“Something to Feel About”: Zora Neale Hurston and Julia Peterkin in African Town

SUSAN MILLAR WILLIAMS Trident Technical College “Something to Feel About”: Zora Neale Hurston and Julia Peterkin in African Town JULIA PETERKIN WAS THE DARLING OF THE LITERARY WORLD IN THE LATE 1920s and early 1930s, a well-to-do white South Carolinian who rocketed to fame when her second novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929. Zora Neale Hurston was virtually unknown then, at least outside of Harlem. Her greatest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, would not be published until 1937, and she had written and published very little. Their work is strikingly similar. The heroines of Scarlet Sister Mary and Their Eyes Were Watching God are strong, sexy, free spirits who live as they please and thumb their noses at convention. Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) echoes Peterkin’s Black April (1927) both in theme and in style, and Hurston’s hilarious, heartbreaking “Eatonville Anthology,” first published in 1926 in the Messenger magazine, is eerily similar to Peterkin’s earliest sketches, which appeared during the early 1920s in the Reviewer. Most interesting of all, these writers apparently shared an important source: an elderly man named Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1997 I published a biography of Julia Peterkin, A Devil and a Good Woman, Too. Ten years later, I happened to pick up Sylviane Diouf’s Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. In it, to my surprise, was a story I recognized from Peterkin’s last, most original, and most poignant novel, Bright Skin (1932). About midway through Bright Skin, two children named Cricket and Blue beg their great-grandfather to tell them the story of his life. Staring into the fire “as if he saw things there,” Big Pa says that he was the son of a king named Taki, and that his mother named him “Kazoola, which means son of a king.” A great drought came when Kazoola was a boy, and the king of a nearby village, Dahomi, “sent a message to Taki asking for part of his harvest.” But “Taki would not divide” (134). Taki’s head man turns traitor: he goes to Dahomi and tells him how to infiltrate the 292 Susan Millar Williams village’s three gates. Dahomi’s men conquer the village and take Kazoola prisoner. He is marched to the sea, locked up inside a high fence, and loaded onto a slave ship. In Dreams of Africa in Alabama, published seventy-five years after Bright Skin, Sylviane Diouf tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last Africans brought to the United States as a slave. In May, 1860, nineteenyear -old Kossola was kidnapped by soldiers from his home near Dahomey (Diouf 39). The raid was triggered when the leader of Kossola’s town refused to share food during a drought. Someone in the town turned traitor and told the soldiers “the secret of the gates”—how to trick their way beyond the walls of a fortress-style defense system (Diouf 39-46). Kossola was marched to the sea, imprisoned inside a high fence called a barracoon, and loaded with one hundred and fifteen other Africans onto a ship called the Clotilda. He was smuggled into Alabama, enslaved for almost five years, and freed at the end of the Civil War. With his countrymen, he established a settlement on the outskirts of Mobile, where the residents spoke in their native languages, including Yoruba, and were ruled by a chief. “Kossola” became known as Cudjo Lewis, but he also continued to identify himself with a name that Alabamians pronounced “Kazoola.” When he later told the story of his life, he called his town and his ethnic group by a name that Hurston recorded as Takkoi and other researchers rendered as Taki, Tekki, Tarkar, and Ataka (Diouf 39-40). Peterkin’s Kazoola has pierced ears and filed teeth. Though Cudjo Lewis had altered teeth, he did not have pierced ears. Diouf reports that Kupollee, one of the other kidnapped Africans, wore hoops in his ears, and his two upper front teeth had been filed to...