Cudjoe Lewis

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Cudjoe Kazoola (Kossola) Lewis
File:Portrait bust of Cudjo Lewis, by Emma Langdon Roche (1914).jpg
Portrait of Cudjo Kazoola Lewis by Emma Langdon Roche, c. 1914
Born c. 1840
Banté region, Benin, West Africa[1]
Died July 17, 1935
Africatown, Mobile, Alabama
Occupation farmer, laborer, church sexton
Known for Last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.

Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (ca. 1840 – 1935), or Cudjo Lewis, was the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Together with 115 other captives, he was brought illegally to the United States on board the ship Clotilde in 1860.[2] After the Civil War Lewis and other members of the Clotilde group established a community at Magazine Point, north of Mobile, Alabama. Now the Africatown Historic District, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.[3] In old age he provided information about the history of the group to visitors including Mobile artist and author Emma Langdon Roche, and author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, preserving the experiences of the Clotilde captives.

Early life and enslavement

File:Map of Cudjo Lewis' Capture in Africa.jpg
Map drawn by Cudjo Lewis for Emma Langdon Roche to illustrate his capture.

Lewis was born around 1840 in West Africa and named Kossola, which American listeners would later transcribe as "Kazoola." Analyzing names and the other words attributed to the Africatown founders, historian Sylviane Diouf has concluded that he and many other members of the community belonged to the Yoruba ethnic group (although the term would not have been used at that time), and lived in the Banté region of what is now Benin. His father was named Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother Fondlolu; he had five full siblings and twelve half-siblings, the children of his father's other two wives.[4] Interviewers Roche and Hurston and those who used their work referred to Lewis and his fellow-captives as "Tarkars." Diouf believes that the term "Tarkar" might have come from a misunderstanding of the name of a local king, or the name of a town.[5]

During April or May 1860 Lewis was taken prisoner by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey as part of its annual dry-season raids for slaves.[6][7] Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilde, a Mobile, Alabama-based ship owned by businessman Timothy Meaher. Although importation of enslaved persons into the United States had been illegal since 1808, Meaher may have believed that he could flout the law without getting caught.[8] By the time the Clotilde reached the Mississippi coast in July 1860, however, government officials had been alerted. Timothy Meaher, his brother Burns, and their associate John Dabey were charged with but never convicted of illegally possessing the captives.[9][10]

With government officials unable to locate the captives, and the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861 removing scrutiny from the case, Lewis and his fellows lived as de facto slaves of Meaher, his brothers, or their associates. Lewis was purchased by James Meaher, for whom he worked as a deckhand on a steamer.[11] During this time he also acquired the name "Cudjo Lewis." He later explained that when James Meaher found "Kossola" difficult to pronounce, he suggested "Cudjo," a day-name commonly given to boys born on a Monday, as an alternative. Historian Diouf posits that the surname "Lewis" was a corruption of his father's name Oluale, sharing the "lu" sound; in his homeland, the closest analogue to what Americans understood as a surname would have been a patronymic.[12]

Life in Africatown

Establishment of African Town

Cudjo Kazoola Lewis photographed with Abache (Clara Turner) by Emma Roche, c. 1914. By then there were eight surviving members of the Clotilde group.

After the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War, the Clotilde captives tried to raise money to return to their homeland, but employments like mill work (by men) and raising and selling produce (by women) did not allow them to acquire sufficient funds.[13] During their time in slavery Lewis and many of the other Clotilde captives were located at an area north of Mobile known as Magazine Point, the Plateau, or "Meaher's hammock," where the Meahers owned a mill and a shipyard. Although only three miles from the town of Mobile, it was isolated, separated from the city by a swamp and a forest and easily accessible only by water. After realizing that they would not be able to return home, the group deputized Lewis to ask Timothy Meaher for a grant of land. When he refused, the members of the community continued to raise money and began to purchase land around Magazine Point.[14] On September 30, 1872, Lewis bought about two acres of land in the Plateau area for $100.00.[15]

African Town developed as a self-contained community. The group appointed leaders to enforce communal norms derived from their shared African background, and developed institutions including a church, a school, and a cemetery. Diouf explains that the African town was unique because it was both a "black town" inhabited exclusively by African Americans, and an immigrant enclave. She writes, "Black towns were safe havens from racism, but African Town was a refuge from Americans."[16] Writing in 1914, Emma Langdon Roche noted that the surviving founders of African Town preferred to speak in their own language among themselves, and described their English as "very broken and not always intelligible even to those who have lived among them for many years."[17] However, the residents also adopted some American customs, including Christianity. Lewis converted in 1869, joining a Baptist church.[18]

File:Elick Lewis grave (CS's son).jpg
Grave of Aleck/Elick Lewis in the Plateau Cemetery, Africatown, Mobile.

