51 pages • 1 hour read

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Appendix

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Historical Context: The Slave Trade and the Middle Passage

Part of what makes Kossola’s life story unique is that he was among the last Africans captured and taken to the US via the Middle Passage to be enslaved. The Middle Passage refers to the journey across the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas specifically for the transport of enslaved Africans. According to the Library of Congress, “more than 10 million people were enslaved and transported from Africa to the Americas” (Beginnings: Exploration and Colonization, Library of Congress). On this forced journey, captives were forced to travel in the hold of the ship, typically under cramped, unsanitary, and violent conditions. More than a million people died during the voyage. The Middle Passage constituted part of the “triangular trade” route that also included Europe, where goods were exported.

The practice of capturing people from Africa and taking them to the Americas (and elsewhere) to be enslaved is known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, making reference, again, to that Middle Passage journey across the Atlantic. The trans-Atlantic slave trade began on a large scale in the 15th century, when the Portuguese sought African labor. Other European nations such as Great Britain, The Netherlands, France, and Spain entered the trade as well, looking for laborers for the new colonies they were establishing. The trade continued until the 19th century. In 1807, Great Britain was the first to outlaw the slave trade, and the US did so the following year. Other European nations followed suit over the next few decades. However, chattel slavery continued legally in all these nations throughout much of the 19th century. Likewise, while the slave trade was no longer legal, slave traders still made illegal journeys on the Middle Passage. Kossola was captured from Africa during the period when chattel slavery was still legal but the trans-Atlantic slave trade wasn’t. Therefore, the captain of the ship that carried Kossola along the Middle Passage had to be very careful to avoid legal ramifications.

Literary Context: Black Vernacular and Literature

Hurston constructed Barracoon in the late 1920s and early 1930s, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, a creative movement in the US that celebrated Black art, literature, and thought. The creative production tended to use African aesthetics, though sometimes in a manner that emphasized African “primitivity” in a way that was more stylistic than realistic. This period, concurrent with what Alain Locke termed the “New Negro” movement, entailed growing diversity in Black urban populations as cities received Black migrants from the US South (known as the “Great Migration”) and even from the Caribbean.

A popular aesthetic element of Harlem Renaissance literature was “dialect,” or the textual representation of the Black oral vernacular, often southern and rural. This practice was prefigured by poets like Countee Cullen and Lawrence Dunbar, and appears during the Harlem Renaissance in the poetry of Langston Hughes, for example, as a reflection of the jazz music that was popular at the time. As a writer, Hurston was fond of using dialect—or “folk speech”—and she had a special appreciation for the US South. This is evident in Barracoon because she transcribes Kossola’s speech using apostrophes and alternate spellings to convey the sound of his pronunciation. The Editor’s Introduction explains:

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Hurston transcribes Kossola’s story, using his vernacular diction, spelling his words as she hears them pronounced. Sentences follow his syntactical rhythms and maintain his idiomatic expressions and repetitive phrases (24).

However, by the time Hurston began seeking a publisher, the popularity of dialect and the Harlem Renaissance in general were waning. In addition, the US economy had taken a turn for the worst. These two factors made it impossible for Hurston to find a publisher: “[P]ublishers like Boni and Viking were unwilling to take risks on ‘Negro material’ during the Great Depression” (22). This explains why Barracoon found publication only in 2018, 90 years later, edited by scholar Deborah G. Plant. While vernacular posed a challenge to Barracoon’s publication in the 1930s, it didn’t stop Hurston from continuing to write in such a style. Her use of Black vernacular also appears, for example, in her popular novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).