{"id":124966,"date":"2018-05-07T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124966"},"modified":"2018-05-07T13:35:19","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T17:35:19","slug":"contraband-flesh-on-zora-neale-hurstons-barracoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/07\/contraband-flesh-on-zora-neale-hurstons-barracoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s Barracoon<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s previously unpublished anthropological text\u00a0<\/i>Barracoon<\/a>\u00a0will be released on May 8, 2018.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Zora Neale Hurston,\u00a0Kossula: Last of the Takoi Slaves<\/em>, stills from a black-and-white film in 16mm, 5 minutes.\u00a0\u00a9\u00a0<\/em>The Margaret Mead Collection. Arrangement by Josh Begley.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On May 10, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter to Alain Locke, the self-professed dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston\u2019s longtime collaborator, frequent pen pal, and sometimes mentor. She reports the arrival of her diploma from Barnard College, where she studied anthropology; commiserates with Locke about the drudgery of teaching; and begs for a visit\u2014Hurston includes a detailed description of the \u201csea animal graveyards\u201d that she\u2019s discovered in the phosphate mines at Mulberry, Florida. Hurston enclosed within the envelope a few objects: \u201ctwo vertebrae of pre-historic sea animals\u201d excavated from the \u201cdeep depressions\u201d of the seafloor and a small piece of wood. \u201cThe bit of wood,\u201d she writes, \u201cis from the ship in Mobile Bay. (Cudjoe Lewis).\u201d<\/p>\n

In May 1859, Cudjoe Lewis, along with 116 other Africans, was captured from Dahomey, in what is today Benin, and sold to Captain Foster. Foster was traveling at the behest of the Mehear brothers, three American slave traders who were originally from Maine but had relocated to Alabama where they operated a shipyard. \u00a0Three months later, the slave ship Clotilde <\/em>docked in Mobile Bay, where the newly enslaved were sold. Because the transatlantic slave trade was abolished some fifty years earlier, once the Mehears landed on U.S. soil, the ship was \u201cscuttled and fired.\u201d Its remains were left to sink to the bottom of Mobile Bay, where, like Hurston\u2019s fish vertebrae, it would await discovery.<\/p>\n

By the early twentieth\u00a0century, Cudjoe (or Cudjo, or Kossula) Lewis\u2014believed to be the last survivor of the Middle Passage and the only living survivor of the Clotilde\u2014<\/em>was, to borrow a phrase from Hurston\u2019s biographer Robert Hemenway, a \u201cmajor scientific resource.\u201d Anthropologists and historians eager to hear a firsthand account of slavery and the Middle Passage clamored to meet him. Locke included \u201cT\u2019Appin (Terrapin)\u201d and \u201cB\u2019rere Rabbit Fools Buzzard,\u201d transcribed versions of two of Lewis\u2019s folktales, in his seminal anthology The\u00a0New Negro. <\/em>As the anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset, who collected and recorded Lewis\u2019s stories and also contributed an essay to the volume, explained, \u201cThere is a strong need of a scientific collecting of Negro folklore before the original sources of this material altogether lapse.\u201d Lewis, it follows, was an exemplary original source.<\/p>\n

The transatlantic slave trade in particular, and antiblackness more generally, comprises formal and informal tactics that transform humans into property and black bodies into evidence of white superiority; or, in the words of Hurston, of logics that create \u201ccontraband flesh\u201d out of black life. On one hand, Hurston\u2019s peculiar gift\u2014vertebrae, ship wood\u2014invited Locke to hold, collect, and possess a piece of the Middle Passage and American slavery. On the other, Hurston\u2019s strategic phrasing\u2014\u201cThe bit of wood is from the ship in Mobile Bay. (Cudjoe Lewis)\u201d\u2014disaggregates the relationship between object, evidence, and blackness. Rather than securing the metonymic relationship between Lewis\u2019s life and wood\u2014between a man and a ship, between blackness and object\u2014Hurston makes the strategic decision to place Lewis\u2019s name in parentheses, after the punctuation. Housed within the parenthetical, Lewis is quite literally positioned as tangential to, rather than equivalent with, the remains of a ship. Hurston\u2019s grammar asks us to consider and then suspend the racial calculus that would allow Lewis to be positioned as interchangeable with a piece of wood, an inanimate object, a piece of property that can be collected, traded, bought, and sold. More simply put, in Hurston\u2019s syntactic structure Lewis cannot be reduced to an object, the piece of wood that should<\/em> make material what otherwise exists in memories, stories, and oral histories. And thus, in this brief moment, Hurston evokes the question that she would grapple with over and over in her career: How do you produce evidence of black life without reducing black folk to inanimate facts and data?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Hurston\u2019s career spanned decades and crisscrossed mediums, disciplines, and expressive modes. She was an anthropologist, dramatist, theater producer, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and singer, but she nevertheless returned to Lewis at nearly every stage of her career.<\/p>\n

