Oluale Kossula: That’s the name author Zora Neale Hurston used when she greeted Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade and the subject of her nonfiction book “Barracoon.” He was delighted at being addressed by the name his mother gave him, according to Hurston’s account of the hours they spent in 1927 piecing together his life on that balmy summer day in Alabama.
“My name, is not Cudjo Lewis. It Kossula,” he said in Hurston’s book, which was published posthumously in 2018. “When I gittee in Americky soil, Mr. Jim Meather he try callee my name, but it too long, you unnerstand me … Den I say, ‘You callee me Cudjo. Dat do.’”
Kossula’s renaming illustrates the complicated and fraught origins of many Black American surnames. But his experience is not singular; it was the rule.
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