"Something to feel about": Zora Neale Hurston and Julia Peterkin in African town.

"Something to feel about": Zora Neale Hurston and Julia Peterkin in African town. JULIA PETERKIN WAS THE DARLING OF THE LITERARY WORLD IN THE LATE1920s and early 1930s, a well-to-do white South Carolinian who rocketedto fame when her second novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, won the PulitzerPrize for fiction in 1929. Zora Neale Hurston was virtually unknownthen, at least outside of Harlem. Her greatest novel, Their Eyes WereWatching God, would not be published until 1937, and she had written andpublished very little. Their work is strikingly similar. The heroines of Scarlet SisterMary and Their Eyes Were Watching God are strong, sexy, free spirits wholive as they please and thumb their noses at convention. Hurston'sJonah's Gourd Vine (1934) echoes Peterkin's Black April (1927)both in theme and in style, and Hurston's hilarious, heartbreaking"Eatonville Anthology," first published in 1926 in theMessenger magazine, is eerily similar to Peterkin's earliestsketches, which appeared during the early 1920s in the Reviewer. Mostinteresting of all, these writers apparently shared an important source:an elderly man named Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlanticslave trade. In 1997 1 published a biography of Julia Peterkin, A Devilanda GoodWoman, Too. Ten years later, I happened to pick up Sylviane DioufsDreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story ofthe Last Africans Brought to America. In it, to my surprise, was a storyI recognized from Peterkin's last, most original, and most poignantnovel, Bright Skin (1932). About midway through Bright Skin, two children named Cricket andBlue beg their great-grandfather to tell them the story of his life.Staring into the fire "as if he saw things there," Big Pa saysthat he was the son of a king named Taki, and that his mother named him"Kazoola, which means son of a king." A great drought camewhen Kazoola was a boy, and the king of a nearby village, Dahomi,"sent a message to Taki asking for part of his harvest." But"Taki would not divide" (134). Taki's head man turnstraitor: he goes to Dahomi and tells him how to infihrate thevillage's three gates. Dahomi's men conquer the village andtake Kazoola prisoner. He is marched to the sea, locked up inside a highfence, and loaded onto a slave ship. In Dreams of Africa in Alabama, published seventy-five years afterBright Skin, Sylviane Diouf tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, one of thelast Africans brought to the United States as a slave. In May, 1860,nineteen-year-old Kossola was kidnapped by soldiers from his home nearDahomey (Diouf 39). The raid was triggered when the leader ofKossola's town refused to share food during a drought. Someone inthe town turned traitor and told the soldiers "the secret of thegates"--how to trick their way beyond the walls of a fortress-styledefense system (Diouf 39-46). Kossola was marched to the sea, imprisoned inside a high fencecalled a barracoon, and loaded with one hundred and fifteen otherAfricans onto a ship called the Clotilda. He was smuggled into Alabama,enslaved for almost five years, and freed at the end of the Civil War.With his countrymen, he established a settlement on the outskirts ofMobile, where the residents spoke in their native languages, includingYoruba, and were ruled by a chief. "Kossola" became known asCudjo Lewis, but he also continued to identify himself with a name thatAlabamians pronounced "Kazoola." When he later told the storyof his life, he called his town and his ethnic group by a name thatHurston recorded as Takkoiand other researchers rendered as Taki, Tekki,Tarkar, and Ataka (Diouf 39-40). Peterkin's Kazoola has pierced ears and filed teeth. ThoughCudio Lewis had altered teeth, he did not have pierced ears. Dioufreports that Kupotlee, one of the other kidnapped Africans, wore hoopsin his ears, and his two upper front teeth had been filed to points(Diouf 44). As I read Dreams of Africa in Alabama and wondered whether JuliaPeterkin could have met Cudjo Lewis, I found myself staring at thephotograph on the cover. It shows Lewis in 1927, posing with his twingreat-granddaughters in front of a house in African Town, Alabama, nowcalled Plateau. I knew I had seen this man before. But where? Finallythe answer hit me--he appears in the limited edition of Roll, Jordan,Roll, a book of photographs by Doris Ulmann with text by Julia Peterkin.At first I was a bit confounded by this realization, since I knew thatdescendants of the people who lived at Peterkin's plantation, LangSyne, had tentatively identified the man in the picture as DanielAnderson, the last meeting-house leader at Lang Syne and a deacon at Mr.Pleasant Baptist Church near Fort Motte, South Carolina (Whitmore n.p.). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The subject of Doris Ulmann's portrait sits in front of anunpainted door, one hand resting in his lap, the other on a homemadecane. His face, framed by a short fringe of white beard, seems strangelyageless. But the hands, shaped by decades of hard work, dominate thepicture. They are abnormally large, with swollen knuckles. The indexfinger, resting on the handle of the cane, is clearly missing its tip,and the thumb, jutting out at an odd angle against the backdrop of hiswhite shirt, is shaped like a small banana. These were the hands and the face I had seen on the cover of Dreamsof Africa in Alabama. Other portraits of Cudjo Lewis taken around thesame time and reproduced inside Dioufs book show him wearing anidentical beard and holding the same cane, his hand posed almost exactlyas it is in Ulmann's shot. His banana-shaped thumb is visible,along with the truncated index finger. Even the wrinkles in his foreheadmatch. I showed the twin images to Gayla Jamison, who was filming adocumentary about Julia Peterkin for South Carolina ETV. Gayla emailedSylviane Diouf and asked her if I could be right. Diouf, who works atthe Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, went to the stacksand consulted the Schomburg's copy of Roll, Jordan, Roll. In amatter of minutes we had our answer: the man in the picture is indeedCudjo Lewis. In Ulmann's photograph he rests his left hand on afolded bit of fabric, possibly a sock, which he may have been darning.His heavily-patched pants are a reminder not only of his poverty but, asDiouf pointed out, of the fact that he loved to stitch. In his part ofAfrica, men did the sewing. Suddenly I saw the subject of the portraitas an individual instead of as a type--a man with a name, a history, andhabits, who patched his pants not because he had to but because hewantedto. When I was doing research for A Devil and a Good Woman, Too, peoplefrom Lang Syne told me that the character Big Pa in Bright Skinresembled a man named Frank Bryant, who was born in Angola and spokeEnglish with a heavy accent. Celebrated by his descendants for resistingslavery, Bryant is said to have maintained two families, one atPeterkin's plantation in the midlands of South Carolina, and one onDaufuskie Island, many miles away. Could Frank Bryant, like Cudjo Lewis, have been transported on theClotilda or one of the other illegal slave ships that brought kidnappedAfricans to the South just before the Civil War? Diouf points out thatthese "new Africans" were scattered throughout the Black Belt,including a group of more than thirty who had come over on theWandererin 1858 and settled near Edgefield, South Carolina (110). TheWandereranchored off Jekyll Island, Georgia, some seventy miles south ofSavannah, and the Africans in its hold were unloaded and smuggled ashore(22). Bryant may have been among them. But Peterkin also came across asecond survivor of the slave trade, Cudjo Lewis, and it is clearly hisstory that shows up in her novel Bright Skin. Peterkin was far from the first writer to discover Cudjo Lewis. Inthe summer of 1927, the young Zora Neale Hurston, then a graduatestudent in anthropology at Columbia University, was sent to Alabama byher professor, Franz Boas, to interview an elderly man who had beenbrought from Africa as a slave (Boyd 154). That man, of course, wasLewis, already a kind of cult figure among anthropologists andhistorians. Two years before, Alain Locke had published a folk talerecounted by "Cugo" Lewis in his groundbreaking anthology TheNew Negro. Thirteen years before, Emma Langdon Roche had interviewedtwelve survivors of the Clotilda and included an account of Lewis'slife in Historic Sketches of the South. But Franz Boas seems to haveunderstood that Cudjo Lewis had more stories to tell, and he sent hisstudent to Alabama to collect them. On that first trip, Hurston later admitted, she had no idea how toget people to talk. "Pardon me," she would say, in acultivated accent, "but do you know any folk tales or folksongs?" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 144). She did manage to meet CudjoLewis, but he didn't tell her much. At the Mobile HistoricalSociety, she found Emma Roche's book, which was packed with thekinds of details she had been sent to discover firsthand. In a move thatwould dismay scholars when it was discovered after her death, Hurstonborrowed extensively from Roche's account without identifying thesource and published an article called "Cudjo's Own Story ofthe Last African Slaver" in the October 1927 issue of the Journalof Negro History. Three months after the article came out, in January 1928, Hurstonwent South again. On this trip, she posed as a bootlegger to explain herfancy car, and all of a sudden people started treating her as a kindredspirit. Even Lewis was friendlier (Boyd 171). It appeared that Hurstonmight get her big story after all. Alain Locke urged her to discourageLewis from talking to other folklore collectors, who, he warned,"should be kept entirely away not only from the proiect in hand butfrom the entire movement for the recovery of our folk material."Hurston's trip had been funded by a white patron, Charlotte OsgoodMason, who was also concerned about keeping Lewis a secret from anyonewho might publish his biography before Hurston's work was finished(Boyd 167). That summer, while Julia Peterkin awaited the publication ofScarlet Sister Mary, Zora Neale Hurston was making her way back toAfrican Town armed with a movie camera. Cudio Lewis was then abouteighty-seven years old, and she set out in earnest to win him over. Thistime, softened up by help with his chores and bushels of fresh peaches,Lewis talked and talked. He even allowed Hurston to film him walkingaround his garden. Zora Neale Hurston stayed in African Town for threemonths, asking questions and taking notes. She began to make plans topublish Lewis's story as a book. In late April of 1930, Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann embarked byautomobile on a trip through the Deep South, a journey that took them toCudjo Lewis's cabin. It is not clear how Peterkin and Ulmann knewabout Lewis, though they could have read about him in Hurston'sarticle in The Journal of Negro History, in Locke's anthology TheNew Negro, or even in Emma Roche's book. Most likely, the tip camefrom Peterkin's friend and advisor Hudson Strode, a professor atthe University of Alabama. Strode's home was in Tuscaloosa, onehundred and seventy-five miles from Mobile, and in 1930 he was living inBermuda. But Professor Strode kept up with the news from home, andLewis's life had been featured in a September 1929 article in TheMobile Register called "Plateau Negro Remembers Capture in JungleLands." However they found out about Cudjo Lewis, Ulmann andPeterkin visited him in the spring of 1930. News of these interloperssoon got back to Zora Neale Hurston, who, following Locke's advice,took steps to protect her source. Her patron Charlotte Mason sent Lewissome money and asked that he not share his story with anyone else. OnSeptember 4, 1930, Lewis dictated a defensive letter to Mason, admittingthat she might have seen his story in the papers but insisting that ithad been over three years since he let anyone "take it off to copyfrom it" (Diouf 226). By 1931, Hurston had finished a book-length manuscript aboutLewis's life entitled "Barracoon." Her publisher turnedit down, and to this day it has never been printed. Bright Skin, withits extended retelling of Cudjo Lewis's story, appeared in 1932,and Roll, Jordan, Roll, with Ulmann's photographic portrait ofLewis, in 1933. Did Hurston read these works? If so, she would certainlyhave recognized Lewis and she would have been furious. The only thing weknow for sure is that in 1934 Hurston expressed a grudging respect forPeterkin, whom she described as an "earnest seeker.., halted onlyby the barrier that exists somewhere in every Negro mind for the whiteman" (Boyd 267). Turf wars among writers are nothing new, and in spite of CharlotteMason's payment, neither Hurston nor Peterkin owned CudjoLewis's story. But what did Lewis mean to these two women, who wereamong the most important