In 1926, the historian Carter G. Woodson sent her to Alabama to collect information from Lewis for an article that would appear in The Journal of Negro History<\/em>. In October of 1927, the journal published Hurston\u2019s short overview of Lewis\u2019s life, \u201cCudjo\u2019s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.\u201d As it turned out, the story was neither Lewis\u2019s nor Hurston\u2019s. Rather, Hurston\u2019s submission, a historical overview that primarily recounted Lewis\u2019s life in Africa, was a highly plagiarized version of Emma Langdon Roche\u2019s 1914 book,\u00a0Historic Sketches of the Old South. <\/em>Apparently, neither the publishers nor Hurston\u2019s benefactors ever discovered the odd act of piracy.<\/p>\n

In late 1927, Hurston returned to the American South for a three-year research trip. Charlotte Osgood Mason, Hurston\u2019s white patron who she fondly, if problematically, referred to as Godmother, sponsored this second sojourn. In December of that year, Mason equipped Hurston with two hundred dollars a month, a car, a motion-picture camera, and the directive to \u201ccollect all information, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and exiting among North American negroes.\u201d Hurston would end up traveling through Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana collecting material that would form the basis of her 1935 collection,\u00a0Mules and Men. <\/em>But before stopping in turpentine camps and mining towns, Hurston planned to visit Lewis.\u00a0 In a letter to Langston Hughes dated December 9, 1927, she sketches the beginning of her itinerary: \u201cI am leaving for the South on Wed. 14th\u00a0on the 3:40 from the Penn Station enroute to Mobile, I shall see Cudjoe first as he is old and may die before I get to him otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurston didn\u2019t arrive at Lewis\u2019s home until the summer of 1928, but she came armed with the sixteen-millimeter handheld camera. Over the course of three months, she filmed Lewis and transcribed their conversations. What emerged was a five-minute silent film that depicts Lewis telling his life story. The film, Kossula: Last of the Takoi Slaves<\/em>,<\/span>\u00a0was culled from the twenty-four minutes of footage Hurston recorded over the course of her multiyear trip through the South. Kossula<\/em>\u00a0is both formally and conceptually distinct. Unlike the other films Hurston shot, which are, for the most part, nonnarrative clips of black social life (children playing hand games, women dancing at a church picnic, a baptism), Kossula<\/em>\u00a0strives for narrative coherence and technical sophistication. In addition to a formal title, the film begins with a series of title cards introducing Lewis as \u201cFull of Vigor at 89\u201d and \u201cCheerful and Dignified; Always Gracious and Courtly.\u201d But for all of Hurston\u2019s attempts at editorial prowess, the film is riddled with technical inconsistencies. Much of the film is over- or underexposed; Hurston accidentally covers the lens with her finger; and after the initial title cards, she abandons all efforts at narration, leaving viewers with the odd sensation of watching a silent film of an oral history.<\/p>\n

Frustrated with her cinematic efforts (she neither publicly screened the film nor mentioned it in any of her writing), Hurston toyed with the idea of framing her in-progress manuscript, Negro<\/em> Folk Tales of the Gulf States, <\/em>with a list of 482 stories that \u201cKossula Told Me.\u201d In 1930, Hurston floated the idea past Mason: \u201cIn the last chapters of the book I shall let Kossula tell his little parables. When I see you next tell me what you think of the idea.\u201d Evidently, Mason didn\u2019t think much of the idea. Not only did Hurston end up reducing the parables to a list, but the collection was never published during Hurston\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n

