Snapshot of the Conversation with Ibram X. Kendi Live at Trinity UMC hosted by Tattered Cover
I discovered a few days ago, before he would be in town, that Ibram X Kendi would be visiting Colorado for an author talk around Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Barracoon, which he adopted for Young Readers. I was like, “I have to be there!” Tattered Cover Bookstore facilitated a great conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi at Trinity United Methodist Church on February 2. For those interested, I have shared some of the conversation and questions asked by the audience (one by myself) answered by Dr. Kendi.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The first middle-grade offering from Zora Neale Hurston and Ibram X. Kendi introduces young readers to the remarkable and true-life story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Atlantic human trade, in an adaptation of the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed Barracoon. It is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself.
Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis was then the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage—fifty years after the Atlantic human trade was outlawed in the United States. Cudjo shared his firsthand account with legendary folklorist, anthropologist, and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston spent months talking with Cudjo about the details of his life. Cudjo recounted memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of the raid of his village, being captured and held in a barracoon for sale by human traders, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.
Adapted with care and delivered with age-appropriate historical context by award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, Cudjo’s incredible story is now available for young readers and emerging scholars. With powerful illustrations by Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, this poignant work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. His books include Antiracist Baby, Goodnight Racism, How to Be an Antiracist, and How to Raise an Antiracist. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. In 2020, Time magazine named Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He has also been awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.
Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. She wrote four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountains, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Every Tongue Got to Confess, 2001); a work of anthropological research, (Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); an international bestselling nonfiction work (Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” 2018); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1928. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida.
THE CONVERSATION
The talk was exactly what my spirit needed to kick off Black History Month and add fuel to my belief in the work that I am doing. Here is a snippet of the conversation with Dr. Kendi.
Xbram X Kendi Interview
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
I noticed in the book’s introduction you actually say that Barracoon was one of your favorites of Hurston's. Am I correct on that record? Good, why? Why was that? Is that what motivated you to do this adaptation for middle schoolers? Who should be reading this? Besides the people here in this audience.
Kendi
So, you were mentioning journeys earlier, and we can even understand periods in, let's say, African American history. If we know periods such as: Africa before captured enslavement, the transatlantic trade, enslavement in the United States, sort of the reconstruction era, and then Jim Crow, those are five critical periods in African American history. I don't know of another story, a personal story, that spans all five of those periods. So for me to be able to expose a child to all five of those periods through someone's personal life. I mean, you know, we as adults prefer to be taught in story form. So imagine what young people prefer.
But then I think also, for me, there's so many different elements. The book and messages of the book that challenge prevailing racist ideas or forms of misinformation about slavery. Of course, I think Cudjo was pretty clear that he didn't benefit from slavery. I also think he's pretty clear that slavery was racist. Because, you know, there are politicians who say this nation is (and never was) never racist. I think he was also pretty clear that Benin or I should say, was currently day Benin, which was where his village was was where he wanted to be. He didn't imagine this nation as this dreamland that even after enslavement ended, he wanted to be here. No, he wanted to go home. Others who arrived also wanted to go home, which is why when they couldn't go home, they created home in Africa Town.
And so I think for a child who potentially has directly, not indirectly, been taught all these negative ideas, false ideas about Africa, to like read somebody saying very clearly that they want to go there and not be here, I think it's quite powerful. And that's after learning why. The book's first section is about Cudjo in his village with his parents and friends, learning, growing, and participating in this culture. So, to me, that also made it quite powerful and compelling.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
Thank you, that is great. I'm glad to hear it directly from you. It looks at all those periods— Periods that we're talking about that are essential for anyone of that ancestry, if you will. Just for a moment, I want to see if we can help the audience know a little bit because there may be some confusion when people read about what happened to the Clotilda. I don't know if everybody's familiar with the Clotilda. With what it was and why it's crucial to this particular story.
Kendi
So, let me give you a short answer. So, in 1808, the United States, which was... presided over by Thomas Jefferson, outlawed international human trade. Now, let's quickly aside the reason why people like Thomas Jefferson, and when I say people like Thomas Jefferson, people who owned hundreds of people, favored the banning of international trade is because it increased the value of increase the value of his holdings, what he called “capital.” So after the prohibition of international trade, that's when you have this domestic trade, where enslavers in Virginia and Maryland started trading their captives to Mississippi and Louisiana. And because, of course, the supply was reduced, it increased the cost. So they made out like bandits, which is why Thomas Jefferson considered the most valuable enslaved person on his plantation to be a breeder, to be a black woman who had a child every two years.
