Cudjo Lewis Quotes

My name, is not Cudjo Lewis. It Kossula.

Cudjo picked up the last name Lewis at this time. It was not his first choice. At first, he tried to approximate Western-style names by adding his father’s name—O-lo-loo-ay—as his last name. “But it too long for de people to call it. It too crooked lak Kossula. So dey call me Cudjo Lewis,” he told Hurston.

Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.

One thing impressed me strongly from this three months of association with Cudjo Lewis,” Hurston writes. “The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us.