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Zora Neale Hurston's posthumously published oral history, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," tells the story of Cudjoe Lewis, one of the final inhabitants stolen from West Africa and illegally sold into chattel slavery by the infamous slavers captaining The Clotilda in 1860. In the introduction to the transcriptions of her conversations with Lewis, Hurston writes,
All the talk, printed and spoken, has had to do with ships and rations; with sail and weather; with ruses and piracy and balls between wind and water; with native kings and bargains sharp and sinful on both sides; with tribal wars and slave factories and red massacres and all the machinations necessary to stock a barracoon with African youth on the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with storing and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses.All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo.
(5-6)
Hurston's narrative of Lewis begins by bringing together the nonhuman artifacts and intimates of slavery—from the iron shackles to the tides. I start with this passage because it also points out, in two ways, how Hurston understands the intersection between Blackness and the nonhuman world. First and foremost, in the shift from "humanity to cattle," we see Hurston critiquing what Paul Outka (among others) has identified as a racist impulse where "whites viewed black people as part of the natural world" (3).1 This vexed and violent relationship between Blackness and the nonhuman underlines how the extractive economics of chattel slavery casts both Black people and the environment as an endless repository of resources, coupling anti-Blackness with environmental destruction. This is certainly central to Hurston's account of Lewis and something we see in Hurston's use of the term "cattle" (5) and her argument that "all the talk, printed and spoken, has had to do with ships and rations."
But there is a second, perhaps more tenuous, way to read this passage. At the same time,...