And so this trade was banned. But as you would imagine, there was not that much enforcement of the ban. People continued to be illegally brought into the United States. And so that's certainly what happened with the Mayors' Society that they were going to hire a Canadian-born ship captain and sail over to present-day Benin. Benin, at the time, was a significant slave port because of the Dahomey Empire, which was quite possibly the primary sort of slave trading act in the Empire; that's what they did in business. And so on that ship, the Clotilda, he of course is the captain of course trades, brings them back to Mobile, Alabama. But when they arrived, they arrived on the cover of night in August of 1859 because, of course, they didn't want to be caught. And then the captain burns his ship. And they only recently found that ship a few months ago.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
I want to make sure you go ahead and put that back on because many things that you read will say that it was burned, but nobody talks about what happened in 2018 concerning the ship.
Kendi
And you know why they burned the ship? He tried to burn the evidence.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
So, this next question is related to a conflict of mind on the Boulder campus. Patricia gives a Western history, and she uses it as a part of her way of influencing her students, graduate students primarily, the idea of history. She speaks of history, and I think you make a similar statement with a different language. She refers to history as turning hindsight into foresight, turning hindsight into foresight. As I was, you know, finishing the work, I was thinking, all right, I'm a big advocate of this applied history approach of not seeing history as something that you read, and then you just put aside but instead that it has relevance even for us today so looking at that hindsight and paying attention to what it tells us about now. What message do you think Barracoon has brought to us for today?
Kendi
Well, let me talk a little bit more about this construct because it's a debate that's going on right now between academic historians. So you have some academic historians who say that those who write history to provide the people today with insight on what's happening today, they call them presentists. They look down on those historians because, for them, that means those historians are engaged in political work, and historians, according to them, should not be doing that. The historians should only be contextualizing the past of the standalone facts. You know, I think this is just ridiculous, and these are the same people who get upset because history is irrelevant; nobody wants to take their classes, nobody wants to read their books. So they complain because people are like, this is irrelevant, right? Nobody's engaging with them, nobody cares about their history, but then they turn around and say, well, it shouldn't be like that.
But for me, I think it's also the case when you are a person from a marginalized, suppressed, or oppressed group. You're not just writing and producing knowledge for knowledge's sake, when you're making knowledge for change's sake, when you're looking into the annals of history to understand, let's say, how patriarchy came to be, so you can deconstruct it at this moment, or how racism came to be so you can deconstruct it. At this moment, you have a completely different orientation to knowledge. You have a completely different orientation to research. You have a completely different orientation to the past in the present. And so, to me, it also just demonstrates this sort of privilege that some historians have, that they can sit up in the Ivory Tower.
Part of it also is the framing of those of us who then write history and history that are relevant to the present as political. And then they imagine themselves as equal. Even though the way they write history, like somebody who doesn't vote, impacts current political sort of matters. The fact that they are not using their knowledge of the past to ensure that people are knowledgeable today has an impact. The fact that they're not out here saying to people that their original book banners were enslavers or saying to people that segregation considered civil rights activists to be divisive— actually impacts people in the current moment. So that's one of my frustrations. It's almost this hoarding of knowledge. It's almost like a banking of knowledge.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
So, no, I appreciate you keeping it going.
Kendi
Well, because part of it also is you have political operatives and people in positions of political power who are constantly making the case for particular policies that are historical cases. So even something as simple as Making America Great Again is inherently historical. I think that it is vital for us to understand that there was a time in which political science and history were the same department. The late 1900s split it off, but there was a recognition of the inherent politics of history.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
Okay, so we'll turn it down a little bit, I guess. And now you have a center at Boston University, which is doing some important work, as was mentioned in Cudjo's introduction in the past, and so forth. Could you let us know what is being done at the center now? How is the center structured for graduate students? Or how is it going out there?
Kendi
I think, as many of you know, during the abolitionist era, I should say during the era of those who were fighting to eliminate slavery, there emerged these anti-slavery newspapers, these abolitionist newspapers. These abolitionist newspapers were quite critical in providing a place and a forum for anti-slavery intellectuals and anti-slavery activists for those who needed and imagined a new type of society. Because, in the North and South, most publications did not allow for abolitionist thought. I mean, it was as inconceivable to most Americans that slavery was in as I think it's unimaginable to most Americans that we abolish prisons. When most Americans thought about the ending of slavery, they felt in the same way Americans think about the ending, or I should say the abolishing of prisons today, that all those dangerous people who are going just to run out and run rampant over the nation.
So they created these places and spaces. So, one of the things we made was a digital publication called The Emancipator. It is named after the first abolitionist newspaper, which was founded in Tennessee. We want to create a forum for antiracist intellectuals and activists who are debating and imagining how we can go about abolishing racism. We're proud of that project. I think being in Boston, we sought to entrench ourselves in abolitionist history with the city’s connection to antislavery into antiracism. And one of the reasons for that is because it's hard for people to imagine a society where racism doesn't exist. Abolitionists somehow envisioned a society where slavery didn't exist. Even though enslavers in 1860 were second to British financiers, they were the wealthiest and most influential group of people in the world. There were more per capita millionaires in the enslaved South than anywhere else. And the the level of military power was just unprecedented, which is why the Confederacy started winning the Civil War.
