![]() ![]() On other days, he talks, and she records his story. Sometimes they just sit together companionably, eating the watermelon ‘from heart to rind’ another time she helps him clean the church where he works as sexton. Over three months, Hurston brings Cudjo gifts of clingstone peaches, Virginia ham and ripe watermelon ‘fresh off the ice’. “All these words from the seller but not one word from the sold,” she notes. While innumerable accounts of the slave trade exist from the perspective of slave traders and owners, Hurston wanted to hear the voice of the enslaved. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston conducted a series of conversations with an elderly African American man named Cudjo Lewis in Alabama - or to use his original African birth name, Oluale Kossula - the last slave brought on the last slaving ship from Africa to America. ![]()
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