Adam Lusher - Story of the last survivor of the last slave ship to travel from Africa to US is published after 87 years
When Hurston hailed him by his African name, it brought tears of joy to his eyes. When she told him she wanted to hear his life story, she wrote, “His head was bowed for a time. Then he lifted his wet face: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’” At the time, Hurston was becoming part of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, an artistic and political movement that took pride, rather than shame, in black America’s African origins... She knew who Cudjo was: “The only man on Earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.”
The descendant of the
last survivor of the last slave
ship to take captives from Africa to
America has spoken of his pride at seeing his
great-great-grandfather’s story finally being published – 87 years after it was
first written. Garry Lumbers
told The Independent he wouldn’t just buy the book
Barracoon for himself. He would buy copies
for all his 22 grandchildren, and study it with them, to play his part in
ensuring that never again would the world neglect the story of his great
ancestor: born in Africa as Kossula, died in America in 1935 as Cudjo Lewis.
Cudjo Lewis - Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama
“I am delighted,” said
Mr Lumbers. “I am so proud, so grateful that his story is is going to be
published and that it won’t ever be forgotten.” Mr Lumbers grew up in
the house that Cudjo built, on the two acres of land that he bought with the
$100 that somehow he scraped together from hard but paid labour after being
freed as a result of the American Civil
War. Throughout his
childhood, Mr Lumbers heard tales told by his grandma, of a warrior in
chains, shipped
to America, it was said, so a rich white man could win a bet that he could
smuggle a consignment of captives 51 years after America had supposedly banned the importation of slaves. He learned too of how
after they were freed, Cudjo and his fellow ex-slaves worked together to build
a new community: Africatown, now known as Plateau, in Mobile,
Alabama.
Cudjo himself had told
snippets of his story to various newspapers and researchers. But it was
only the black writer Zora
Neale Hurston who took the time and trouble to let him tell the full,
book-length story of his life. She did so when Cudjo
was in his 90s, by then the last person alive out of the 116 humans who had
formed the “cargo” of the slave ship Clotilda in 1859. But when Hurston
submitted the story to publishers in 1931, no-one wanted it. Cudjo died four years
later, aged about 94, with his story still not properly told. Though celebrated
today, Hurston died in poverty in 1960, buried aged 69 in a pink
dressing gown and fuzzy slippers in an unmarked grave in a segregated Florida
cemetery.
Her Barracoon manuscript
- its title taken from the name for the African holding pens for captives
awaiting sale and shipment into slavery - languished in an archive at her alma
mater Howard University. It would probably have
stayed there too, but for the fact that quite recently her literary trust
acquired new agents. Were there, the new
agents asked, any unpublished works? Now the
publisher Harper Collins is
saying that when Barracoonfinally hits book shops on both sides of
the Atlantic on Tuesday May 8, it will be “a major literary event.” Some see it as a
political event too.
Valerie Boyd, the
author of the acclaimed Hurston biography Wrapped
in Rainbows, has been quoted as saying “We’ve got an open bigot in
the White House. A book like Barracoon says,
‘Yeah, black
lives matter. They’ve always mattered.’” Mr Lumbers simply
says: “Let’s finally publish the book and let the world know what
happened.” For him Barracoon is
a testament to his forefather, to all those who travelled in the hold of the
Clotilda and who used their freedom – once they got it - to forge a new life
for themselves. “It is time,” he says,
“For America to know who these people were.”
That certainly seems
to have been what Cudjo wanted.
When Hurston hailed
him by his African name, it brought tears of joy to his eyes. When she told him she
wanted to hear his life story, she wrote, “His head was bowed for a time. Then
he lifted his wet face: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want
tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and
callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’” At the time, Hurston
was becoming part of the ‘Harlem
Renaissance’, an artistic and political movement that took pride,
rather than shame, in black America’s African origins.
She knew who Cudjo
was: “The only man on Earth who has in his heart the memory of his African
home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery;
and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.” Hurston knew how
rarely the voice of the African-born slave had been heard. “All these words from
the seller,” she wrote, “But not one word from the sold. The kings and captains
whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the
“black ivory,” the “coin of Africa,” had no market value.
“Africa’s ambassadors
to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no
recorded thought.” And so she came
from New
York to a Southern home with a garden gate that was locked using “an
ingenious wooden peg of African invention”, to talk to an old man eating his
breakfast “with his hands, in the fashion of his fatherland”. When the old man
talked over the peaches and Virginia ham she brought him, she listened. And when he refused to
talk, she helped him clean the church where he was sexton, or drove him into
Mobile to buy some turnip seed. When she couldn’t find
an Alabama hotel that would rent her a room, Hurston slept in the Chevrolet
coupe she called "Sassy Susie", with a pistol for protection.
