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Article Excerpt
Pushing open that gate with its "African" latch, walking up to that door and standing at the precipice, toes just barely peeking over the threshold, looking across a chasm to encounter the solitary person who has made the distance, who has survived the violence of the Middle Passage and slavery and who has persevered as an African in an American land....
Dr. Franz Boas of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia had sent her on her way through the South and instructed her to stop by this man's house. He was said to be the last surviving African brought to the United States as a slave. A relic, a talisman at ninety-five years who could pull the curtain back and reveal the fissure, where the earth cracked, the African perished and the African American emerged. He was an African called "Kossula" who also went by the slave name "Cudjo Lewis." He had been one of 116 African slaves brought to the United States by the Mehears brothers in 1859, on The Clotilde, supposedly the last slave ship.
Perhaps one can imagine why she plagiarized. Perhaps the first encounter was a failure. Perhaps it yielded little more than a salutation and a repudiation. Who could blame her? She was young. She was an anthropologist, a scientist. She was an African American woman driving though the South alone in 1928 collecting bits and pieces of African American identity--the ephemera, whistles, and recipes anthropologists loved to busy their fingers with. She was Zora Neale Hurston.
So perhaps Hurston's first attempt to meet with Kossula was a failure. A closure. One door slammed when another opened at the Mobile Historical Society, where a quaint little tome sat smugly on the shelves, beckoning her: Emma Langdon Roche's Historic Sketches of the Old South. The work was "Cudjo's story" told through Roche's eyes, spread across the pages in darling portraiture and dated photographs: "Cudjo and his wife, Abime" under the fruit trees they had grown themselves; hand-drawn maps of the route from his village to the barracoon where he was stripped and sold and loaded on a small vessel bound for the United States....
And so, much of Roche's work and writing found its way into Hurston's first scholarly article: "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver." It wasn't provocative. It was plagiarism. Except, of course, where Hurston removed Roche's racist hand, and replaced it with her empowering one. Her transgression did not go unnoticed. There were tears. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston describes the fallout of this failed research trip: "I stood before Papa Franz and cried salty tears. He gave me a good going over, but I later found out that he was not as disappointed as he let me think. He knew I was green and feeling my oats, and that only bitter disappointment was going to purge me. And it did" (688). She was given another try. A chance to make good. A way back. But this time her approach was more effective. She brought peaches. She brought bug powder. She brought the magical ingredients for a recipe that would initiate his story ... and hers.
After the appearance of Hurston's first scholarly article, "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," and after her plagiarism had been discovered, Hurston returned to Alabama to confront the task of recording this story once again. This time, she visited Lewis repeatedly over the course of three months, and, as she writes, this subsequent trip was not dominated by the anthropological work she initially set out to do on her first trip. (1) The two ate together; Hurston helped Kossula clean the church where he worked as the sexton, and sometimes they chatted as friends. In these new circumstances, Hurston was eventually able to ask Kossula about his life and sometimes he answered her questions, sometimes he did not. In 1931, she wrote up a manuscript about her experience and had it typed. When it was sent to her publisher, Harry Block, he responded enigmatically that it was "not ready." (2) Since then, "Barracoon," as Hurston ultimately titled the text, has remained unpublished, and the relatively few critics who have commented on it have tended to be dismissive of it.
While "Barracoon" was written long before the inception of the contemporary field of testimony, it shares many of the characteristics of a "testimonial text." As a scholar and as an African American, Hurston's involvement in recording this testimony is motivated by the desire to access and understand the violent history that African Americans share, to hear the story of those who had been silenced because of the institution of slavery. In this study, I argue that exploring "Barracoon" as a testimonial text helps us to see its critical and historical singularity. That singularity is filtered through Hurston's personal relationship to the work, but is ultimately visible in her self-displacement in the narrative, which foregrounds Kossula's intended role in the work as the Last Witness of the Middle Passage: a missing voice, a hinge uniting past, present and future. An analysis of Hurston's textual, structural and narrative framing reveals a tension between the desire to hear and understand the urgent heart of the testimony, and the rejection engendered because of the inability to compensate for the loss, violence or injustice that the testimony is intended to mitigate. "Barracoon" thus shows a conflict between looking to testimony in order to access the atrocity of the past as a means of recovering this rupture, and the simultaneous recognition that the past is interminably closed off as inaccessible and intangible. Kossula's testimony--the testimony of the last witness--therefore speaks at a precipice of loss.
Although Hurston's literary and dramatic works have experienced a virtual renaissance in the last two decades, "Barracoon" has received little critical attention, and its few critics, again, have tended to give it a damning or dismissive assessment. In the chronology of Hurston's life supplied in the Library of America collection of her work, the events surrounding her plagiarism of Roche's work, her return to Alabama, and the manuscript of "Barracoon" itself are described as follows:
"Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," [is] partly based on interviews with Cudjo Lewis, but heavily supplemented by passages taken from Historic Sketches of the Old South by Emma Langdon Roche (plagiarism is not detected until 1972). [Hurston] returns to interview Lewis several times in December and completes book-length manuscript inspired by his life. (Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings 966)
In his literary biography of Hurston, scholar Robert E. Hemenway entirely dismisses his subject's claims to the authenticity of "Barracoon," calling it "a highly dramatic, semi-fictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader" which speciously "purports to be solely the words of Cudjo" (100-101). Despite these dismissive assessments of the work, Hurston would tackle the nettled topic of Kossula's testimony several times throughout her life. (3) Hemenway further faults Hurston in his analysis of "Barracoon" (while not mentioning it specifically by name) for not maintaining an empirical distance in her attempt to "recreate slavery from a black perspective," claiming that she wrote it "as an artist rather than as a folklorist or historian" (101). Indeed, "Barracoon" is different from what one would find in an anthropological exploration, a folktale collection, or even an abolitionist slave narrative such as those which had defined the African American experience during and after the Civil War.
In her discussion of "Barracoon," Hurston scholar, Lynda Marion Hill argues that the work is different from many nineteenth-century slave narratives. She claims that while "Barracoon" contains some of the formula found in slave narratives, "it is not structured around events leading toward escape, although the transition from slavery to freedom is given prominence; and it contains no argument for abolition, enfranchisement, women's rights, or any other political agenda. It does, however, offer a heroic spin on repatriation [...]" (69). Hill ultimately characterizes "Barracoon" as a toothless document that lacks a political point. Again, however, the dismissive characterization contrasts strikingly with the way in which Hurston labors strenuously throughout the preface and introduction of the work to demonstrate the authenticity of Kossula's narrative, suggesting that she considers the work a worthy protagonist in the history of slavery and the Middle Passage. Hurston also emphasizes the contrast between "Barracoon," as a story that has remained silent over the years, and the history that has "already been heard," clearly seeing the work as an important exercise in historical justice.
"Barracoon" also differs from other trans-Atlantic abolitionist narratives written by other Africans such Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano...
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