Black Feminist Book Club #1: Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

The Black Feminist Book Club is back!

Starting in January 2025, I will be posting monthly reviews of Black feminist books here on Substack. Each entry will feature a summary and thoughts on the text. For paid subscribers, you may also receive access to lecture notes, recommended readings, and other guided discussion topics. Tap in!

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Book: Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston

Summary:

Zora Neale Hurston is one of my all-time favorite writers and thinkers. In this book, she shows that she is not only a prolific novelist but also an incredible anthropologist and qualitative researcher. In Barracoon, Hurston interviews a man named “Kudjo” who was stolen from his tribal lands in western Africa by Dahomey tribesman and warriors. He was then imprisoned in a “barracoon,” an enclosure which was often above ground, outdoors, exposed to the outside air and available for passersby to see. Slaves in the barracoon were then bartered with foreign slavers and sent to foreign lands.

Kudjo’s story is deeply significant because he was sold to slavers who had illegally launched the last slave voyage on a ship called “The Clotilda.” The illicit voyage was meant to steal souls before slavery was officially outlawed in the United States. In this captivating story, we hear directly from Kudjo as he recalls the horrors of captivity. He tells of the ways his ceremonial and tribal practices were stripped away in the bowels of the ship. Trapped without common language or practices, the human cargo were bonded together on the Clotilda in ways that many today will never fathom.

Once in the United States, enslaved captives from the Clotilda were separated and sold across the South, many ending up near the Mississippi. But, they were just a few years from freedom. Once the freedom bell was wrung across the United States, these previously enslaved peoples banded together to envision a way back home. But, the way home was impossible. So, they built a place called “Afrikatown.” In Afrikatown, these newly freed Blacks charted a course for citizenship that had not yet been imagined by any other community in this land. They encountered the struggles of death and terror that many Black Americans encountered in the United States. And, they always longed for a way home.

Thoughts:

One of the most important characteristics of Barracoon is that it is self-told in Kudjo’s own dialect. Hurston is known for her efforts to preserve the language, character, dialects, and sentiments of the Black people she wrote about. In that way, Barracoon is a captivating account of the journey through enslavement on the homeland and to the United States because it preserves the history as told by Kudjo himself.

Qualitative researchers will also note that Barracoon is a sophisticated study of a deeply traumatized man who must relive the horrors of enslavement in telling his own story. In so doing, Hurston must often confront the challenges he has in remembering, not just because he is aging, but because Kudjo is grieving.