"This Bitter Earth, What Fruit It Bears"

Let's begin with a door, a threshold, which shackled Africans stepped through as part of the process and journey of losing one's freedom, one's family, one's language, one's religion, one's culture, one's community, one's nation, one's native land, one's home, and one's rights and freedom—what Zora Neale Hurston so eloquently and concisely, and always so rightly, summed up as "the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle."¹ The literal and figurative Door of No Return marks the end of the known and the beginning of the unknown.

Oluale Kossola's oral testimony is riven by this threshold, of being betwixt and between, never wholly belonging to one or the other, "Americky soil" or the "Aficca soil" of memory that he longs for and imagines a way of returning to; giving his life's narrative to Zora Neale Hurston, he hopes, will provide a form of homecoming: "I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, 'Yeah, I know Kossula'" (19).

Hurston begins Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" with another door. It is "standing wide open" when she arrives, and the gate to Kossola's yard is unlocked, intimating that he is at home and promising Hurston ease of access not just over his threshold but to his story. Yet Hurston, as she reminds us in almost every chapter, has to cajole, to push, to barter, to bring, in order to persuade Kossola to share his memories with her. Kossola is immersed in the present; as Alice Walker reminds us in her foreword to Barracoon, survival necessitates focusing on the present and the immediate future. Time and again Kossola disrupts Hurston's plans to gather his story in order to attend to pressing and present concerns: a broken fence will take three days to fix; the grass in the garden needs chopping; it's Saturday and he has to clean the church where he serves as sexton; he must tend to his pole beans, his sugar cane, his potato vines. At times, Hurston notes, "he couldn't be bothered" to speak with her. "The present was too urgent to let the past intrude" (93). As Kossola chides Hurston, "If I talkee wid you all de time I cain makee no garden. You want know too much. You astee so many questions. Dat do, dat do … go on home" (57).

His reluctance, along with Hurston's tenacity, and her decision to include that tension within the narrative as part of the contextual frame, highlights the value and authenticity of his story. Barracoon occupies a unique liminal space within the long tradition of African American autobiography as a genre dedicated to the mission of proving black people's humanity while documenting history's denial of it. Amidst the sea of untruths told about black people, first-person narratives of formerly enslaved men and women were essential for correcting the historical record, but also all the likelier to be dismissed and disbelieved. "All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold," Hurston points out (6). By telling their own life histories—using their subjectivity, their experiences, and the power of language, oral and written—formerly enslaved men and women challenged the master('s) narrative that justified the barbarism of slavery by asserting whites' racial superiority. Hurston's manuscript gestures backward, toward the antebellum slave narrative with its authorizing preface establishing the text as a true, first-person account, and forward to the ex-slave narratives gathered under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project as part of the WPA, specifically the narratives collected by Florida's segregated Negro Writers' Unit, of which Hurston was a member.²

Antebellum slave narratives had to be authenticated for a white readership by a white interlocutor who testified to the narrator's reliability in recounting the horrors of enslavement and the continued perils of "freedom." In validating Kossola's narrative, Hurston, a professionally trained ethnographer, was...