Cudjo

With my newfound appetite for the written word, I've now turned to devouring Hurston's "Barracoon," the story derived from interviews conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving "cargo" transported from Africa.

My mind oscillates between the story of Cudjo Lewis' history and Professor Ferguson's resonant warning and about the current efforts to suppress history as "fascist degradation of human beings."

On that journey, Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis, then the oldest living formerly enslaved man who had been abducted on the Clotilda ship, the last slave ship to the United States.

Some read from “Barracoon,” the posthumously published 1931 manuscript in which former Clotilda captive Cudjo Lewis recounted his story in an interview with author Zora Neale Hurston.

Even legendary folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s 1931 text “Barracoon,” capturing the oral testimony of the long-lived survivor Cudjo Lewis, couldn’t get published until 2018.