And finally, she wrote
Cudjo’s story, in his words, in his dialect.
It was a story of epic
proportions, told by an old man in a foreign land, infused with his longing for
Africa. It begins in a modest
but proud home in Benin, with
a young man training to be a warrior: “I grow tall and big. I kin run in de
bush all day and not be tired”. He never thinks about
what might be happening across an ocean he has never even seen. According to some
accounts, Captain Tim Meaher, of Mobile, Alabama, has bet a northern businessman $100,000 he can smuggle a
“cargo”, despite America having enforced a ban on slave importation (as opposed
to ownership) since 1808.
Meaher commissions the
fast schooner Clotilda. Skipper Bill Foster sets sail with instructions
to buy slaves at a rate of $50-$60 each.
And Kossula’s village
is raided by warriors loyal to the Dahomey king, the head of a dynasty which
has grown rich by fulfilling the white man’s insatiable demand for
slaves. For Kossula, now in his late teens, there is no escape. “I call my mama name.
I beg de men to let me go findee my folks. De soldiers say dey got no ears for
cryin’.” As he is led away, he
sees in the hands of the Dahomey warriors the severed heads of his fellow
villagers. He watches them smoke the heads so they don’t spoil in the
heat: “We got to set dere and see de heads of our people smokin’ on de stick.”
After three weeks in
the barracoon, the buyer arrives: “De white man lookee and lookee. He lookee
hard at de skin and de feet and de legs and in de mouth. Den he choose.” The slaves are
stripped of their clothing, possibly to improve hygiene in the stifling
conditions of the Clotilda’s hold, although none of that is explained to
Kossula: “I so shame! We come in de ’Merica soil naked and de people say
we naked savage.” Then comes 70 days
of thirst
and sour water, on a terrifying sea that “growl lak de thousand
beastes in de bush”.
But since none of the
slaves die or fall sick, Cudjo considers Captain Bill Foster “a good man”. He counts himself
lucky to be bought by Jim Meaher, who was less keen on seeing his slaves beaten
than his brother Tim. But there were
beatings. “De overseer, de whip
stickee in his belt. He cutee you wid de whip if you ain’run fast ’nough to
please him. If you doan git a big load, he hitee you too.”
And then on April 12,
1865, “De Yankee soldiers dey come down and eatee de mulberries off de
trees. Dey say ‘You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo’. “We so glad we makee
de drum and beat it lak in de Affica soil.”
Cudjo even asks Tim
Meaher to give the ex-slaves land, since he had taken them away from their land
in Africa: “Cap’n jump on his
feet and say, ‘Fool do you think I goin’ give you property on top of property?
I doan owe dem nothin.” Meaher never paid for
his slave smuggling. No-one insisted on payment of the court fines
imposed on him, his brother and Captain Foster. And when by working in
the saw and powder mills, and on the railroad, and by selling vegetables, the
ex-slaves earned enough money between them to buy land from the Meahers, “Dey
doan take off one five cent from de price”.
They bought the land
from their former masters and built Africatown.
Garry Lumbers beside
the grave of his great-great grandfather Cudjo Lewis (Garry
Lumbers/ Frederick Lumbers). Cudjoe married
Abila. They gave each of their six children an African name “because we
not furgit our home”, and an American name that wouldn’t “be too crooked to
call.”
Yah-Jimmy, Aleck, was
Mr Lumbers’ great-grandfather. They faced prejudice,
from black as well as white Americans. Cudjo’s sons were called ‘ignorant
savages’ and “kin to monkey.”
They faced tragedy
too, the loss of all Cudjo’s children but Aleck through illness or accident.
His youngest son, also
called Cudjo, was shot dead by a police officer. The officer himself
was black, but the story might sound wearyingly familiar to the modern Black Lives
Matter movement: “He make out he skeered my boy goin’ shoot him and
shootee my boy …. My po’ Affican boy dat doan never see Afficky soil.” And yet Cudjo became a
respected leader in his community, the sexton of the church they built, the
“Uncle Cudjo”, to whom people came seeking wisdom, asking for “a parable”.
Once Hurston had written
up his story, it resonated with humanity as well as drama.
“At last,” she wrote
in a letter of April 18 1931, “Barracoon is ready.” And no publisher
wanted it.