A year later, Hurston began working on her most ambitious exploration of Lewis, a book-length manuscript about his life titled Barracoon; or, the Last Black Cargo. <\/em>After years of gathering notes, Hurston was confident that she had finally found the form best suited for the complexity of Lewis\u2019s life story. The manuscript, which she alternately referred to as \u201cthe African thing\u201d and \u201cKossula\u201d before finally settling on Barracoon<\/em>, was never published. When she submitted it to her editor, Henry Block, he simply told her that it wasn\u2019t ready. Working with what was likely a mix of resignation and determination, in 1944 Hurston published \u201cThe Last Slave Ship\u201d in The American Mercury<\/em>. Like the 1927 essay \u201cCudjo\u2019s Own Story of the Last African Slaver,\u201d \u201cThe Last Slave Ship\u201d provides a cursory historical overview of Lewis\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, HarperCollins will publish Barracoon; or the Last Black Cargo<\/em>. At just over a hundred typed pages, the text is narrated mostly in Lewis\u2019s voice, who describes his childhood in Africa, the Middle Passage, the five years he spent enslaved, and his post-emancipation life. The work, which Hurston once described as a testament to Lewis\u2019s \u201cremarkable memory,\u201d details his cultural traditions, games, folktales, religious practices, and day-to-day activities. According to HarperCollins, the book \u201cmasterfully 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.\u201d\u00a0Following the announcement, various cultural blogs and news outlets offered cursory remarks on Barracoon<\/em>\u2019s pending publication. Like HarperCollins\u2019 official notice, this coverage focused on the importance of works that have been recovered, the value of a first-person account of the Middle Passage, and Barracoon<\/em>\u2019s capacity to illuminate the horrors of slavery. Drawing a direct line between the slave past and our present political moment, Kristian Wilson, writing for Bustle<\/em>, praised the book\u2019s capacity to trigger political transformation, noting, \u201cat a time when hate crimes are on the rise and the United States\u2019 ugly legacy of white supremacy is on prominent display, Barracoon<\/em> is a book we need now, more than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slavery and its \u201cpernicious legacy\u201d does, indeed, continue to \u201chaunt\u201d us.\u00a0 We are, as many scholars have put it, living in the afterlife of slavery. In the words of Saidiya Hartman:<\/p>\n

If slavery exists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery\u2013skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hartman\u2019s framework not only alerts us to the way that our contemporary moment is conditioned by slavery\u2019s organizing logics but also attunes us to those modes of life that can never be assimilated into narratives of historical progress. Lives like Lewis\u2019s straddle the seemingly stable break between enslavement and freedom. If contemporary U.S. life and politics are structured by slavery\u2019s legacy of refusing black humanity, then, the logic continues, we are still awaiting the belated arrival of emancipation.<\/p>\n

Pitched by its publisher as a highly anticipated \u201cliterary event,\u201d the release of Barracoon<\/em> is offered as a stand-in for the nonevent of emancipation.\u00a0And like so many other attempts at narrating the past of a slave, the release of Barracoon<\/em> promises to both reveal and suture the wounds wrought by slavery. But if slavery continues to haunt the present, then Hurston\u2019s editor was right: the book was not and never could be ready. After all, how do you narrate a story that has yet to come to an end? If emancipation was less an event and more an incomplete experiment, what would it mean to recast Barracoon <\/em>in similar terms\u2014that is, as less of a literary event and more as an experiment in communicating and conveying the life of a survivor of the Middle Passage, the life of a man who is, quite literally, the afterlife of slavery? From this perspective, it\u2019s impossible to consider Barracoon <\/em>without taking into account Hurston\u2019s movement through and across media, from the essay to the film to the book and back again. Viewed in this way, the question that underpins Hurston\u2019s efforts is not so much one of documentation, preservation, historical accuracy, or recovery. Her project, rather, is only a piece in the ongoing search for an expressive practice that can communicate the afterlife of slavery.<\/p>\n

