Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

This is the full harrowing, first-person narrative of one man's capture, enslavement, life as a slave and his life after emancipation. Zora Neale Hurston transcribed Kossula's remembrances in the original vernacular, as he recounted his experiences as a 19-year-old, in 1860, and how he was captured, tortured, chained, put on a slave ship and taken to a strange place. The date of his capture is important because it is a reminder that even the 1808 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves did nothing to stop the insidious practice of importing slaves to the United States.