So for people to imagine that those with the most guns, the most weapons, the most wealth, the most power, the most political power, would be defeated. And slavery that they had collected and amassed all of to defend would be abolished. It was inconceivable, but people still believed that the impossible was possible, which is why we were able to eliminate it.
So we draw that; We draw on the people and our Ancestors who imagined it. And we also draw on the fact that the abolitionist movement was a multiracial movement. So there were people of all backgrounds and all races who were fighting for the end of slavery and they all recognized how they stood to benefit from the abolishment of slavery. We're hoping that everyone starts to realize that they're going to benefit from a society where we have abolished racism as opposed to this current society, where racism is reinforcing every form of danger, where it's causing people to more or less promote and worship dictators.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
Last question to bring it back to Cudjo Lewis. This is the second day of Black History. I want to personally thank you for bringing me into the world of Cudjo Lewis Zora Neal Houston, your world in looking at what Barracoon has said to me. I hope that everybody who gets to read this or even listen to it on audible will find that this is an engaging work altogether. I appreciate that we are sitting here on February 2 conversing about it. I wish there were more conversations like this taking place throughout the rest of this leap year month. Is there anything on the site, your center's site, that might keep that going related to this event, if you will, or any other source? I know that you have several books available for people. I'm looking for a way to use Cudjo Lewis' gift to Zora Neale Hurston and now to you to make it something relevant for this month.
Kendi
Well, I would encourage people who read this book, who may even be reading the adult version, and who haven't necessarily read that many books on slavery to take this as an opportunity to read more books on slavery. The reason is because you cannot understand the United States. You can't even understand the modern world if you do not understand slavery. Depending on your interests, you can enter into the literature through things you are interested in. If you're interested in political economy; There are many books on the political economy of slavery, whether through cotton, rice, or other cash crops. There are books on the military apparatus that enslavers created to keep people enslaved. There are books on the ideas that enslavers made and used to keep people enslaved and to justify slavery. There are books on how enslavers, on the one hand, sought to work enslaved Africans as much as possible but, at the same time, keep them alive. That created a very thriving medical industry within the enslaved in the South, in which doctors were required to support people who had been brutalized to the point of death to kept working.
So I'm saying that depending on your interests, it is important. If you want to learn about resistance, there's a whole host of books. Slaver's goals on abolitionists, on the Underground Railroad and other individual acts. One thing I'm hoping and encouraging— mainly in a moment in a time which books on slavery are being banned. They don't want us to learn about slavery. I personally think the primary reasons they don't want people to learn about slavery is that they don’t want people to learn about enslavers. If we learn about enslavers, you will be like, ‘Oh that guy sounds just like..’
You know even something as simple as, ‘I want the power to prevent your child from reading a book that your child wants to read,’ that's that comes from enslaved logic. In other words, I want the freedom to prevent you from doing what you want and any restriction on my freedom to dominate you to prevent you from doing what you want to do to enslave you, to silence you to such a view is a restriction on my freedom. And that conception of freedom, that sort of enslaver logic has been direct contrast with another type of logic. Which is we want freedom from oppression, we want freedom from people dictating to us what books we are going to allow our children to read.
Because in this moment you literally have people who are advocating for policies that suppress and dictate in the name of freedom. That's enslaver logic.
Ibram X Kendi Answering Audience Questions
Audience Question 1
I was wondering why you have decided to do adaptations with Zora Neale Hurston’s work? She argued against desegregation and for “race pride” and “self-association,” and various other things. I wonder how you square your approach to race with her approach.
Kendi
Sure, so actually, our ideas are pretty aligned. For example, from the 1920s to the 1940s, she was a vehement opponent of assimilationist ideas. These were ideas that were held by many Black writers and intellectuals, in which they imagined that they were going to sort of shapeshift Black characters to make them seem white, to persuade white racists ideals. She was an advocate of creating imperfect human characters that were Black. She didn't care how white writers, I should say, how white people consumed them. So, she pushed back on those writers who operated through the white gaze.
For her, and others like Lansing Hughes, she wanted to write Black characters for Black people and so she was challenged by people like Richard Wright, and others. Even her use of speech and language that regular Black people spoke because, again, she wanted to create Black characters, in their fullness. She even challenged the Brown Board of Education decision, not the decision itself, in terms of that segregated schools were unconstitutional. But she challenged, and I wrote about this in Stamped From The Beginning, the logic behind why they did it. So the court, Warren, actually made the case that segregated schools were bad for black children. Not white children, not all of us, but they quote retarded Black children, and this became the justification for busing. It became the justification, let's not equalize the schools, let's not make sure that all the schools have equal resources. Let's move Black children from inferior Black schools to superior white schools and what made those schools superior was whiteness of the people. She pushed back against it. She wrote in 1955 that this sort of logic does not recognize the brilliance of Black teachers. So I heard cherishing of Black culture, loving of Black brilliance, pushing back against assimilationist ideas, allowing individual Black people to thrive amid their individuality, and recognizing that they're part of the group. This is precisely what I've written about in terms of being antiracist. I'm not sure what this guy's talking about that.
