Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last living survivors of the transatlantic slave trade and a man who endured the Clotilda, the final slave ship to bring enslaved Africans to America. Hurston preserves Cudjo’s voice exactly as he spoke it—unpolished, wandering, human. While I wanted more detail about his time in captivity and enslavement, I was struck by how much of his story centered on what was stolen: family, homeland, language, and identity. As an Af