Marriage and family life

During the mid-1860s Lewis established a common-law relationship with another Clotilde survivor, Abile (Americanized as "Celia"). They formally married on March 15, 1880, along with several other couples from African town, and remained together until Abile's death in 1905.[19]

They had six children, five sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, Aleck (or Elick) Iyadjemi, became a grocer; he brought his wife to live in a house on his father's land, in what Diouf describes as a Yoruba-style "family compound." Another son, Cudjoe Feïchtan, had recurrent legal troubles and died after being shot by a sheriff's deputy in 1902. Lewis outlived all of his children as well as his wife. He allowed his daughter-in-law Mary Wood Lewis, his grandchildren, and eventually her second husband Joe Lewis (no relation) to remain in their house in the compound.[20]

Lewis worked as a farmer and laborer until 1902, when his buggy was damaged and he was injured in a collision with a train in Mobile. As he was then unable to work, the community appointed him sexton of the church, which in 1903 became the Union Missionary Baptist Church.[21]

Participation in American institutions

Although native-born American former slaves became citizens upon the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in July 1868, this change in status did not apply to the members of the Clotilde group, who were immigrants. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis became a naturalized American citizen on October 24, 1868.[22]

Lewis also utilized the American legal system in 1902 after his injury in the buggy-train collision. After the Louisville and Nashville Railroad refused to pay damages, he hired an attorney, sued the railroad and won a significant settlement of $650.00, although the decision was overturned on appeal.[23]

Role as storyteller and historian

After the turn of the twentieth century Lewis began to act as an informant for a range of scholars and other writers, sharing the history of the Clotilde immigrants and other stories and tales. Mobile-based writer and artist Emma Langdon Roche interviewed Lewis and the other survivors for her 1914 book Historic Sketches of the South, describing their capture, enslavement and lives in African Town. They requested that she use their African names in her work, in the hope that it might reach their homeland "where some might remember them."[24] In 1925, when he was the last survivor of the Clotilde, he was interviewed by the educator and folklorist Arthur Huff Fauset. Two of his animal tales, "T'appin's magic dipper and whip" and "T'appin fooled by Billy Goat's eyes," and an anecdote about hunting in Africa, "Lion Hunt," were published by Fauset in 1927.[25]

File:Detail of Cudjoe Lewis marker.jpg
Detail of commemorative marker for Cudjo Lewis, Plateau Cemetery, Africatown, Mobile.

In 1927 he was interviewed by the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who in 1928 published an article about his history, "Cudjoe's Own Story of the Last African Slaver." For the most part, this piece plagiarized Emma Roche's work, although Hurston did add additional information about daily life in Banté.[26][27] In 1928 Hurston returned with additional resources and conducted more interviews, took photographs, and recorded what is now the only known film footage of an African person trafficked to the United States through the slave trade. With this material she produced a manuscript, Barracoon, which her biographer Robert Hemenway described as "a highly dramatic, semifictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader."[28][29] After this round of interviews Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, began to send Lewis money.[30] Barracoon, however, remained unpublished.

Lewis was also interviewed by journalists for local and national publications.[31]

Legacy

Cudjo Lewis died July 17, 1935 and was buried at the Plateau Cemetery in African Town. Since his death, his status as the last survivor of the Clotilde and the written record created by his interviewers have made him a public face of the history of the community, which is now known as AfricaTown USA. In 1959 a memorial bust of Lewis was erected in front of Africatown's Union Missionary Baptist Church atop a pyramid of bricks made by the Clotilde captives, on behalf of the Progressive League of Africatown.[32][33] In 1977 the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) commemorated Lewis and the Clotilde group.[34] Around 1990 the City of Mobile and Mobile alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority erected a commemorative marker for him in the Plateau Cemetery.[35] In 2007 two African filmmakers donated a bust of Lewis to the Africatown Welcome Center, although the bust was severely damaged in 2011.[36][37] In 2010, archaeologists from the College of William and Mary excavated his homesite in Africatown, along with those of two other residents.[38]

References

  1. ↑ Diouf, Sylviane A. 2007. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilde and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 40.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 40-43.
  5. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 41.
  6. ↑ Diuof, Dreams of Africa, p. 46
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 86, 93.
  12. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 92, 134.
  13. ↑ Roche, Historic Sketches, pp. 114-115.
  14. ↑ Roche, Historic Sketches, pp. 116-117.
  15. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 155.
  16. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 157, 184.
  17. ↑ Roche, Historic Sketches, pp. 125-126.
  18. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 169.
  19. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 136, 180, 217.
  20. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 217-219.
  21. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 214.
  22. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 165.
  23. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, pp. 211-214.
  24. ↑ Roche, Historic Sketches, pp. 120-121.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 100-101.
  29. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 225.
  30. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 225.
  31. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 226.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. ↑ Diouf, Dreams of Africa, p. 232.
  38. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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