A recent article on History.com details the interviews anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston conducted with the last slave ship survivor in the 1930s.
“We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” Cudjo Lewis, who was originally from what is now Benin in Africa, told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”
A figure from the Harlem Renaissance who published the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston sent the manuscript to a publisher at the time, but was turned away because of her refusal to change any of Lewis’ dialect. The book is finally being published on May 8, 2018, and is titled Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
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