collectors and interpreters of African Americanfolklife during the early twentieth century? In her autobiography, DustTracks on a Road, Hurston describes Lewis as "a cheerful, poeticalold gentleman" (164) who, even "After seventy-five years..,still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood andcultural ties. That sense of mutilation." His life story, she said,"gave me something to feel about" (168). For Peterkin, too, Lewis offered a way to fee] the horror anddispossession of the slave trade, and to make it real for her readers.Big Pa's account of the Middle Passage is wrenching in its elegantunderstatement. "The hold was dark and stenchful. When the shipmoved off, everybody took the seasick. Some died. Some lived." BigPa says that he wept night and day. When the ship reached the"Unity States," he was "smuggled up the river where theblack people were as strange as the white ones. Nobody talked hislanguage" (135). The chapter ends as Big Pa sobs, "I want tosee my mammy so bad" (138). Big Pa's story occupies only six and half pages of Bright SMn,yet it serves as a kind of centerpiece for the novel, which, far morethan any of Peterkin's other books, looks both forward andbackward. Big Pa, like so many hundreds of thousands of Africans,becomes an unwilling American. The name Kazoola resurfaces later in thenovel, when Cricket goes to Harlem and dances at a nightclub as"the Princess Kazoola," naked except for "small circlesover her breasts and a narrow band around her thighs" (342). Peterkin could have chosen to tell Cudjo Lewis's story asnon-fiction in Roll, Jordan, Roll. For many years, critics assumed thatthe stories and photographs in the book were drawn almost entirely fromthe area around Lang Syne. Philip Walker Jacobs and others havedemonstrated that many of the photographs were taken in Mississippi andLouisiana, and it is clear from Peterkin's letters that the subjectof at least one of the essays, a woman she called "TheSeeker," did not live in South Carolina but came to her attentionwhile she and Ulmann were exploring other parts of the South. It wouldhave been logical for Peterkin to use Lewis's story in Roll,Jordan, Rollin the same way she used "The Seeker," as anexample of how different rural African Americans were from people likeher. Instead, she explored it in fiction, where she was able to show theold man as his own great-grandchildren might have seen him. Peterkin used Lewis as a way to imagine what it was like for aperson to be captured and sold into slavery. And, in an interesting kindof reversal, it appears that Cudjo Lewis was also trying to usePeterkin, just as he had used earlier researchers like Zora NealeHurston and Emma Roche. Even in extreme old age, he seems to have hopedthat telling his story and continuing to use his African name mightsomeday lead to a reunion with the family he had left behind. CudjoLewis never saw his mother again, and he never made it home to Africa.He died on July 26, 1935, not long after singing a death song to Rochein his native Yoruba (Diouf 229). Works Cited Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003. Diouf, Sylviane A. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave ShipClotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. NewYork: Oxford UP, 2007. Hurston, Zora Neale. "Cudjo's Own Story of the LastAfrican Slaver." The Journal of Negro History 12.4 (1927): 648-63. --. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. Jacobs, Philip Walker. The Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann.Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. Peterkin, Julia. Bright Skin. 1932. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. --. Roll, Jordan, Roll New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933. Sexton, Genevieve. "The Last Witness: Testimony and Desire inZora Neale Hurston's 'Barracoon.'" Discourse 25.1-2(2002): 189-212. Whitmore, Jackie J. Family and Friends Day Celebration: A UnitedFamily Reunion, 1800-2000, Celebrating Nine Generations of Love, Unity,And Life: Columbia and Fort Motte, SC, August 26-27, 2000. Fort Motte,SC: Mr. Pleasant Baptist Church, 2000. Williams, Susan Millar. A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives ofJulia Peterkin. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997. SUSAN MILLAR WILLIAMS Trident Technical College