Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo

"Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon in 1931, but the book generated little interest from publishers back then. Known only to scholars until it was published this year, Barracoon is an extraordinary find: It’s an account of the interviews Hurston conducted in 1927 with 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, then the last known living person who could recount firsthand the experience of having been taken captive in Africa and transported on a slave ship to the United States. Barracoon illuminates aspects of the slave trade that largely went unrecorded and also vividly dramatizes two extraordinary voices in conversation."