“Cudjo meetee de people at de gate and tellee dem, ‘You see de rattlesnake in de woods?’ Dey say ‘Yeah.’ I say ‘If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you why you bother wid him? Same way with my boys, you unnerstand me.'”
With these words, Cudjo Lewis—né Oluale Kossula—explains his child-rearing philosophy to an upstart anthropologist named Zora Neale Hurston in 1927. Captured by a neighboring tribe as a young adult in Africa, purchased by whites, and smuggled to U.S. soil 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, Lewis was freed just five years later in the wake of the Civil War and went on to have a family, found a town, and grow old in the Jim Crow era, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward in her editor’s note on Hurston’s long lost work Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
from Hit & Run https://ift.tt/2KGCFjc
via IFTTT