Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Oluale Kossola before he died in the 1930’s to create this first-person narrative by one of the last people to be transported to the United States through the middle passage. It is interesting in that, among the existing records of that period in time, it is written from the perspective of someone who lived slavery rather than perpetuated it. It wasn’t written with an agenda. It is a record of a history.
It is a story of a culture and a life lived far from home and family because of human greed.
“I hailed him by his African name as I walked up the steps to his porch, and he looked up into my face as I stood in the door in surprise.” pg 17
Hurston records Kossola’s responses to her questions phonetically, which makes you feel like you’re sitting there with her, listening to the remembrances of Kossola as he says them.
In the introduction by Deborah G. Plant, she captures this feeling: “The narrative space she creates for Kossula’s unburdening is sacred. Rather than insert herself into the narrative as the learned and probing cultural anthropologist, the investigating ethnographer, or the authorial writer, Zora Neale Hurston, in her still listening, assumes the office of a priest.” pg xxv
I think, as someone looking back, it’s important to understand the transportation of slaves into the U.S. was made illegal in 1808, fifty years before Kossula was taken from his home. It’s a piece of American history that has been almost entirely forgotten.
“Of the thousands of Africans smuggled into American after 1808, only one man was held accountable and hanged, and even he died proclaiming his innocence.” pg 132
In Barracoon, not only are we given the story of Kossula’s transportation in life in the U.S., but also, he shares fascinating details of his life in Africa. There’s information about the justice system, social structure, rites of initiation and more.
In addition to his life story, Kossula shares fables he created to share his feeling of loss about his family as he outlived all of his children and wife. I enjoyed this folk lore part of the book the most.
There’s some controversy surrounding this book. Apparently, Hurston published a magazine article about Kossula early in the last century and was accused by later scholars of plagiarism.
“Of the sixty-seven paragraphs in Hurston’s essay,” Hemenway relates, “only eighteen are exclusively her own prose.” pg 120
The text in question is Emma Langdon Roche’s Historic Sketches of the South, that was published in 1917. The full text is available from the U.S. Library of Congress and can be accessed online. That’s how I read it and was able to see some of the similarities in the writing.
However, the interview portions of this book, written in Kossola’s distinctive style of speaking, are entirely unique. As the editor of this book points out, Hurston was never accused of plagiarism in her works after writing about Kossola and it was very early in her career. We all make mistakes.
Recommended for any readers interested in history. Barracoon is a treasure.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s the History Guy episode I wrote about Oluale Kossola:
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