This week I finished reading two books.
Edith Wharton’s The Reef (1912) concerns American expats in France, but it’s really about the shadings of love, jealousy, and class, and in its minute dissection of its characters’ psychology, it resembles both Henry James and Marcel Proust. Although it’s a superb and compelling read, full of nuance, tenderness, and pain, it was panned upon publication and criticized by the author herself, who called it a “poor miserable lifeless lump.” James disagreed and told Wharton it was “quite the finest thing you have done.” Of its primary protagonists, he wrote, “Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself.”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was completed in 1931 but unpublished until this year; it is essentially a recasting of a series of interviews with Cudjo Lewis, an ex-slave born in Africa and kidnapped as a teenager, conducted in 1927 and 1928. Because I have closely edited three volumes of slave narratives, written a book about the author, and visited Africatown, where it takes place, I was quite anxious to read Barracoon when it was published, but I had trouble getting a copy, since the publisher didn’t anticipate the demand for it (it debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list). The book is superbly packaged, and the ancillary material, most of it by Deborah Plant, is exemplary, with one exception. Hurston utterly fictionalized her own story in the book, pretending that the interviews took place between June and October, and that they were all done under the auspices of Charlotte Mason, her patron. In fact, she first interviewed Lewis in the summer of 1927 under the auspices of Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and those initial interviews were unsuccessful; she then went back that winter to conduct a series of much more successful ones. I think this fictionalization should have been pointed out somewhere. But that’s a quibble. The meat of the book is Cudjo’s own story, which is unusual in its emphasis on the role of Dahomeyan slave traders. In every other slave narrative, the most evil parts are played by American slaveowners; in this one, the African slave traders take the prize. It’s also unusual in its emphasis on the cruelties of post-Emancipation Southern life, as what happened to Lewis’s family on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, during the sixty years after Emancipation is more horrific than what he faced during the few years he was a slave. In no other slave narrative is there such a palpable warmth and tenderness between the narrator and his amanuensis; in no other slave narrative does one come away with a better picture of the daily life of the narrator at the time of his narration; in no other slave narrative that I’ve read is homesickness for Africa such a pervasive theme.
I want to close with a brief excerpt from my book Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal about Barracoon.
Cudjo Lewis, the reason for Zora’s presence in Mobile, was idealized at the time as the last true connection between Africa and America. (Zora later found an even older woman who had been on board with him.) The Clotilda was the last known slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States: it was secretly commissioned by a wealthy Mobile businessman and arrived in 1859, over fifty years after the United States had abolished the African slave trade. Lewis and his fellow shipmates were slaves only a few years. After the Civil War, they established an extensive community called Africatown a few miles north of Mobile, with shotgun shacks dispersed over a large wooded area. Unlike in Mobile, there were no sidewalks, paved roads, electricity, or gaslights. (Home to lumber mills from the time of its inception, the community has been continually plagued by industrial pollution, and even now its poverty is shocking. “We’re still burying most of our people between the age of 40 and 50 right now,” a resident stated recently.)
Cudjo’s house had no windows, so he left the door open in the summer. He grew sugarcane and clingstone peaches in his garden. Speaking in a thick West African accent, he was somewhat cagey about his past. Zora helped him sweep out the church he attended and drove him to Mobile to buy turnip seed. But she was unable to obtain sufficient information from her interviews to complete the kind of report Carter Woodson expected. So she padded her article with lengthy uncredited excerpts from the 1914 interviews with Lewis that Emma Langdon Roche had published in her book Historic Sketches of the Old South, and submitted the resulting piece to Woodson, likely with no intention of having it appear in print. Woodson, however, unaware of her plagiarism (the last seven pages were taken almost verbatim from Roche), published the report under Zora’s name as “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver” in the Journal of Negro History. Zora never told anyone what had happened, and it wasn’t until long after her death that her copying was discovered and revealed. Biographer Robert Hemenway believes that her plagiarism was a kind of subconscious academic suicide attempt, since Zora was at this point tired of being beholden to academic standards. Certainly if Woodson had discovered her source, it would have been the end of her academic career. Zora would, however, go back to interview Lewis again, much more successfully, later that year and the next, and would use those interviews as the basis for a book, Barracoon, completed in 1931 and finally published in 2018. In it, she heavily fictionalized her own experience, presenting her visit as having lasted from June to October, all under Godmother’s auspices. But Zora told Cudjo’s story faithfully, backing it up with copious research.
Comments