Slavery and Racism Theme Analysis

Barracoon tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving victim of the Middle Passage, one of the most appalling aspects of the trading network that supplied the Americas with slaves. One of only a few firsthand narratives of this forced journey, Barracoon is clearly important because it bears witness to the historical trauma of slavery. However, Cudjo devotes remarkably little time to describing the Middle Passage or even his five years in slavery. Instead, he pays more attention to other forms of racism that he experienced before and after slavery, during his capture as a teenager and later during his adult life in America. In doing so, he approaches the institution of slavery less through its practices than its consequences. This narrative decision signals Cudjo’s refusal to place slavery at the center of his life but also emphasizes slavery’s ability to blight whole societies, even after its official end.

In describing his capture as a teenager, Cudjo focuses on the role of enemy tribes and their collaboration with European slave traders. Cudjo is captured as a result of internecine struggles between his tribe and a neighboring one. On the night of the raid he witnesses soldiers murdering old people and the very young. After that night, Cudjo never sees his mother or anyone from his family again; it’s probable that they’re all among the dead.

Although these events are brutal, they’re also presented as a longstanding convention of war wherein victors enslave civilians for a period of time. For example, Cudjo casually mentions the slaves living in the familial compound where he grew up, showing that he is accustomed to the idea of slavery. Even when he’s transported to the enemy kingdom of Dahomey, he’s not particularly upset to be kept in the “barracoon,” or slave pen. He and the young people from his village play games in the barracoon until they realize that they’re going to be taken to another continent, and thus that their enslavement will be permanent and irrevocable. In this sense, the true betrayal is not Dahomey’s raid on the village or capture of Cudjo, but rather their collaboration with Europeans and Americans, which contravenes the rules of warfare and makes slavery into a lifetime doom. At this point in his life, it’s the tribe’s behavior that Cudjo resents most.

Once transported to America, Cudjo is enslaved for five years before the Civil War frees him. Describing this time, he focuses less on the material suffering he endures than the injustice of slave owners’ refusal to acknowledge his humanity. Cudjo devotes only a few paragraphs to describing his life as a slave, merely saying that the work was hard to learn and to execute at the pace required by overseers. He notes that he fared better under the slave owner Jim Meaher than his countrymen who were bought by Meaher’s harsher brothers. He even appreciates that Meaher buys him new shoes.

Cudjo doesn’t express any anger until an episode after the end of the Civil War, when he approaches Tim Meaher (one of the brothers who financed the slave-trading expedition that brought Cudjo to America) on behalf of a group of freed slaves from his village, asking him to give them a piece of land on which to build their own town. Meaher rebuffs this request harshly, saying that he won’t “give you property on top of property”—in other words, give land to people whom he still considers chattel. For Cudjo, this dehumanizing comparison is the most wounding aspect of slavery. More broadly, Meaher’s unchanged views show that slavery will outlast its official end through the extreme attitudes of racial entitlement and white supremacy it engenders.

In his postwar life as a free man, one of the most disturbing forms of racism Cudjo experiences comes from other African Americans. When Cudjo first arrives at Meaher’s plantation, he says that the other slaves “makee de fun at us” because they couldn’t speak English. After the war, the black community ostracizes Cudjo and his fellow villagers for retaining their West African customs; Cudjo says that “dey pick at us all de time and call us ig’nant savage,” even though these recently arrived Africans are actually representatives of their heritage. This hostility is the reason that the villagers build Africatown, and it also plays a role in Cudjo’s sons’ inability to find work or build fulfilling lives within the wider community. In a way, this prejudice is the most tragic. It shows the extent to which white supremacy has pervaded society, taking root even amongst the people it actively oppresses, like former slaves.

Cudjo’s relative lack of focus on the Middle Passage and his period of enslavement shows his refusal to place these traumas at the center of his life—even though this is the very reason Hurston has sought him out for an interview. Instead, he focuses on the legacy of racism that is most troubling to him: its ability to disrupt cohesion and goodwill within black communities themselves, both in his West African homeland and in his adopted home in Alabama.