By Zora Neale Hurston, from Barracoon, a previously unpublished ethnography based on interviews that she conducted with eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis in Alabama in 1927 and 1928. Lewis was then the last known surviving man to have been brought to the United States from Africa as a slave. Hurston (1891–1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. The book was published last month by Amistad.
Cudjo’s friends down the bay caught us a marvelous mess of blue crabs. We left these people late in the afternoon with many lingering exchanges of good wishes.
On the way home we saw some excellent…