Dr. Alphonse Keasley
That's right. Hey. By the way, if you missed the title of that book it was, that's Stamped From The Beginning.
Audience Question 2
Thank you for your speech. I had the good fortune of learning from a great professor also from Boston, but in the Pompous of Savoury, who wrote, gave me my first course on slavery, the literary imagination. It lets my writing pieces about the transformation of the oral literary tradition to the written literary tradition. Zora Neale Hurston was a crucial in that. And later on, Alice Walker, Tony Morrison, and eventually Gloria Naylor. And I'm curious how your work addresses your transformations; Zora Neale Hurston and her work address how the spoken traditions were transferred into written traditions.
Kendi
So that was one aspect of Zora's Barracoon, particularly her introduction, that I wish she would bring about to get a sense of her conception. But I think that she understood it, and I tried to preserve this in the adaptation, was that she didn't just want to have the oral tradition of Cudjo's sort of voice in her essentially recording it. She also recorded interactions with Cudjo, which, of course, was her writing act. And so there was this exciting blending of this oral tradition and this tradition that makes for quite this sort of pulsating narrative. And, of course, I wanted to maintain that and retain that because I think that's the other aspect of what made this document great. She didn't just sit there and record what Cudjo said, and how he said it. She also recorded her interactions. And so it was an entire story, about the story, so to speak.
Audience Question 3 from Nyasha Williams (Myself)
Greetings! Good evening. I just wanted to, first of all, thank you both for your time and energy this evening. I wanted to ask, as I am also an author, and so my ask is for those of us who are creatives in this space working to imagine beyond, what advice and inspiration to do you have for us as we move in this path, and imagining our current systems and the models that currently exist?
Kendi
I want just first to share that when I decided to write the book that became Stamped From The Beginning, I realized that I needed to get a literary agent. So, I probably got about 65 rejections before finding a literary agent who wanted to work with me. Then, after we started working together, I believe he sent out that manuscript to, I think, 25 different editors. I believe two of them were interested in it. I'm mentioning this because, particularly if you're a sort of a first time author, it is challenging.
And that's why I wouldn't even say persistence, but a belief in what you want to create for the world has to be so profound. And it has to be so deep that it will keep you through those nos that will likely come. And so, in other words, it's constantly saying yes to yourself, you know, as people are telling you no. And I think part of saying yes to yourself is saying yes to your voice on the page, really honing in on how you want to speak on the page, not how anyone else speaks or the voice of any other writer, but honing in on how you write and how you want to convey your ideas. So, really believing in yourself as a writer. I can't emphasize enough how critical this is, you know, for you to continuously say yes to yourself.
Audience Question 4
When you were writing the book, what was going through your mind?
Kendi
So, this story that Zora crafted of Cudjo Lewis, the original, was quite the painful story at times, horrific and dramatic. So, I thought to myself, how do I ensure that a young person will be able to get through this book and hear the essential elements of the story and see it and not sort of be horrified? I have a seven-year-old daughter who whenever we watch an action movie, she’s like ‘Pause that because I don't want to see it’. She is very sensitive. So, I was also thinking about her; I want her to be able to get through this book. So, it took me a long time to get into the right kind of mind space. What got me there was thinking quite a bit about Cudjo's relationship in the book to his great-granddaughters. So, he has these two twin great-granddaughters who he interacts with. Zora records his interactions. She records him giving them peaches.
At one point, he's like, see that sugarcane? I planted that sugarcane so that anytime they come over here I can give it to them. He's overlooking them, playing in the yard as he's speaking to Zora, in his affection, and love for his great-granddaughters know no bounds. Those of us who are parents and their grandparents are involved, we know a little bit about that. You all know, grandparents don't tell their grandkids, no, ever. Especially great-grandparents. And we're like, you've always told me no for that.
So anyway, of course, it was like that. You know, Cudjo, there was nothing these little girls could do. So I thought to myself, how would he tell his story to his great-grandchildren? You know, these children who he just adored, who, of course, he never wanted them to feel any loss, tell his life stories to. You know, particularly those painful things, but there's a message in them that they want their grandchild to hear. How do they do it? And it happens every single day. So that's what I was thinking about as I was writing, I wanted the young person reading it to feel as if it was their beloved great-grandfather who had an exciting life story and was sharing it with them. It took me a while actually to get to that place because when I started this, I had no idea how I was going to do this. But I don't think there's anything more beautiful than witnessing a grandparent talk about their lives to their great-grandchild.
