The Clotilda
The Clotilda was literally built for the purpose of illegally engaging in the slave trafficking; it was fast, maneuverable and captained by a man already part of the financial backing cabal. It actually exceeded expectations as it managed to get to Africa and back with drawing undo attention and maintaining its cargo intact. Repeat business should have been great, but ironically this prize example of the shipbuilding was scuttled, set afire and lost for more than a century after just one incredibly successful voyage, never even to take advantage of its superior construction again for legitimate reasons.
Oblivious to the Irony
While on the subject of irony and the Clotilda, arrangements had been pre-arranged that as soon as it return home to port in Mobile Bay, a tugboat would be there to quickly get its illegal cargo to a position of safety. It just so happened that the timing of this arrangement felt on a Sunday morning and the pilot of the tugboat was attending church. It is probably safe to say that none involved in the criminal conspiracy found anything ironic at all about a tugboat pilot leaving church early to help steal away a cargo of human beings destined to be bought and sold as property.
Two Pages a Slave
Perhaps the single greatest example of irony in the book is that from the perspective of literary genre, it qualifies as an example of the slave narrative. And yet, of all the first-person narrative related in native dialect by the book’s protagonist, a mere two pages are devoted to the five-year long period in which he was actually held in bondage as property owned by another human being. And half of that is devoted to the period in which the Confederacy had already begun to lose the war.
The Essential Irony of the Slave Trade
The entire narrative detailing the long life of Cudjo and the very fact that he is still in the very same city to which he was brought in that slave ship all those decades earlier persistently underscore the fundamental irony of the whole sick operation. Uprooting human beings their homes and families and shipping them across an entire ocean was easy. Getting them back onto a ship and returning them across that same ocean to their homeland, however, was apparently an even more impossible undertaking than explaining to southerners how people are not the same thing as horses, mules and cotton.
Publishers Were Wrong?
Even though the book was published in 2018, Zora Neal Hurston prepared her manuscript to be reviewed by publishers in 1927. It was not rejected outright; an interest was shown by some but conditionally. That condition was that Hurston rewrite the first-person narrative account of Cudjo so that it reflected conventional modes of spoken English rather than the much more difficult to penetrate replication of his native dialect. Hurston refused to give in to this condition, arguing that the replication of the actual voice of the storyteller in written form was fundamental to the story. Even noted Harlem Renaissance figure Richard Wright urged Hurston to change her mind, insisting the dialect served no necessary purpose and would only turn the material into a minstrel show routine. The irony here, of course, is that with publication at last, the highest critical acclaim went precisely to the effect of reading Cudjo’s first-hand recollection of his story in the closet thing to approximating hearing him narrate an audiobook.
