He told Hurston about the roughly five years he spent enslaved, how he gained his freedom when Union soldiers appeared one day and told him he didn’t belong to anyone anymore, and how he joined together with a group of other former slaves and helped to establish Africatown, a community founded and run by Africans.

“Barracoon” unfolds largely as a monologue from Lewis, with an introduction and occasional interjections from Hurston. Some days, he didn’t feel like talking, so she helped him with chores. Other days, he grew exhausted by her questions and told her she wanted to know too much. At times, he was so overcome by painful memories that he couldn’t speak, like when he recalled the day his village was attacked by Dahomey warriors, who beheaded victims they deemed too weak to be sold, and smoked their victims’ heads to preserve them.

“His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate,” Hurston wrote.

She would bring him food, a basket of peaches or a Virginia ham, and tell him stories to break the ice. When Lewis was feeling chatty, he could go on for hours, and Hurston cedes the narrative to him for long, meandering stretches.

“She wanted us to hear his voice and she kept herself out of it as much as possible,” said Alice Walker, who wrote a foreword to “Barracoon.” “She knew it was important for us to hear from him.”

Scholars of Hurston’s work have long known of the manuscript’s existence, but few recognized its significance. Some thought Hurston’s historical research was sloppy, even unethical. Before she wrote “Barracoon,” Hurston detailed her conversations with Lewis in an article published in The Journal of Negro History, titled “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.” Parts of the article borrowed from another scholarly work, Emma Langdon Roche’s “Historic Sketches of the South,” without proper attribution, and the appearance of plagiarism cast a shadow over “Barracoon.” Robert E. Hemenway, who published a biography of Hurston in 1977, treated “Barracoon” as an extension of the article, and argued that Hurston had taken creative liberties, recreating Lewis’s story “as an artist rather than as a folklorist or historian.”