HarperCollins\u2019 celebration of Barracoon<\/em> as a landmark event that sheds new light on the tragedy of slavery indexes our ongoing cultural obsession with slavery\u2014from Steve McQueen\u2019s Twelve Years A Slave<\/em>\u00a0to Colson Whitehead\u2019s Underground Railroad<\/em>\u00a0to the short-lived series Underground. <\/em>Many of these productions are excellent and deserving of the praise and celebration they\u2019ve received, but their popularity also reveals what Hurston knew all along: that conveying the story of slavery in particular, and black life in general, is tricky business. Taking up the project will always risk reducing black life to an object of knowledge, an exchangeable commodity, or just simply black cargo.<\/p>\n

Frederick Douglass also knew as much. After escaping from slavery, Douglass found himself recast on the antislavery circuit as a new form of evidence. Working as a \u201cfugitive slave lecturer,\u201d Douglass\u2019s body and narrative was offered as physical evidence of the horrors of slavery. \u201cI had the advantage of being a brand new fact,\u201d he sarcastically remarks in his 1855 autobiography. In a literary move that anticipated Hurston\u2019s relationship to Lewis, Douglass would spend his life revising and rewriting the autobiographical events that thrust him into the spotlight. And like Hurston\u2019s efforts, Douglass\u2019s can be understood as a refusal to reduce narratives of black life and enslavement to a singular event.<\/p>\n

The publication of Barracoon<\/em> invites us to hold and possess a piece of the past. But you can never actually hold a past that is still ongoing, that has yet to come to an end. This is all to say that I am less interested in the reparative account of slavery and freedom that Barracoon<\/em> promises and more interested in what we can learn from Hurston\u2019s inability to ever really get ahold of Lewis and his story. I am worried about how fetishizing a single book might obscure the longer arc of Hurston\u2019s work and what I read as her perpetual desire and failure to find an adequate form of conveying Lewis\u2019s life. Slavery, it seems, can only ever be evidenced in fragments: ephemeral artifacts, shards of wood, and fish vertebrae.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Hurston was never able to square Lewis\u2019s status as valuable evidence with what she understood as the necessarily ongoing and incomplete project of conveying slavery and its afterlife. So although she drafted a multitude of accounts of Lewis from as many perspectives, she did so while holding on to yet another verbal account of enslavement. On July 10, 1928, Hurston sent a letter to Langston Hughes. As she had with Locke, Hurston frequently exchanged writing with Hughes while she was working and living in the South. Toward the end of the letter, Hurston lets Hughes in on a secret. \u201cOH! almost forgot. Found another one of the original Africans, older than Cudjoe about 200 miles up state on the Tombighee river. She is most delightful, but no one will ever know about her but us. She is a better talker than Cudjoe.\u201d Unfinished business, indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kossula: Last of the Takoi Slaves<\/em>, stills from a black-and-white film in 16mm, 5 minutes.\u00a0\u00a9\u00a0<\/em>The Margaret Mead Collection. Arrangement by Josh Begley.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Autumn Womack is a New Jersey\u2013based scholar and a professor of African American Studies and English at Princeton University. Her writing on Hurston has been published in<\/em>\u00a0Black Camera, An International Film Journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s previously unpublished anthropological text\u00a0Barracoon\u00a0will be released on May 8, 2018.\u00a0     On May 10, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter to Alain Locke, the self-professed dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston\u2019s longtime collaborator, frequent pen pal, and sometimes mentor. She reports the arrival of her diploma from Barnard College, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1482,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33933,33934,33931,33936,33935,32556,33932,33937,33938,3844],"class_list":["post-124966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alain-locke","tag-barnard","tag-barracoon","tag-clotilde","tag-cudjoe-lewis","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-kossula-last-of-the-takoi-slaves","tag-saidiya-hartman","tag-trans-atlantic-slave-trade","tag-zora-neale-hurston"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nContraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s Barracoon by Autumn Womack<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Pitched as a highly anticipated \u201cliterary event,\u201d the release of \u2018Barracoon\u2019 is offered as a stand-in for the nonevent of emancipation.\" 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