Barracoon is a revealing book.
Some of what it tells us we already know. Many of us have read first-hand accounts of slavery and racial injustice, such as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Zora Neale Hurston’s interview with Cudjo Lewis–a man born in Africa, captured and shipped across the ocean like cargo, made to work as a slave, who then spent the rest of his life as a free man in a country that saw him as a second class citizen because of his skin color–only has one surprise for us about his actual experience of living as a slave. That surprise is that in light of other painful events and the relative kindness of the man claiming to be his owner, working as a slave does not seem to have been Cudjo Lewis’ most traumatic experience.
Cudjo’s most traumatic experience is one of many Africans that were sold into slavery that disproves a popular narrative of the transatlantic slave trade found in books like Alex Haley’s Roots and presented visually in the TV miniseries that followed–this is the narrative that Africans were peaceful people untouched by sin but beset upon by white slavers who arrived on the African shore, marched inland, overpowered the native inhabitants, and forced them onto their ships. Instead, Africans were largely taken against their will and sold by other Africans to white middlemen who could not have long survived inland on a strange new continent, particularly one where they were hostile and outnumbered. It was Lewis’ memories of slaughter from a neighboring tribe, of seeing his fellows decapitated and their heads burned to preserve them, that he could barely recount when Hurston asked him about his life–not his ignoble and unjust experience of slavery.
This forgotten history reveals a neglected but universal truth about human nature: all of us, regardless of skin color, are capable of great cruelty and evil. Decades after Hurston’s interview of Cudjo Lewis, James Baldwin would remark on our shared humanity, “one of the things the white world does not know, but I think I know, is that black people are just like everybody else. We are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human, too.” (cited rom a transcript in The New York Times’ March 7, 1965 article “The American Dream and the American Negro.”)
This is a truth that many, once they have learned it, desire to repress. In fact, Hurston’s incredible book was not published when she originally wrote it in 1931 because, “there was concern among ‘black intellectuals and political leaders’ that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade. ‘Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade?'” asked Alice Walker in her foreword to the 2018 release of Barracoon.
Of course, accounts of human cruelty are never pleasant to read. But this account is particularly unpleasant for many who tell a story of collective black innocence and collective white guilt. One of the many ugly things that racism has birthed in America is an aversion to acknowledging our shared humanity lest white people (all white people, regardless of when they lived and what they did) be “let off the hook.” This aversion is partly what led to Barracoon‘s failure to be published when it was written despite the fact that it plainly deserved to be.
In this aversion to truth-telling which for some has practically become a religion, black people must be portrayed as either so good and so innocent that they are no longer human persons or so powerless and naive that they forfeit personal responsibility. Any evidence to the contrary which presents people of color as being complex, as truly human, must be ignored. This mentality was demonstrated not only in the rejection of Barracoon among some in the black elite when it was initially written, but also in reactions to its recent release.
For instance, the introduction to the book, written by a woman of color, detailed the strong case that Hurston’s earlier article on Cudjo Lewis was partly plagiarized from other written reports of his life without proper attribution (a shortcoming not seen in her later works). This revelation was summarily treated by one Audible reviewer as “whitesplaining” that “attacked Hurston.” As such, “this book is not written for black people” and “black people should not buy this.” Note that telling the truth is not “for black people” according to the mentality that reality must be altered to fit into pre-constructed boxes of “black good” and “white bad.” Another Amazon reviewer was shocked that the book implied “that [Lewis’] master treated him with the utmost respect” and that this “editor’s version [was] written to appease” someone before turning to the “biased accusations” of plagiarism. Of course, the account of Lewis’ life in slavery is from his own mouth and the accusations of plagiarism are well-supported in the introduction.
None of these complex realities undo America’s history of slavery and racism, any more than America’s history of slavery and racism justify half truths about all Africans as “kings and queens” (to quote the rapper Nas) and all Europeans as devils. But they do remind us of something that we desperately need to remember if we’re going to build a healthy multi-ethnic society moving forward: to adapt a line from Solzhenitsyn, the line separating good and evil (or king and devil) cuts through the heart of every human being. Barracoon reminds us of this unsavory but essential truth.