slave trade was outlawed.

At the time, Cudjo was the only person alive who could recount this integral part of the nation's history. As a cultural anthropologist, Hurston was eager to hear about these experiences firsthand. But the reticent elder didn't always speak when she came to visit. Sometimes he would tend his garden, repair his fence, or appear lost in his thoughts.

Hurston persisted, though, and during an intense three-month period, she and Cudjo communed over her gifts of peaches and watermelon, and gradually Cudjo, a poetic storyteller, began to share heartrending memories of his childhood in Africa; the attack by female warriors who slaughtered his townspeople; the horrors of being captured and held in the barracoons of Ouidah for selection by American traders; the harrowing ordeal of the Middle Passage aboard the Clotilda as cargo with more than one hundred other souls; the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War; and finally his role in the founding of Africatown.

Barracoon employs Hurston's skills as both an anthropologist and a writer, and brings to life Cudjo's singular voice, in his vernacular, in a poignant, powerful tribute to the disremembered and the unaccounted. This profound work is an invaluable contribution to our history and culture.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Mai 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780062748225
• Artikelnr.: 52534724

Autorenporträt

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. She wrote four novels (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountains, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Every Tongue Got to Confess, 2001); a work of anthropological research, (Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); an international bestselling nonfiction work (Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, 2018); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1928. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida.

Rezensionen

"One of the greatest writers of our time." Toni Morrison

"That Zora Neale Hurston should find and befriend Cudjo Lewis, the last living man with firsthand memory of capture in Africa and captivity in Alabama, is nothing shy of a miracle. Barracoon is a testament to the enormous losses millions of men, women and children endured in both slavery and freedom-a story of urgent relevance to every American, everywhere." Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars and Wade in the Water

"Zora Neale Hurston's genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece." Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple

"Barracoon is a powerful, breathtakingly beautiful, and at times, heart wrenching, account of one man's story, eloquently told in his own language. Zora Neale Hurston gives Kossola control of his narrative- a gift of freedom and humanity. It completely reinforces for me the fact that Zora Neale Hurston was both a cultural anthropologist and a truly gifted, and compassionate storyteller, who sat in the sometimes painful silence with Kossola and the depth and breadth of memory as a slave. Such is a narrative filled with emotions and histories bursting at the intricately woven seams." Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

"A searing reminder of how recently American slavery ended, and the depth of the pain it caused." The Economist

"A deeply affecting record of an extraordinary life." Daily Telegraph

"Barracoon and its long path to print is a testament to Zora's singular vision amid so many competing pressures that continue to put us at war with ourselves." Huffington Post

• Books of the Year - The Economist
• Best Books of 2018 - New York Public Library
• Best Books of 2018 - NPR
• Best Books of 2018 - SELF.com
• Best Non-Fiction Books of 2018 - TIME