READ MORE: This 1841 Rebellion at Sea Freed More than 100 Enslaved People Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”Īs for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on.

I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.” Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. “We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. READ MORE: The Atlantic Slave Trade Continued Illegally in American Until the Civil WarĪ marker to commemorate Cudjo Lewis, considered to be the last surviving victim of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States, in Mobile, Alabama. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo. Along with many European nations, the U.S. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States. A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast. Hurston’s book tells the story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. READ MORE: A Survivor of the Last Slave Ship Live Until 1940

Barracoon by zora neale hurston