He begins by telling her about the culture of his people.
“Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want to tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Affickey soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’” Shortly thereafter, civil war broke out and five years later, Cudjo would be a free man again - but far from his country and his true culture.Ĭudjo’s narrative is poetic and deeply affecting. Kossula, along with other members of his Yoruba tribespeople, had been captured in an attack led by the king of Dahomey - thereafter to be held in ‘barracoons’ or holding sheds by the sea, before being sold to slave traders and brought across the Atlantic on the Clotilda, the last slave transporter to have made the transatlantic journey called the ‘Middle Passage’. On other days, he talks, and she records his story. Sometimes they just sit together companionably, eating the watermelon ‘from heart to rind’ another time she helps him clean the church where he works as sexton.
Over three months, Hurston brings Cudjo gifts of clingstone peaches, Virginia ham and ripe watermelon ‘fresh off the ice’. “All these words from the seller but not one word from the sold,” she notes. While innumerable accounts of the slave trade exist from the perspective of slave traders and owners, Hurston wanted to hear the voice of the enslaved. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston conducted a series of conversations with an elderly African American man named Cudjo Lewis in Alabama - or to use his original African birth name, Oluale Kossula - the last slave brought on the last slaving ship from Africa to America.
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