Enjoyed this look into a man who was part of one of the last groups stolen from Africa to be a slave in the US. It was also heartbreaking and infuriating. Super quick too.

This is a fascinating piece of ethnographic history. I’m glad I listened to the audiobook because I get why it is important to write an oral history in the dialect as spoken but I think it would have been difficult to understand. Hearing it was clearer I think. 

Upgrading to a five. The book itself wasn’t especially compelling, but I could feel it changing me on some celular level to read it. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else.

The depth of his loneliness almost broke me, but it took me some time to get there. He’s so matter of fact in his telling, but then again, I wish I could’ve heard his actual voice. That would’ve made a huge difference in how I imbibed this book.

My only fear from this experience is that there will be others out there who read it and walk away thinking and saying, pointing to his words, that not all slave masters were horrible people. That is a lie I’d hate to see perpetuated, because no matter how kind they might’ve been, they still only had slaves because they lacked respect for the dignity of these African lives and refused them any agency.

Zora Neale Hurston provides us with an account of one of the last slaves brought to the United States through a participant-observer methodology. She provides Cujo's story through his own narrative. 

As readers, we confront uncomfortable truths about U.S. history and are forced to dismantle the falsehoods we've been deceived into believing. In my mind, Cudjo's story puts words and history to the collective trauma of millions of Africans forced into slavery in the U.S.

Besides Cudjo's words, I loved the editor's notes. She provided important context and a wealth of original thought to this story. 

The story of one of the last enslaved people to arrive in the U.S. from Africa, on the Clotilda, in 1859, told mostly in his own words as transcribed by Zora Neale Hurston. Kossulo (American name Cudjo Lewis) was born about 1841 in what is now Benin, captured by the king of Dahomey, sold to a (by then illegal) slave trader, and smuggled to Mobile, Alabama. He was enslaved for 5+ years, until the end of the Civil War, and became a founder of Mobile's Africaville. His story is horrifying and moving, and shocked me with its immediacy--I have a great-grandfather who was born about the same time as Kossulo. And his life after slavery indicates how little has changed: his life as a "free" man included, among other tragedies, the shooting of one of his sons by a sheriff and a white lawyer who defrauded him. This was one of Zora Hurston's first works, but, because she would not permit publishers to change Kossulo's dialect (as she had heard and transcribed it) into standard English, it was not published until 2018. It's a short book, and I recommend the audiobook, beautifully and movingly narrated by Robin Miles.