Salvaging Treasure: Come Memorial Day Sunday to Lift Up Near-forgotten History (with bibliography)

Please join us on May 24 for our lay-led service, "Zora and The Last Slave Ship: Salvaging Treasure from History," to help lift up some history we almost lost! Once again, we will be blessed with the voice and dramatic presence of Keara Hailey Gordon, accompanied by pianist Dan Kader, with Caroline Blanchard interpreting the story for all ages.

In 1931, author and anthropologist and American genius Zora Neale Hurston put the finishing editorial touches on what eventually came to be published as Barracoon. But she could not find a publisher in her lifetime for this story of Cudjo Lewis – born in Africa as Oluale Kossola. The manuscript languished in the archives of Howard University until it was finally published in 2018.

In 2018, author Ben Raines, relying in part on Barracoon, located the sunken timbers of the last slave ship to bring people from Africa to be enslaved in the United States – in 1859, 51 years after importing slaves was outlawed in 1808. The story of the ship and the 116 souls on board who were kidnapped and brought to the US on a bet and enslaved until 1865 was long dismissed as a myth, even though those people had formed a community known as Africatown in 1865, and of course had many descendants. Cudjo Lewis was not the only survivor from the ship who was still living when Zora conducted her interviews in 1927.

Ben Raines not only found the ship, but tracked down descendants of the men who outfitted and piloted the ship and purchased and brought the kidnapped people to Alabama, but also brought a descendant of the Dahomeyans who conducted the raid on Cudjo’s village to conduct a ritual of remembrance and a prayer for forgiveness above the waters where the timbers of the ship were found. His book recording all of this was published in 2019. His certainty that he would find it was founded no little part on Zora’s presentation of Cudjo’s vivid recollections.

This service distills over a year of research and reading. Hoping you may want to learn more about the history, or delve into Hurston’s fiction, essays and scholarship, here is a bibliography of some of my reading, which you may borrow for your own. I have not yet read all her works but the list is in several of these volumes, if you want to get into it.

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Abramowitz, Sophie. “Trained and Taught this Song by Zora Hurston”: Dramatic Ethnography and Zora Neale Hurston’s The Great Day. American Quarterly volume 72.4 March 2020- December 2020. Johns Hopkins University Press. Pages 881 - 908 (Copy available to borrow from Shari Loe)

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston, A Literary Biography. Foreword by Alice Walker. Univeristy of Illinois Press. (1977; 1978).

Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Plant, Debora G. Editor. Forward by Alice Walker. Harpercollins Amistad Press. Copyright 2018, Zora Neale Hurston Trust. (New York 2018).

Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Seiglinde Lemke. Harpercollins (New York: 1995). Individual copyrights for stories included.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States. Kaplan, Carla, Ed. Copyright 2001 by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust. Harpercollins (New York 2001).

Hurston, Zora Neale. Stories from the Harlem Renaissance: Hitting A Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick. Harpercollins (New York: 2020).

Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. (Copyright 1938 by Hurston). Harpercollins Amistad Press, Gates, Henry Louis, Ed.; Reed, Ishmael, More than A Voodoo, Foreword copyright 1990.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Copyright 1937; many editions available).

Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago (1994).

Raines, Ben. The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. Simon & Schuster (New York: 2022).

Walker, Alice. Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and A Partisan View (1979; pages 83-92); Looking for Zora (1975l pages 93-116.) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (New York; San Diego 1983)