Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

While Hurston is credited as the author of Barracoon, the story is Kossola’s. The conditions of production for the text are unusual, in a way that often makes questions of authorship complex. Barracoon is largely a transcription of an oral account. In this sense, it’s an autobiography. However, Hurston structured the text and the overarching narrative and put it into written form. This makes Barracoon a truly collaborative text, with two authors. Other works bear similarities with Barracoon. A comparison with these other texts helps illuminate the unique aspects of Barracoon as well as common strategies in transcribed autobiographies.

First, Barracoon could be compared to a text like The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), which is the autobiography of Mary Prince, a previously enslaved Caribbean woman. Prince’s book is considered a slave narrative. Most popular in England and the US, slave narratives were a popular genre of formerly enslaved people’s autobiography that circulated on the abolitionist circuit in the 18th and 19th centuries. These narratives typically followed a similar formula and structure, starting with the person’s birth and ending shortly after self-emancipation, and were always politically motivated toward the cause of abolition. While most slave narratives were written by previously enslaved persons, some were transcribed, as was Mary Prince’s story. The History of Mary Prince was transcribed by a white woman named Susanna Moodie, whose approach to transcribing was similar to Hurston’s. Both were intentional about faithfully representing their subject’s speech. Moodie aims to “retai[n], as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology” (The History of Mary Prince, iii). Likewise, Hurston says that Kossola “has been permitted to tell his story in his own way without the intrusion of interpretation” (34). While Moodie and Hurston both used this technique, Barracoon still differs substantially. It was written in the 1920 and 30s, long after the political imperatives and social context of the abolitionist movement. Hurston recorded Kossola’s story not as a propagandistic tool but as an anthropological exploration. Thus, the texts fundamentally differ in tone, correlating to many differences in experience for Prince and Kossola as well.

Barracoon consists of a narrative of the life of an enslaved person in a post-emancipation era. Likewise, Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Maroon), published in 1966, tells the life story of former enslaved Cuban man Esteban Montejo, who dictated his story to Miguel Barnet. Like Kossola, Montejo was elderly at the time and one of the few people still living who had endured slavery. Barnet interviewed him extensively and did his best to represent Montejo’s style of speech, much like Moodie and Hurston. However, as the book’s title indicates, Montejo managed to self-emancipate and live for a time as a maroon (a fugitive from slavery, often living in a maroon community of other fugitives). Further, he was born in Cuba, whereas Kossola was born in Africa and never self-emancipated, being freed during the Civil War instead.

Barracoon is therefore in some ways comparable to the standard slave narrative, especially that of Mary Prince, while in other ways it belongs more among transcribed autobiographies of enslaved people post-emancipation. Regardless, it must be read among transcribed autobiographies for their unique conditions and the imperatives they place on the transcriber to represent the author’s speech. Such texts, like Barracoon, are truly unique as being simultaneously autobiographies and written by the hand of someone other than the speaker.