Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ Audiobook (Free)

A significant literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Viewing God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery since it tells the real story of 1 of the last known survivors from the Atlantic slave trade-abducted from Africa around the last ‘Dark Cargo’ ship to reach in the United States.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston visited Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile phone, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. From the about Barracoon: THE STORYPLOT from the Last ‘Dark Cargo’ millions of men, women, and children carried from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the just person alive to tell the story of this integral area of the nation’s background. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account from 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 kilometers from Cell founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending a lot more than three months there, she spoken in depth with Cudjo about the details of his lifestyle. During those weeks, the youthful writer and older people formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past-memories from his youth in Africa, the horrors to be captured and in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing connection with 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.

Predicated on those interviews, offering Cudjo’s exclusive vernacular, and created from Hurston’s perspective using the compassion and singular design that have produced her among the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever described by it. Offering insight in to the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and effective work can be an invaluable contribution to your shared history and culture.