Captain William Foster left Mobile in secret and returned the same way. On July 8, 1860, he dropped anchor in the waters off the coast of Mississippi, hid his cargo below deck, slipped ashore, and travelled overland to fetch a tugboat from Alabama. By then, Foster and his ship had survived a hurricane, a mutiny, an ambush, and a transatlantic journey, but late that Sunday night, after the tug carried him up the Mobile River to Twelve Mile Island, the Captain emptied his hold, dismissed his crew, and set fire to his ship. The Clotilda, Foster would forever after complain, was worth more than his share of what it had smuggled.

Although the international slave trade had been outlawed in America more than half a century earlier, Foster and three co-conspirators, a trio of brothers by the name of Meaher, had purchased a hundred and twenty-five men, women, and children, from Benin and Nigeria, to traffic them into the United States. The plan had been hatched a year before, when one of the Meahers got into an argument: a New Yorker insisted that slaves could no longer be transported across the Atlantic, a Louisiana planter wagered a hundred dollars that it could be done, and Timothy Meaher bet a thousand that he could be the one to do it.

The market for slaves had grown tremendously in the previous five decades. Absent imports, slavers relied on reproduction and relocation for their supply, and, as labor-intensive agriculture shifted to the Deep South, more than a million enslaved people were forced there by ship, rail, and sometimes by foot, in coffles. By the middle of the nineteenth century, domestic slave prices were so high that many planters had begun lobbying to reopen the global trade.

Among them were the Meahers, who had moved from Maine to Alabama, where they owned sawmills, steamboats, plantations, and people. To increase their holdings and win the bet, they recruited Foster, a Nova Scotian shipbuilder, and chose the Clotilda from among his ships. Although the schooner was fast enough to evade capture, it had to be refitted as a slave ship, with a false deck to conceal the necessary barrels of water, rice, beef, pork, sugar, flour, bread, molasses, and rum. Foster sailed from Mobile Bay with papers that claimed he was delivering lumber to St. Thomas, and eleven crew members who had not been told of their real mission. The nine thousand dollars in gold stashed on board to pay for the slaves played havoc with the ship’s compass, taking it off course; after that, a hurricane caught it just north of Bermuda. While repairing the ship, Foster’s men discovered the hidden deck, and threatened to alert the authorities.

Captain and crew negotiated a compromise, and reached Ouidah, on the west coast of Africa, a few weeks later. After eight days of discussion, Foster traded his rum and gold for more than a hundred slaves from the barracoons, as the holding pens were called. He loaded them onto his ship, and crossed the Atlantic in forty-five days. An estimated two million Africans died in the Middle Passage during the slave trade, but all the men and women on the Clotilda made it to Alabama alive. Neither the Meahers nor Foster were ever convicted of any crime, and, after five years of slavery, the survivors of the last transatlantic run were liberated by the Union Army. Free, but unable to raise the funds to return to Africa, many of them banded together to form Africatown, a settlement of their own just outside Mobile.

Kossola and his former shipmates worked in sawmills and powder mills, on farms and railroads, and as domestic help, until they had saved enough money to buy the land that became Africatown. Photograph from Erik Overbey Collection, Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama

In the subsequent years and decades, the survivors of the Clotilda gradually died, until only one man answered the door in Africatown when a student from Barnard College came knocking, in 1927. The survivor’s name was Kossola; the student’s name was Zora Neale Hurston. Their first visit went badly, but Hurston wrote an article about Kossola’s life for the Journal of Negro History anyway. After that false start, she returned to Alabama several times to talk with Kossola, trying to learn, in her own words, “who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man.”

Hurston spent four years turning what Kossola shared with her into a longer work of nonfiction, but no publisher wanted the resulting book—not then, not when the publication of “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” in 1934, made her a celebrated novelist, and not even posthumously, after “Their Eyes Were Watching God” had sold more than a million copies. Hurston’s manuscript languished for nearly nine decades. Now HarperCollins has published “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo.’ ” Why it was rejected in Hurston’s lifetime, and how the residents of Africatown faded from her history and our own, is a story almost as plaintive as the one the book itself records.

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were undergraduates when they ran into each other on the streets of Mobile, in the summer of 1927. Hurston was thirty-six, but still a semester shy of becoming the first black graduate of Barnard College; she was down below the Mason-Dixon Line to collect folklore and oral histories for the American Folklore Society and for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She had been sent to tour Fort Mose, a black settlement founded by runaway slaves in Florida, and to talk with Kossola, but hadn’t got enough material “to make a flea a waltzing jacket.” Hughes was twenty-five and between semesters at Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania; he had gone South to read his poetry at Fisk University and at the Tuskegee Institute. Although Hughes and Hurston had crossed paths a few times in New York, they met in Alabama entirely by chance: when he got off the train at the M. & O. Railroad Terminal, Hurston happened to be walking down the street.

They went to lunch, then Hurston offered Hughes a ride home. Driving a Nash that she called Sassy Susie and carrying a chrome-plated pistol in her suitcase, Hurston was formidable even in her failures. She’d made a disastrous marriage two months earlier. Now, with her scanty research, she was courting the wrath of the professor who had arranged her travels: the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. It was her “Barnardese,” Hurston said, that was alienating would-be subjects like Kossola. Hurston was born in the tiny Alabama town of Notasulga, and brought up in the all-black Florida town of Eatonville, which, like Africatown, was founded by former slaves in the years after the Civil War. But she no longer sounded like the daughter of a sharecropper turned Baptist preacher, much less like someone who had once earned her living as a waitress, a manicurist, and a maid. Her airs, she feared, were not only put-on but off-putting. Still, never one to acquiesce to circumstances, she cadged what she could from the records of the Mobile Historical Society to embellish what little Kossola had told her, and headed north with Hughes.

The two writers took the long way home, stopping to talk with conjurers, tramps, convicts, and backwoods preachers all over the South. Harlem Romantics, their Lake District was Dixie, and their lyrical ballads were the songs, stories, and tales they gathered—Hurston compiling transcripts for her academic work, Hughes jotting down phrases in his notebook. He didn’t have a license, so Hurston drove: from Mobile to Montgomery, from there to Tuskegee to meet with students, and then to Georgia, where they encountered Bessie Smith in Macon and toured the plantation where Jean Toomer gathered his material for “Cane.” They stopped on the way to South Carolina to meet with a root doctor, got a flat tire in Columbia, and then scooted up the coast. By September, they had returned to New York, where Hurston settled down to write her article on Kossola, who was then known mainly by his American name, Cudjo Lewis.