'There are times - and finding Zora Hurston's grave was one of them - when normal responses to grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels,' Walker wrote of the experience. Barracoon is a testament to the enormous losses millions of men, women and children endured in both slavery and freedom-a story of urgent relevance to every American. At once a work of anthropology, folklore, and reminiscence, the book relates the interviews Hurston conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis (18401935), the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade.

She arrived at the cemetery and found the most published female African American writer of the 1930s buried in a 'field full of weeds.' That Zora Neale Hurston should find and befriend Cudjo Lewis, the last living man with firsthand memory of capture in Africa and captivity in Alabama, is nothing shy of a miracle. Novelist Zora Neale Hurston drafted Barracoon in 1931, but the work has never been published until now. She went to Fort Pierce after learning of Hurston's burial location. When she traveled to Hurston's hometown - Eatonville, Florida - people there told her the schools didn't even teach Hurston's books, as Walker recounted in her 1975 article for Ms. In 1973, Alice Walker went looking for it. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Hurston died poor and mostly alone, having never attained the same acclaim as other celebrated 20th century writers during her lifetime. 'That yearning for blood and cultural ties. 'After seventy-five years he still had that tragic sense of loss,' Hurston wrote, as cited in Boyd's biography, 'Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.'

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