Man, not Slave
In something of an ironic paradox, the master storyteller involved in this work is not definitive voice telling the story. Hurston does provide a narrative framework in which she becomes part of the story herself in her efforts to get to know this truly distinctly unique individual in American history. For the actual accounting of the life of the last surviving victim of the slave trafficking routes taking ships through the nefarious Middle Passage—Hurston puts her prodigious literary skills to work mainly as editor and transcriber of dialect. The result is a far less harsh collision between Hurston’s highly polished writing skills and the immediacy and emotionally unvarnished oral tradition demonstrated by Cudjo’s recollections.
A Not-a-Slave Narrative
The book is an example of one America’s most despicable contribution to literary genres: slave narratives. What notable sets it apart from other examples is that the actual five-year-long hellish torment which the protagonist endured as a slave held in bondage as property by another human being (so-called) makes up one of the shortest sections in the entire book. Cudjo has nice words to say about his owner, at least in comparison to that man’s more malevolent brothers, and within the context of his storytelling the period taking place between he is put to work as a slave and the Civil War breaks out occurs in the blink of an eye. Another ironic paradox: the thematic significance five years a slave within such a long life speaks louder by its virtual absence from the narrative.
Slavery, Profit and Racism
The natural assumption is that slavery grew out of racism. This is a natural assumption because of the persistent strain of racism which characterizes the history of the Confederate states both before and after the abolition of slavery. The mechanical process actually at work here seems to be the reverse, however. It was the introduction of Africans into white society as slaves that fomented generational racism. This explains how such profoundly ignorant racism can exist in a society which has never itself witnessed the structure of racial superiority and inferiority enforced by bondage. The tale being told here is one which reveals that the primary motivating factor of slave trafficking was commercial. Both the Americans who illegally attempted to circumvent legislation which had outlawed trafficking and the Africans tribesman who made economic deals to save their own hides by facilitating the abduction of their enemies acted out of greed rather than hateful prejudice. That prejudice among the Americans becomes most fully expressed—at least in Cudjo’s account—not while he was legally held in bondage, but when he became legally freed from servitude.