Did the “thoughts of
the ‘black ivory’, the ‘coin of Africa’”, still have no market value? Various reasons have
been suggested for the rejection, one of them being Hurston’s insistence on
telling Cudjo’s story in Cudjo’s dialect. The Viking Press did
contact her, but only to ask for a rewrite “in language rather than
dialect”. She refused.
Perhaps because of her anthropological training, perhaps because she was ahead
of her time, Hurston saw Cudjo’s dialect as a vital and authenticating feature
of his story.
In some publishers’
minds there may have been concerns similar to those later expressed in 1937
when Hurston’s most celebrated novel, Their
Eyes Were Watching God, came out. Some black critics eviscerated
it for its use of dialect. Hurston’s fellow
Harlem writer Richard Wright wrote, witheringly: “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues
in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro …
the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh … [which]
evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.” There have also been
suggestions that Cudjo’s story was problematic because of the way it
highlighted African involvement in slave taking.
It in no way altered
the fact that voracious European and American demand for slaves had created
incentives for captive taking beyond anything ever seen before in Africa. Nor did it change the
fact that the new market for slaves turned them from the prized human
possessions they had historically been into mere beasts of burden, whose
mistreatment was justified by a racist literature demeaning them as incapable
of a white person’s ‘feelings’. But it potentially sat
uneasily with anyone seeking to promote a Harlem Renaissance that took pride in
black America’s roots.
Hurston herself later
wrote that what Cudjo told her “Did away with the folklore I had been brought
up on – that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at
the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.” Whatever the reason,
she never saw Barracoon published.
“There is no agony,”
Hurston once wrote, “like bearing an untold story inside you.” Despite becoming briefly famous due to her
other work, the largest royalty she ever received was
$943.75. By the time she died all her works that had been published
were out of print.
She had suffered the
humiliation of being spotted, in 1950, working as a low-wage servant in a Miami
suburb, with the resulting, vicious headline: “Famous author working as maid
for white folks down in Dixie". After she died in a
Florida welfare home, her neighbours had to club together to pay for a cheap
funeral. Her name was misspelt on her birth certificate. It was only after her
death that her true worth was recognised.
Alice Walker, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Color Purple, who has written the foreword for the newly
published Barracoon, found her grave and marked it
properly. The headstone read: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the
South.” Cudjo too has a
physical monument, to go with his soon-to-be published literary one. It is his towering
tombstone in the graveyard of the church where he was sexton, in the heart of
Africatown, the place he helped build. On every return visit
to Plateau, the first thing Mr Lumbers does is pay his respects there.
For him, Cudjo and
those who formed the “cargo” of the Clotilda have a place in the history of a
struggle that included famous figures like Martin Luther
King, and other, less famous people, like his aunt Martha, the
great-granddaughter of a slave: “She went to a
predominantly white college and got herself a Masters, became a teacher.
Can you imagine how hard that was for her?” But, says Mr Lumbers,
Cudjo and his companions also deserve their place in the story of the American dream.
When asked the moral
of his great-great grandfather’s story, he answers without hesitation: “You
never give up. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Cudjo arrived in
America without even the shirt on his back. Yet he and his fellow
ex-slaves worked together to buy land, to build themselves a church, a school,
a community. “Cudjo was a great
man,” says Mr Lumbers. “He started from nothing, from dirt. He
rolled his sleeves up, pulled his pants up and got his hands dirty.” Mr Lumbers is 61 now,
living in Pennsylvania and still working – somewhat ironically, this descendant
of the last survivor of the last American slave ship specialises in the
logistics of shipping cargo. But he is looking forward to retirement.
And like Cudjo did, he
yearns to return home – although, of course, for Mr Lumbers ‘home’ is Plateau,
Africatown, the substitute community his forbear created when he realised that
return to the real Africa was impossible. Plateau, says Mr
Lumbers, has fallen on hard times of late. The jobs have dried up. “They forgot about
this place,” says Mr Lumbers. “Plateau became somewhere that trucks pass
through, on their way to the Interstate 65.” 'I imagine Cudjo Lewis
would be grinning on that old cane pipe and saying ‘So, they’re finally going
to do the right thing …’
He longs to be able to
help restore Plateau to what it should be – a thriving community, one that
attracts tour buses that stay, not trucks that leave, a proud embodiment of his
family, and America’s heritage. He hopes the
publication of Barracoon will be a spur in that direction. And he knows that his
great-great grandfather would be proud to see his words published at last. “He can rest easier
now,” says Mr Lumbers. “I imagine Cudjo Lewis would be grinning on that
old cane pipe of his and saying ‘So, they’re finally going to do the right
thing …’ “It is a story that
needs to be told.”
