Born Oluale Kossola in the 1840s, Lewis was believed to be the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. But the story he had to tell filled an important gap in the grand narrative of the African American experience.
“This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself.” Zora Neale Hurston similarly begins her preface to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Barracoon is not a slave narrative in the traditional sense, and its subject, Cudjo Lewis, never mastered the written word. Douglass’s books, along with photographs of the author, portrayed a man who was fully self-composed. “Written by himself” is Douglass’s subtitle, a phrase that resounds throughout early African American autobiographical writing. More remarkable than Douglass’s physical prowess was the fact that he lived to write about this at all: In addition to the beatings and other miseries, Douglass endured severe cold that left gashes in his feet pronounced enough to cradle his pen. “You shall see how a slave was made a man.” These words herald the moment when Douglass masters his master, the sadistic overseer and “negro-breaker,” Edward Covey, seizing him by the throat. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
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