📕 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'

29 Sep, 2026

I've been meaning to read Hurston for years now, and i'm glad i finally got around to it. To be completely accurate, i'd like to assert that this book is a collaborative work by Oluale Kossola and his interlocutor, Zora Neale Hurston. The book was first published in 2018, having languished among Hurston's papers for nearly a hundred years before seeing the clear light of day. I do believe that authorship should have been split between Kossola and Hurston, but i did not make the editorial decisions on this work¹.

Barracoon is a peculiar text, for it is a memoir within a memoir; Hurston recounts Kossola recounting the brutal circumstances of his capture in Africa (somewhere in present day Nigeria, i gather), his transportation to the United States in the twilight of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, his time enslaved, carrying out back breaking labour day in and day out, and finally his life as a free man in Africatown, a town he founded with his fellow Africans. His story is told by Hurston in her capacity as a young social scientist navigating fieldwork, and she differentiates her own recollections by preserving Kossola's dialectical expression as he relates his autobiography.

In between Kossola's memories, Hurston writes the details of her encounters with the man she is interviewing; the gifts of food exchanged between the two — peaches, watermelons, Virginia ham, and crab boils. Hurston assists the old man with his chores, and drives him to carry out errands. The frigid objectivity of the anthropologist is absent from these pages, instead, an intimate objectivity is established, no less scientific, merely honest about objectivity as a process of human activity, rather than a metaphysical ideal to be attained.

Last year, i'd read David Diop's novel Beyond the Doors of No Return, and its structure bore a striking resemblance to Kossola and Hurston's narrative, although Diop's is decidedly more complicated, i'd wager they're both equally exciting. They're just stories within stories, within stories, within stories, within stories, within stories, within stories, within stories, within stories...

Back when i was reading Diop's novel, i had foolishly assumed, that the titular doors of no return were a metaphor that tied the novel into a complex knot that constituted the lived experience of Africans enslaved by Europeans. Imagine my surprise when the photograph nestled between the pages of Barracoon was one from the island of Goree, just off the coast of Senegal, depicting a door at the end of a darkened hallway opening out to the deep blue sea. The door of no return was never merely a metaphor, it is a real place, a piece of terrifying history, that sits tranquil, looking out over the waves of the Atlantic ocean.

#autobiography #book review #memoir