Evolution of Love 2

We remember

He was 19 when he was kidnapped from Africa and smuggled into Alabama on the last slave ship to reach America—52 years after the slave trade was illegal. He lived until 1935, telling his story to anyone who would listen. His name was Cudjo Lewis, and he never forgot home.
In 1860, Oluale Kossola was a young man living in the town of Banté in the Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now Benin, West Africa.
He had a home. He had a family. He had a name that meant something in his language—a name given to him by parents who loved him, in a community where he belonged.
Then, one morning, everything ended.
Warriors from the neighboring Dahomey kingdom raided his town. They came at dawn, armed and ruthless, killing anyone who resisted and capturing everyone they could for one purpose: to sell them to European slave traders on the coast.
Oluale was 19 years old when he was marched to the sea in chains.
He was thrown into a barracoon—a holding pen—where enslaved Africans were kept like livestock while slave traders negotiated prices. He watched as families were torn apart, as children were separated from parents, as people who had never seen the ocean were told they were about to cross it.
And then came the Clotilda.
The ship was captained by William Foster, hired by a wealthy Alabama plantation owner named Timothy Meaher who had made a bet: even though importing enslaved Africans had been illegal in the United States since 1808, he claimed he could still smuggle a cargo of captives into Mobile, Alabama, without getting caught.
It was 1860. The Civil War was months away. And Meaher was about to commit one of the last acts of the transatlantic slave trade.
On July 9, 1860, the Clotilda set sail from West Africa with 110 enslaved Africans crammed into its hold—men, women, and children stolen from their homes, packed into a ship barely large enough to hold them.
Oluale Kossola was among them.
The Middle Passage—the voyage across the Atlantic—was a nightmare that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The enslaved Africans were chained below deck in darkness, with barely enough room to move. The smell of human waste, sweat, and death filled the air. Some died during the crossing. Their bodies were thrown overboard.
Oluale survived 45 days at sea.
When the Clotilda reached Mobile Bay in Alabama, Captain Foster knew he'd committed a federal crime. Importing enslaved people had been illegal for 52 years. If caught, he could face prosecution.
So he burned the ship and sank it in a swamp, trying to destroy the evidence.
But he couldn't destroy the people.
The 110 Africans were quickly sold to plantation owners across Alabama. Oluale was purchased by a man who gave him a new name—a name meant to erase his identity, his history, his very self.
They called him Cudjo Lewis.
For five years, Cudjo was enslaved. He worked in the fields, learned English, and tried to survive in a world that had stolen everything from him—his freedom, his family, his homeland, even his name.
Then, in 1865, the Civil War ended. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. Cudjo and millions of others were suddenly, legally free.
But freedom without resources is a hollow promise.
Cudjo and the other Clotilda survivors had nothing—no land, no money, no education that the white world would recognize. And they were strangers in a strange land, speaking English with heavy accents, practicing customs that white Southerners didn't understand.
So they did something extraordinary: they built their own community.
The Clotilda survivors pooled what little money they could earn and bought land just north of Mobile. They called it African Town—later Africatown. It was a settlement where they could live according to their own traditions, speak their own languages, practice their own customs.
Cudjo helped build the first church. He helped establish the first school. He married a woman named Abile (who was renamed Celia), another Clotilda survivor, and together they had six children.
For decades, Cudjo worked as a laborer, building a life from nothing. But he never forgot who he was or where he came from.
Every day, he spoke Yoruba—his native language—at home. He told his children stories about Banté, about the family he'd been stolen from, about the life he'd had before the Clotilda.
He remembered.
And he wanted the world to remember too.
In 1927, a young Black anthropologist and writer named Zora Neale Hurston came to Africatown. She had heard about Cudjo Lewis—one of the last living survivors of the transatlantic slave trade—and she wanted to document his story before it was lost forever.
Cudjo, now in his 80s, agreed to speak with her.
Over many visits, Cudjo told Zora his story. He spoke in a mixture of English and the Yoruba-influenced dialect that Africatown residents had developed. He described his childhood in Africa, the raid on his village, the horror of the Middle Passage, the cruelty of slavery, and the bittersweet taste of freedom that came too late to give him back what had been stolen.
"I want to go back to Afficky," he told Zora, using his pronunciation of Africa. "But I cain go back."
He couldn't return. His village was gone. His family was probably dead or scattered. The Africa he remembered existed only in his memory.
Zora wrote it all down, creating a manuscript she called "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo.'"
But publishers rejected it. They said Cudjo's dialect was too difficult to read. They said the story was too painful. They said America wasn't ready.
The manuscript sat unpublished for decades.
Cudjo's life was marked by unbearable loss.
By the 1930s, all six of his children had died—some from illness, some from accidents, one murdered by a white police officer who faced no consequences. His wife Abile died in 1908.
Cudjo outlived everyone he loved most in America. And he could never return to everyone he'd loved in Africa.
He lived alone in Africatown, tending his garden, going to church, telling his story to anyone who would listen—journalists, anthropologists, curious visitors who heard about "the old African man" who could still speak his native language.
On July 26, 1935, Cudjo Lewis—Oluale Kossola—died at approximately 94 years old.
He was the last known survivor of the Clotilda, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States.
His funeral was attended by the entire community of Africatown, the place he'd helped build from nothing.
For decades after his death, Cudjo's story faded. Africatown declined as industries polluted the area and younger generations moved away. The Clotilda remained hidden beneath the mud of the Mobile River.
But Cudjo's story refused to die.
In 2018, researchers finally located the wreckage of the Clotilda in the Mobile River, confirming its identity through historical records and archaeological evidence. The ship that had been burned and hidden for 158 years was found.
And in 2018—91 years after Zora Neale Hurston wrote it—"Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'" was finally published.
Cudjo's words, preserved by Zora, reached the world at last.
The book became a bestseller. Millions of people read Cudjo's firsthand account of being kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to build a life in a country that never wanted to acknowledge what it had done to him.
Today, Africatown still exists, though much diminished. Efforts are underway to preserve it as a historical site, to honor the Clotilda survivors who refused to let their African heritage be erased.
And Cudjo Lewis—Oluale Kossola—is finally being remembered not just as "the last slave ship survivor," but as a man who endured the unendurable and still found the strength to build, to love, to remember, and to tell his story.
He was 19 when he was stolen from Africa.
He was 94 when he died in Alabama.
In between, he survived the Middle Passage, five years of slavery, the loss of his entire family, and decades of Jim Crow segregation.
He never made it back to Africa. But he never let Africa leave him.
He spoke Yoruba until the day he died. He told stories of Banté to anyone who would listen. He kept his name—Oluale Kossola—alive in his heart even when the world called him Cudjo.
And he made sure that his story was recorded, preserved, and passed down—so that generations who never knew him would know what happened, would know what was stolen, would know that he was a person with a home and a family and a life before the Clotilda took it all away.
Cudjo Lewis's story isn't just about slavery. It's about memory, resistance, and the refusal to let history erase you.
He couldn't go back to Africa. But he made sure Africa came with him—in his language, his stories, his community, and his insistence that the world remember the crime committed against him and 109 others on a ship that was burned and hidden but never truly destroyed.
The Clotilda is gone. Cudjo is gone. But his words remain.
And in his words, we hear not just one man's story, but the story of millions who were stolen, renamed, and told to forget who they were.
Cudjo Lewis refused to forget.
And because he refused, we remember.