A couple of weeks ago Joseph Lemuel Morrow
Associate Pastor for Evangelism and Community Engagement at Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago mentioned this story and this book in his lesson he was preaching. Having read Their Eyes Were Watching God more than once because of the sheer beauty of it, I was intrigued and ordered this up on hold at the library. It came in immediately. It is a stunning piece of work, history, historical document, lesson, eye opening …
This nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published posthumously in 2018.
It is based on Zora’s interviews in 1927 with Cudjoe Lewis, the last presumed living survivor of the Middle Passage.
Sitting on his porch in 1928, under the Alabama sun, snacking on peaches, Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola) recounted his life story: how he came from a place in West Africa, then traversed the Middle Passage in cruel and inhumane conditions on the famed Clotilda ship, and saw the founding of the freedman community of Africatown after five years of enslavement. After eight decades, the manuscript is finally published in 2018.
As she explained in her introduction, he is “the only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.”
As Kossola tells Hurston, he shared his life with her out of a desire to be known and remembered: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’”
Originally published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become one of the most important and enduring works of modern American literature. Written with Zora Neale Hurston’s singular wit and pathos, this Southern love story recounts Janie Crawford’s
“ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless,
teenage girl into a woman with her finger
on the trigger of her own destiny.”
A tale of awakening and independence featuring a strong female protagonist driven to fulfill her passions and ambitions,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
is a classic of the Harlem Renaissance and perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of literature.
The Sermon in the link above.
Zora
Teaching resources.
zoranealehurston.com is a wonderful education place.
Zora Neale Hurston,
January 7, 1891- January 28, 1960,
an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker.
She portrayed racial struggles in the early 1900s
American South and published research on hoodoo.
The most popular of her four novels is
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
published in 1937.
She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama,
and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894.
She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.
It is now the site of the
“Zora! Festival”,
held each year in her honor.
