The current issue of The New Yorker also covers the publication of Zora Neale Hurston's _Barracoon_[1], and what I found most interesting was that Mr. Kossola w

The current issue of The New Yorker also covers the publication of Zora Neale Hurston's _Barracoon_[1], and what I found most interesting was that Mr. Kossola was not the last survivor of that slave ship. > “Oh!” she exclaimed toward the end [of a letter to Langston Hughes], “almost forgot”: she had found another survivor of the Clotilda living on the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles north of Africatown. The woman was older than Kossola, and, according to Hurston, a better storyteller. But there can’t be two lasts or more than one only, so Hurston, perhaps believing that Kossola’s story would be more valuable if people thought it was unique, told Hughes that she planned to keep this other survivor secret: “No one will ever know about her but us.” > Tragically, that proved true. Abandoning her training by Boas, and ignoring the dictates of both honesty and history, Hurston forsook the opportunity to record the story of another survivor. Later scholars have determined that the person Hurston “almost forgot” was most likely a woman named Allie Beren, but no film footage records her face, no known photographs document her home, no oral histories capture her memories. The loss of Ms. Beren's story is tragic; that its loss occurred through Hurston's intentional neglect is infuriating. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hurstons-story-of-a-former-slave-finally-comes-to-print https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hur...