But how do you convey African American history in the absence of sources? This anthology offers a number of innovative creative reimaginings, exemplified by Kiese Laymon in Cotton, whose narrator depicts cotton as a character and blames it for her family’s woes, for their broken black bodies. “All these words from the seller,” lamented Hurston, “but not one word from the sold.”Ī century on from Kossula’s recollections, the democratising approach of Four Hundred Souls feels like the culmination of the corrective endeavours of Hurston’s and others’ persuasive blend of writing and activism.īarracoon was dependent on Kossula’s voice. Her empathy contrasted with the narrative of slavery, often told from the slave owner’s perspective, with diaries and bills of sale. In her posthumously published book Barracoon, Hurston recorded the memories of Kossula, the last enslaved person abducted from Africa.

This cultural movement included such luminaries as the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, while travelling through America’s south, packed a pistol and a pen.

Perhaps the most fertile passages are those on the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s, when “the Negro was in vogue”. It’s a fresh and engaging voyage that includes confounding accounts of the 1676 Rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon, in which enslaved Africans and indentured whites united to overthrow colonial rule in Virginia ruminations on the 18th-century “sacred sound of freedom” heard in Afro-Brazilian religions and the contemporary resonance of a 19th-century manifesto for self-sufficiency in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American-owned newspaper.Īt its heart, Four Hundred Souls addresses the question: whose story is it anyway? This is a people’s history mediated by impassioned professionals. What follows, as the book’s subtitle makes clear, is a whistle-stop tour of 400 years, in a series of crisply written three- or four-page essays, short stories and personal reflections. At its heart, Four Hundred Souls addresses the question: whose story is it anyway? Their shameful erasure marks “the propaganda of history”, argues Hannah-Jones, and it’s imperative that the tale of both ships is recognised as “inherently intertwined, inseparable”. by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies”. The opening essay, Arrival by Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, interrogates the official silence over the arrival in Virginia in 1619 – a year before the Mayflower – of the White Lion, with its “cargo” comprising “30 Angolans, sold from the deck.

Four hundred souls book