New York Times Bestseller - TIME Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 - New York Public
Library's Best Book of 2018 - NPR's Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 - Economist Book of the
Year - SELF.com's Best Books of 2018 - Audible's Best of the Year - BookRiot's Best Audio Books
of 2018 - The Atlantic's Books Briefing: History Reconsidered - Atlanta Journal Constitution
Best Southern Books 2018 - The Christian Science Monitor's Best Books 2018 - A profound impact
on Hurston's literary legacy.-New York Times One of the greatest writers of our time.-Toni
Morrison Zora Neale Hurston's genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.-Alice Walker A
major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes
Were Watching God with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker brilliantly
illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the
last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade-abducted from Africa on the last Black Cargo
ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927 Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau Alabama just
outside Mobile to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men women
and children transported from Africa to America as slaves Cudjo was then the only person alive
to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record
Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the
Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931 Hurston returned to Plateau
the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves
from his ship. Spending more than three months there she talked in depth with Cudjo about the
details of his life. During those weeks the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man
ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past-memories
from his childhood in Africa the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for
selection by American slavers the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more
than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda and the years he spent in slavery until the end of
the Civil War. Based on those interviews featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular and written from
Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the
preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century Barracoon masterfully illustrates the
tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious
legacy that continues to haunt us all black and white this poignant and powerful work is an
invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
