In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children kidnapped from Africa and trafficked and enslaved in America, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of 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 miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other freedmen who were brought to Alabama on the slave ship Clotilda. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American enslavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other people aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

Based on those interviews and written from Hurston’s perspective and Cudjo’s AAL, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. This poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.