Barracoon

Zora Neale Hurston

4 ideas

1. Kossola's capture and the Clotilda voyage

   Around 1860 a Dahomean army raid destroyed Oluale Kossola's Yoruba-region town, and he was marched to a coastal barracoon at Ouidah. There he was sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, which Mobile businessman Timothy Meaher financed on a bet that he could smuggle Africans into Alabama despite the 1808 federal import ban. The ship was burned to hide the evidence, and Kossola was enslaved for about five and a half years until emancipation. Hurston interviewed him in 1927, when he was the last known living survivor of the transatlantic trade able to describe it.

2. Hurston kept Kossola's speech as spoken

   Hurston recorded Kossola's account in his own dialect, grammar and pronunciation rather than converting it into standard English, so that the record preserves his voice rather than an editor's paraphrase of it. Her refusal to standardise the dialect was one reason publishers declined the manuscript, which went unpublished from around 1931 until 2018.

3. Enslavement began with Dahomean raids

   Kossola's account places the first act of his enslavement with the Dahomean kingdom, whose army raided his town and sold captives at Ouidah to American buyers. Hurston reflects that being sold by fellow Africans is a pain distinct from American slavery, and the account shows the trade as a chain running from local war through coastal sale to foreign demand, without lessening the guilt of any link.

4. Africatown: rebuilding home after return failed

   After emancipation, the Clotilda survivors wanted to go back to Africa but could not afford the passage. Meaher refused to give them land as recompense, so they saved wages from mill and field work, bought land near Mobile themselves, and founded Africatown. There they chose their own chief and judge, built a church and school, and kept African customs. Kossola nonetheless outlived his wife and all six children, and in old age he described himself as profoundly lonely.

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