The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.
So, what is this book about? By the end of the Introduction, it becomes crystal clear and more than a disconcerting. Although Zora Neale Hurston can hardly be termed a contemporary author, her work has not been part of the academic canon for all that long and so as a result she seems more modern and of our time than the idea of a someone who lived as a slave. Just the mere idea that a writer who did not even begin publishing until the 1920’s would be writing about her encounter with an actual living survivor of the slave trade trade seems almost beyond belief. And yet this collision of history—between a man already a relic of another time and a woman who would not attain her greatest fame until the 21st century—is precisely what is at stake in reading the book.
“Oh Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me my name from cross de water but you. You always callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!”
Any confusion about who is telling the story is immediately cleared away with the first quote from the last surviving member of the least popular club in American history. Hurston wrote this book in the late 1920’s, but it was not published until 2018. Part of that delay—the primary aspect of that delay, actually—is that she insisted upon retaining the first-person narration of Cudjo as transcribed in her attempt to recreate his native dialect. Publishers of both races rebuffed her inviolable demand that the book be published as written. In retrospect, this seems to be a rather strange decision since some of the most best-selling books and stories in American history had been written recreating slave dialect. Publishers obviously had their reasons, but it would not seem that a concern over lack of sales would be at the top of the list. That said, Cudjo’s first person narrative sections of the book are certainly much more difficult for the modern reader whose experience in reading stories written in such thick native patois is severely more limited than it would have been at the time.
The Clotilda was the fastest boat in their possession, and she was the one selected to make the trip. Captain Foster seems to have been the actual owner of the vessel. Perhaps that is the reason he sailed in command.
An entire book could—indeed, very well may have been—written about the last ship to traffick the last abducted Africans through the Middle Passage to be sold as the last slaves in America. Captain Foster and the brothers who ran the shipbuilding company which constructed the Clotilda were an unholy union of men whose greed was overshadowed only by their inhumanity. The Clotilda had to be fast and it had to be skippered by a sailor who know how to handle it because the entire enterprise was being conducted illegally. While slavery was still in place as the nation headed toward war, the actual slave trade had been outlawed. Don’t think for a second that this restraint of trade did not play a huge part in slave-owning states being willing to go to war; it is almost impossible to imagine the whole sordid business not gearing right back up again had the Confederacy succeeded. The ship would make just one illegal trip to Africa and back, however, because it had to be scuttled under pressure of its secret being discovered and—rather ironically—its precise whereabouts remained a mystery until, quite coincidentally, right around the time the book finally got published.
“De war commences but we doan know ’bout it when it start: we see de white folks runnee up and down. Dey go in de Mobile. Dey come out on de plantation. Den somebody tell me de folkses way up in de North make de war so dey free us. I lak hear dat. Cudjo doan want to be no slave. But we wait and wait, we heard de guns shootee sometime but nobody don’t come tell us we free. So we think maybe dey fight ’bout something else.”
Technically speaking, the book is an example of the genre known as slave narrative. The reality of the situation, however, is that Cudjo’s first person account of his long life is notably light on that five-year-long period in which he was considered not a human being, but someone else’s property. What he does have to say about the period may strike some the wrong way: he is more than generous in painting Jim Meaher—one of financiers of the Clotilda’s illegal business trip—as more humane than his two brothers. But while one may rankle at the uncomfortable association with Uncle Tom that this characterization creates, the primary thing to take away is that it takes little more than a page to leap to the outbreak of the Civil War, described in the quote above. Cudjo’s unwillingness to shine the focus of his long life on single half-decade chunk seems to be his way of shouting with a whisper that being a slave is not what defines his life in any way at all.
