Hurston and Mason conversed about the potential publication of Barracoon over a period of years. In her desire to see Hurston financially independent, Mason encouraged Hurston to prepare Barracoon, as well as the material that would become Mules and Men, for publication. Charlotte Mason considered herself not only a patron to black writers and artists, but also a guardian of black folklore. She believed it her duty to protect it from those whites who, having “no more interesting things to investigate among themselves,” were grabbing “in every direction material that by right belongs entirely to another race.” Following the suggestions of Mason and Alain Locke, Hurston advised Kossola and his family “to avoid talking with other folklore collectors—white ones, no doubt—who he and Godmother felt ‘should be kept entirely away not only from the project in hand but from this entire movement for the rediscovery of our folk material.’”13
Mason’s support of Hurston’s efforts with Barracoon extended to monetary contributions to Kossola’s welfare. Mason and Kossola would eventually communicate directly with each other, and Kossola would come to consider Mason a “dear friend.” As one letter suggests, Kossola was struggling financially. It had come to Mason’s attention that Kossola had used excerpts from his copy of Hurston’s narrative to gain financial compensation from local newspapers. Kossola dictated a letter to Mason in response to her concern:
Dear friend you may have seen in the papers about my History. But this has been over three years since I has let anyone take it off to copy from it. I only did that so they would help me. But there is no one did for me as you has. The lord will Bless you and will give you a long Life. Where there’s no more parting, yours in Christ. Cudjo Lewis.14
As Mason was protective of Hurston’s professional interests, both women remained concerned about Kossola’s welfare. Having discovered that Kossola was not receiving money that Mason had mailed to him, Hurston looked into the matter. She updated Mason accordingly:
I have written to Claudia Thornton to check up on Kossula and all about things. I have also asked the Post Office at Plateau to check any letters coming to Cudjoe Lewis from New York.15
As Hurston checked on Kossola, she continued revising the manuscript. “Second writing of Kossula all done and about typed,” she wrote Mason on January 12, 1931. On April 18, she was enthusiastic: “At last ‘Barracoon’ is ready for your eyes.”16 Appreciative of Mason’s support, Hurston dedicated the book to her and began submitting it to publishers. In September 1931, she contemplated Viking’s proposal: “The Viking press again asks for the Life of Kossula, but in language rather than dialect. It lies here and I know your mind about that and so I do not answer them except with your tongue.”17 The dialect was a vital and authenticating feature of the narrative. Hurston would not submit to such revision. Perhaps, as Langston Hughes wrote in The Big Sea, the Negro was “no longer in vogue,” and publishers like Boni and Viking were unwilling to take risks on “Negro material” during the Great Depression.18
THE GRIOT
There seems to be a note of disappointment in the historian Sylviane Diouf’s revelation that Hurston submitted Barracoon to various publishers, “but it never found a taker, and has still not been published.”19 Hurston’s manuscript is an invaluable historical document, as Diouf points out, and an extraordinary literary achievement as well, despite the fact that it found no takers during her lifetime. In it, Zora Neale Hurston found a way to produce a written text that maintains the orality of the spoken word. And she did so without imposing herself in the narrative, creating what some scholars classify as orature. Contrary to the literary biographer Robert Hemenway’s dismissal of Barracoon as Hurston’s re-creation of Kossola’s experience, the scholar Lynda Hill writes that “through a deliberate act of suppression, she resists presenting her own point of view in a natural, or naturalistic, way and allows Kossula ‘to tell his story in his own way.’”20
Zora Neale Hurston was not only committed to collecting artifacts of African American folk culture, she was also adamant about their authentic presentation. Even as she rejected the objective-observer stance of Western scientific inquiry for a participant-observer stance, Hurston still incorporated standard features of the ethnographic and folklore-collecting processes within her methodology. Adopting the participant-observer stance is what allowed her to collect folklore “like a new broom.”21 As Hill points out, Hurston was simultaneously working and learning, which meant, ultimately, that she was not just mirroring her mentors, but coming into her own.
Embedded in the narrative of Barracoon are those aspects of ethnography and folklore collecting that reveal Hurston’s methodology and authenticate Kossola’s story as his own, rather than as a fiction of Hurston’s imagination. The story, in the main, is told from Kossola’s first-person point of view. Hurston transcribes Kossola’s story, using his vernacular diction, spelling his words as she hears them pronounced. Sentences follow his syntactical rhythms and maintain his idiomatic expressions and repetitive phrases. Hurston’s methods respect Kossola’s own storytelling sensibility; it is one that is “rooted ‘in African soil.’” “It would be hard to make the case that she entirely invented Kossula’s language and, consequently, his emerging persona,” comments Hill.22 And it would be an equally hard case to make that she created the life events chronicled in Kossola’s story.
Even as Hurston has her own idea about how a story is to be told, Kossola has his. Hurston is initially impatient with Kossola’s talk about his father and grandfather, for instance. But Kossola’s proverbial wisdom adjusts her attitude: “Where is de house where de mouse is de leader?”23
Hurston complained in Dust Tracks on a Road of Kossola’s reticence. Yet her patience in getting his story is quite apparent in the narrative. She is persistent in her returning to his home even when Kossola petulantly sends her away. He doesn’t always talk when she comes, but rather chooses to tend his garden or repair his fence. And sometimes her time with him is spent driving Kossola into town. Sometimes he is lost in his memories.
Recording such moments within the body of the narrative not only structures the overall narrative flow of events but reveals the behavioral patterns of her informant. As Hurston is not just an observer, she fully participates in the process of “helping Kossula to tell his story.” “In writing his story,” says Hill, “Hurston does not romanticize or in any way imply that ideals such as self-fulfillment or fully realized self-expression could emerge from such suffering as Kossula has known. Hurston does not interpret his comments, except when she builds a transition from one interview to the next, in her footnotes, and at the end when she summarizes.”24 The story Hurston gathers is presented in such a way that she, the interlocutor, all but disappears. The narrative space she creates for Kossola’s unburdening is sacred. Rather than insert herself into the narrative as the learned and probing cultural anthropologist, the investigating ethnographer, or the authorial writer, Zora Neale Hurston, in her still listening, assumes the office of a priest. In this space, Oluale Kossola passes his story of epic proportion on to her.
Deborah G. Plant
Zora Neale Hurston’s introduction to Barracoon has been edited to align with the conventions