Cudjo Lewis/Kossula
The central protagonist of the book Kossula, who was captured by slave traffickers from his West African village home and given his slave name Cudjo Lewis. He was a teenager when he was captured during a raid and manage to survive the perilous journey to America by the route known as the Middle Passage. The one fortunate aspect of his story is that he arrived in Alabama just as the Civil War was about break and so had to endure the life of a slave for just five miserable years. When the author learns of his story, he is the sole remaining survivor of the Middle Passage.
The King of Dahomey
Dahomey was a tribe that neighbored that of Cudjo’s own and curried favor with the European imperialists by facilitating the capture of potential slaves from opposing regions. Like any powerful leader looking to save his own neck as well as enrich himself with a distinctly alien culture naturally suspected by his own, the King won his own people—also potential slaves—by drumming up a war against his native enemies to seed his plans for self-survival, or so Cudjo says.
Seely/Abila
Abila is another African brought across the ocean, made a slave and given a name change. When Cudjo sees Seely, he knows he wants her to become his wife. Marriage back home is relationship structured upon love, not contractual legal agreement and so to the point she represents for him a chance to connect with the simpler, more honestly valued society and tranquil domesticity that runs in their shared African blood.
Tim Meaher
Tim Meaher—along with his brothers Jim and Burns—represent three of the four points of a perfect square of inherent evil driven by the malevolence of racism as profit and profit as racism which formed to make Cudjo’s story worth telling American readers. The Meaher’s spit in the face of even already legal sanction prohibition of slave trafficking by working secretly to continue importing new Africans into the country to be sold into slavery.
Captain Foster
The point of the infernal square colluding with the brothers Meaher is William “Bill” Foster. The Meahers owned a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama but were only good ole southern boys in name. They actually hailed from Maine which made them even more well-suited to the business of building ships to cross the Atlantic than the natives at the southernmost end of Alabama. The fastest ship in their fleet just also happened to be registered to Captain William “Bill” Foster. And to all outward appearances, that ship set off one fateful day for the coast of western Africa with the intent to load and transport red palm oil.
The Clotilda
That ship was named the Clotilda and aside from Cudjo himself may be the single most fascinating character. It was a vessel built with the intention of transporting contraband cargo: human beings. Not only was it fast enough to get in and out of port before drawing undo attention, its design also facilitated maneuvers which similar ships could not match. In addition, the space for storing human cargo was larger than most slave ships which meant a bigger return on the investment of setting sail. Upon return with Cudjo aboard, Foster ordered the ship to be burned and destroyed in the face of almost certain conviction of violating laws against slave trafficking. A year following publication of the book, the wreckage of the Clotilda was finally certified as having been discovered; a mystery that had remained unsolved for a century and a half.
