The “Clotilda,” the last slave ship to bring Africans to America, has been much in the news recently. After long years in a drawer, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon” was finally published in 2018. Hurston was one of several reporters, anthropologists, scholars, who interviewed, among other survivors, Kossula, known generally as Cudjo Lewis, who remained alive until 1935 and was a valuable source of first-hand knowledge.
Quite recently, in 2021, Ben Raines of Mobile published “The Last Slave Ship.” Raines had searched for the sunken, burned vessel for years, locating it in 2018, after it had lain at the mud, near 12 Mile Island, for over 150 years. On a research trip to Africa, Raines had also learned a great deal about the warrior tribes in Dahomey, who had for several hundred years made a business of violently seizing neighboring peoples, then driving them to the coast, corralling them in stockades called barracoons and selling them to Portuguese, British or American slavers.
This new study, while touching on these subjects, has its focus elsewhere, on the subsequent lives of the survivors. British scholar Hannah Durkin did a good deal of the research while teaching at the University of Nottingham. A well-known historian of the Atlantic Slave trade, Durkin is now an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile and spoke at Africatown in 2021. She has investigated the lives of as many of the Clotilda’s 103 survivors as possible. (Seven died at sea, on the dreadful “middle passage.”)
The results are remarkable. After the enslaved were put ashore and the ship scuttled, they were sold and spread over a good deal of South Alabama. A number, of course, went to plantations near Mobile, but some went to work on river boats or were sold to plantations in Bogue Chitta, Martin’s Station, Selma, Prattville, the site of present-day Gee’s Bend, even Montgomery. There are here dozens of short biographies, stories which we had generally assumed must be lost, but with Durkin’s impressive effort, were retrieved.
At first, after emancipation, understandably, they hoped to save money and return to the life they remembered very well, but this proved impossible. Instead, one group saved money, bought parcels of land and founded African Town, making their stand in North Mobile County. This group, about 30, built homes, a church, established a legal system, made a village.
They and their “shipmates” elsewhere in Alabama survived slavery, the Klan violence of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of the 1901 constitution, sharecropping, every imaginable hardship and prejudice, including the scorn and xenophobic fear of many of their black brothers, who saw them as heathen and savage.
They were Africans, spoke no English, were not Christians, believed in the spiritual and religious ceremonies of their native village. Some had scarification on their faces. All the “Clotilda” survivors began in abject poverty, illiterate, powerless. Nevertheless, they endured.
