Zora Neale Hurston's "Barracoon" arrives after 87 years

Cudjo Lewis was getting old, and Zora Neale Hurston had something to prove.

Hurston, the prolific African-American author best known for "Their Eyes Were Watching God," was just starting her career in 1928 when she traveled down to Plateau, Alabama, to meet with Lewis. The man was in his 80s. He was widely believed to be the last African man alive who had been kidnapped from his village, shackled in the cargo of a ship and forced into slavery in America. Hurston, competing with other anthropologists of the day, set out to document his life more thoroughly than the rest.

But the book she would write in 1931 about the life of Lewis, much of it in his own words, was never published. For at least two publishing houses, Lewis' heavily accented dialect was deemed too difficult to read.

So the manuscript remained tucked away in the archives at Howard University for decades.

Then the Zora Neale Hurston Trust finally found a buyer — more than 50 years after Hurston's death in 1960.

HarperCollins has just published "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo' " (Amistad, 208 pp., $24.99), named for the packed enclosures in which enslaved people were confined on the harrowing Middle Passage. The book includes a foreword by Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist credited with reviving interest in Hurston's works in the 1970s. 

As Lewis told Hurston, he was captured in his village, Takkoi, during a raid carried out by one King of Dahomey, who "got very rich ketchin slaves" and then selling them to white slave buyers. After a three-day march to the coast, American slave owners stripped Lewis and more than 100 fellow villagers naked and forced them into a barracoon aboard the Clotilde, the last known ship to have made the trans-Atlantic trip in 1859, more than 50 years after Congress had outlawed the slave trade.

Lewis arrived in Mobile and was sold to the owner of a shipping business. He worked toting freight on the Alabama River for more than five years, until the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War freed him in 1865. Then, he and more than two dozen others who had been on the Clotilde banded together and founded Africatown in Plateau, where they would be free to speak their language and continue their native customs — and where Hurston would find him more than 60 years later.

Hurston interviewed Lewis several times in the late 1920s. Telling his story was one of her first major projects after studying anthropology at Howard University and Barnard College, but it also marked her first major failure. After her first interview with Lewis, she published an article in the Journal of Negro History in 1927. Decades later, historians would discover that various passages were borrowed from other works without attribution.

Hurston returned to Alabama to meet with Lewis again in 1928, in part because she feared "he is old and may die before I get to him." The experience would leave Hurston deeply moved, with enough material to write "Barracoon."

As Boyd wrote: "Tears welled in his eyes as he described the trip across the ocean in the Clotilde. But what moved Hurston most about the old man — whom she always called by his African name, Kossola — was how much he continued to miss his people back in Nigeria. 'I lonely for my folks,' he told her."

Hurston died poor and mostly alone, never having attained wide acclaim. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.

In 1973, Alice Walker went looking for it.

When she traveled to Hurston's hometown — Eatonville, Florida — people there told her the schools didn't even teach Hurston's books, as Walker recounted in a 1975 article for Ms. Magazine. She arrived at the cemetery and found the most published female African-American writer of the 1930s buried in a "field full of weeds."

Walker got her a gravestone. The inscription was "Zora Neale Hurston: A genius of the south. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist."

Hurston's work made its way back into print. Hurston's most famous novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," became required reading in high school English classrooms.

"I wanted people to pay attention. I realized that unless I came out with everything I had supporting her, there was every chance she would slip back into obscurity," Walker told PBS in a 2014 documentary. "I loved the way Zora showed a delight in the beauty and spirit of black people. She loved her own culture, especially the language."