Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

In this Introduction, Hurston highlights her concern for A Survey of Enslaved People’s Testimony and Transcribed Autobiography. She describes slavery, her encounter with Kossola, the circumstances of his capture, and the historical context around it. After opening with a general survey of the body of literature around the slave trade, Hurston follows with a biting criticism that accounts of slavery rarely attend to the perspectives of captured Africans: “All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold” (38). The remainder of Barracoon reinforces this criticism, where she offers many words “from the sold,” specifically from Kossola’s own mouth. This emphasizes the author’s concern with the importance of Memory Versus History. Barracoon is an important text largely because it’s a firsthand account of someone who experienced the Middle Passage. While many texts are narrated by formerly enslaved people—look especially to the slave narrative genre, popular in the US and England in the 18th and 19th centuries—few of these narrators were born in Africa. Kossola’s story is especially unique because he was on the very last ship to take that journey.

The introduction follows the journey of the Clotilda from the US to Africa and then back to the US via the Middle Passage. Given Hurston’s earlier criticism of slave trade literature, it seems unusual at first to focus on the ship’s journey rather than focusing primarily on Kossola. However, detailing the journey is of particular interest to Hurston because of the peculiar historical circumstances around that journey. The slave trade had been outlawed since 1808, making the Clotilda’s journey illegal. Consequently, Captain Foster had to use extra precautions and unofficial channels to purchase captives from the west coast of Africa and transport and sell them successfully in the US. By following the Clotilda, Hurston’s Introduction answers the big question of how Kossola was brought into slavery in the first place. As a careful anthropologist, she can’t transcribe the story of Kossola’s captivity without first establishing that important context.

Hurston’s Introduction also tackles a difficult truth—that African kingdoms often cooperated with western slave traders to capture and provide African people for enslavement. Hurston describes the practices in the kingdom of Dahomey, where fully half the calendar circled around making war to capture people to sell at the coast. For Dahomey, this was a means of accumulating wealth and establishing dominance in the region. Although unfortunate, this fact affords Barracoon the nuance necessary for any responsible anthropological study. Hurston demonstrates the complex interactions between peoples—how communities across Africa were distinct from one another and how Africa itself had political interests in the slave trade that often don’t come up when scholars in the West study the slave trade. Additionally, this aspect of Hurston’s Introduction helps establish how the Middle Passage fundamentally restructured the way certain peoples interacted with each other once they were brought to the US. For example, while the Introduction establishes that Dahomey and Kossola’s nation of Takkoi became enemies, this wasn’t true once people from either region ended up enslaved. In Chapter 8, when Kossola and his fellow Africans are freed, they start forming a community and choose a man named Gumpa to be their leader. Kossola explains that Gumpa was a former nobleman from Dahomey. However, while there might have been animosity between them back in the context of Africa, in the US, there was none. Kossola understood that they’d both suffered the same fate and that, ultimately, the king of Dahomey was to blame.

In describing the aggressive tactics of Dahomey, Hurston does the important anthropological work of documenting the people’s cultural practices. She describes not only their war tactics but also their feasts, festivals, and yearly customs. While Hurston doesn’t cast the Dahomey people in the best light—naturally, given that they’re partly responsible for the captivity of Barracoon’s narrator—she nevertheless treats their customs with cultural respect. Hurston never uses negative adjectives to describe Dahomey as a place or the culture there. She approaches the subject matter objectively, providing the necessary context. This is consistent with the attention that Barracoon gives to other African cultural practices—such as when Kossola describes the common polygamous arrangements in Takkoi—and to traditionally African aesthetics—such as Barracoon’s effort to capture a sense of the oral tradition of storytelling in its narration.