After the abolition of slave trade in 1807, 60 years after, an anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston discovered the whereabouts of the last surviving captive on the last slave ship that transported Africans to the United States, conducted an interview with the survivor and scripted it all in a book with the title Barracoon: The story of the last ‘’Black Cargo‘’ which since the 1930s was buried away from the public.
The book relays the life experiences of the captive Cudjo Lewis, who was born in Kossula which is now referred to as Benin republic in west Africa. He was of 19 years when he was captured by members of the Dahomian Tribe who took him to the coast where he and 120 others were traded as slaves and taken aboard the ‘’Clotilda’’, the very last slave ship to arrive the united states.
The ship transported the captives to Alabama in 1860, a year in which the international slave trade was already termed illegal by the law but, slave trading was still very much in existence and booming in markets underground.
Lewis and other captives which survived the harsh living on the ship were snuck in at night to avoid trouble from the law and forced by the slave traders to hide in the swamp on a sailboat for many days, of which was later set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta to erase the evidence.
The captives were separated at Alabama and distributed to work on different plantations, the separation for Lewis and the others was a saddening experience, because over the several months they spent together these captives had come to find a friend and a touch of home in each other, despite the fact that they were all strangers to each other, their common black skin gave them a sense of hope.
In Lewis’ words ‘’we very sorry to be parted from one nother, we seventy days cross from the Affica soil, now dey part us from one nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it.’’
The book also narrated how Lewis felt when he arrived on a plantation filled with other Africans with different languages which he had no knowledge of, Lewis lost himself in all of the different people around him, he couldn’t ask why he was there and why the others were there, why he was being held in captive, who he really was and who the slave masters were, here is how he describes it
‘’ We doan know why we be bring way from our country to work lak dis, everybody lookee at us strange, we wanted to wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan whut to say’’.
Ships filled with thousands of Africans to be sold to slave masters were transported across the Atlantic ocean from the shores of Africa to that of Europe frequently, at that time this type of trade was rated top in the market of trading until it was finally abolished in the year 1807.
For many nights and days for several years Lewis and other blacks worked tirelessly on the plantation, concealed from the rest of the world, their life was within the plantations , the plantations was their life, until confederate General Robert E.Lee surrendered in April 1865 as a result of a war that broke out in the North of the united states to free enslaved blacks, gave them their freedom.
