For those of you familiar with my latest novel, Renaissance, you know that Zora makes a guest appearance so I am excited to dig into her newest release from Harper Collins next year. It sounds like a powerful one. Here’s what’s going on:
HarperCollins will launch a never-before-published book by Zora Neale Hurston. Barracoon is a non-fiction work of anthropology, rather than a novel.
As Daniel Johnson writes for the Black Youth Project:
Barracoon tells the story of the last known person to survive the transatlantic slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Many know that Hurston was an acclaimed fiction writer, but here it is her work as an anthropologist that shines. Hurston was able to sit down in the Black community of Plateau, Alabama, which was founded by Cudjo Lewis and other ex-slaves from the ship that brought them to America, and talk with the then 95-year-old Lewis about his life in 1931.
The book’s name comes from the type of ship on which Lewis was held and brought to America. In Barracoon, Hurston captures, largely in Lewis’s own words, the horrors of his passage to America, the brutality of his time as an enslaved person in America, and the story of his life after the Civil War.
This sounds like it’s going to be a powerful read.
The PBS Blog 