5Note 6: The native term of derision for the Kroos. They are despised by the other tribes because they are usually the porters for the white men. They are called Many-costs because it is said that many Kroos may be hired for the cost of one decent worker. Some white trader went inland with a number of Kroo porters. While he was doing business with the native king, the porters wandered about the village and arrived at the market place. The girls, as is customary, wore nothing above the waist. The Kroo men amused themselves by pinching the busts of the young women. When the men heard of this desecration they hurried to the headman with the information. He told the white trader to move along with his Kroo porters instantly or they would be killed. The white man replied that the local men could not dispose of his porters because they were so numerous that the local men were in danger of being chastised themselves. The king replied by asking him, “How many costs?” Meaning, “How much did they cost you?” This was not a question but a sneer, meaning, “They are just as cheap for us to kill as they are for you to hire.” Let just one more of your Many-costs pinch titty of our girls and all shall die. The white trader changed his mind and restrained his boys. The story spread and the name stuck to the Kroos.
6Note 7: Canot, a notorious slave trader, says that the slaves were stripped for cleanliness and health in the middle passage. [Editor’s note: Canot and Mayer, Adventures of an African Slaver, 108.]
7[Editor’s note: Ibid., 109.]
8[Editor’s note: According to Henry Romeyn’s account, in “Little Africa,” “One hundred and seventy-five slaves were contracted for. . . . One hundred and sixty-four slaves had been taken on board. Of these but two died on the passage” (15).]
CHAPTER IX: MARRIAGE
1Note 8: Neither from Kossula nor from the community have I been able to get a clear account of what led up to the killing. One fact is established however: That the community in general feared the Lewis boys.
According to one informant there had been several fights between the Lewis boys and some others, extending over a long period of time. There were numerous grudges to be paid off. The Lewis boys felt as if their backs were against the wall and fought desperately in every encounter.
There was a bloody battle on July 28, 1902, in which one man was shot to death and one seriously wounded with a knife.
Young Cudjo was said to have done both the cutting and the shooting when set upon by some of his enemies. The Negro deputy sheriff is said to have been afraid to attempt an arrest. He tried for three weeks to catch the young man off his guard. Failing in that, he finally approached him concealed in the butcher’s wagon and shot young Cudjo to death.
[Editor’s note: Note 8 was misnumbered as note 7 in the original manuscript. Hurston’s note 7 is a handwritten insertion on the reverse of an early typed manuscript draft, page 28. As Hurston pointed out, the details were not clear. According to Sylviane Diouf and Natalie Robertson, in January 1900, Cudjo Lewis Jr. was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree in the death of Gilbert Thomas, who may have been young Lewis’s brother-in-law. Lewis Jr. was condemned to five years in the Jefferson County state penitentiary, but was transferred into the state’s convict-lease system. He was pardoned in August 1900.]
CHAPTER XI
1[Editor’s note: Hurston took photographs of Kossola as well as film footage, which can be viewed in Kristy Andersen’s PBS American Master’s Series production of Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at de Sun, 2008.]
APPENDIX
1[Editor’s Note: In “Appendix 3” of Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States, is a listing of stories Hurston collected from Kossola.]
AFTERWORD
1Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1942] 1984), 198.
2Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 95.
3See Hurston’s preface, in the present volume.
4See Hurston’s introduction, in the present volume.
5Zora Neale Hurston to Carter G. Woodson, July/August 1927, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 103; Zora Neale Hurston to Thomas E. Jones, 12 October 1934, in Ibid., 315; Hurston, Dust Tracks, 198.
6A version of this article was published in The American Mercury in 1944, and then in a condensed version in Negro Digest, also in 1944.
7Zora Neale Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last Slaver,” Journal of Negro History, October 1927, 648, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2714041.
8Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 96–97, 103 n23.
9Ibid., 98.
10Zora Neale Hurston to Thomas E. Jones, 12 October 1934, in Kaplan, Letters, 315.
11Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: The Crossing Press, 1984), 112.
12Zora Neale Hurston to Thomas E. Jones, 12 October 1934, in Kaplan, Letters, 315.
13Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 96.
14Ibid., 99.
15Ibid., 98.
16Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 154.
17Ibid., 153.
18Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, spring-summer 1927, in Kaplan, Letters, 99.
19Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 154.
20Ibid., 153.
21Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 89.
22Lynda Marion Hill, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996), 64.
23Hurston, Dust Tracks, 204.
24Ibid., 200.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27Hill, Social Rituals, 64.
28Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 100–101.
29See Hurston’s preface in the present volume.
30See Hurston’s introduction in the present volume.
31Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama, 246.
32Ibid., 246, 3.
33See Hurston’s introduction, in the present volume.
34Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19.
35Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), i, 275.
36Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama, 66.
37Philip Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, [1967] 1997), 9.
38Morrison, Beloved, 274.
39Hurston, Dust Tracks, 204.
40Marimba Ani (Dona Richards), Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992), 12.
41See chapter 8 in the present volume.
42Henry Romeyn, “Little Africa: The Last Slave Cargo Landed in the United States,” in The Southern Workman 26.1 (January 1897), 14, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .lib.usf.edu/eds/ebook.
43See narrative in present volume.
44Ibid.
45Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama, 156, 157.
46Ibid., 2.
47Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 69.
48James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” in Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, [1965] 1998), 723.
About the Editor
DEBORAH G. PLANT is an independent scholar and writer based in Florida. She is the author of Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (1995) and Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit (2007), and editor of The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston (2010).
About the Author
ZORA NEALE HURSTON was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. An author of four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); a
nd more than fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University, and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1927. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She died in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at her grave site with this epitaph: ZORA NEALE HURSTON: “A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH.”
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Zora Neale Hurston
Jonah’s Gourd Vine
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Seraph on the Suwanee
Mules and Men
Tell My Horse
Dust Tracks on a Road
Copyright
BARRACOON. Copyright © 2018 by The Zora Neale Hurston Trust. Foreword: Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief: Reading Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” © 2018 by Alice Walker; granted by permission of Alice Walker. Introduction, editor’s note, and reference materials copyright © 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs: Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama (portrait); Broadside from Charleston, South Carolina, advertising the sale of a new shipment of slaves, 24 July, 1769 (print); American School (eighteenth century) / American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA / Bridgeman Images (background and border); © THE PALMER/iStock/Getty Images (peach)
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Door of No Return. Courtesy of Deborah G. Plant and Gloria Jean Plant Gilbert
Kossula. Courtesy of McGill Studio Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama
Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274822-5
Version 04042018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274820-1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
* This table is drawn from the works of Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship “Clotilda” and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Natalie S. Robertson, The Slave Ship Clotilda, and the Making of AfricaTown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends