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How the amazing story of America’s last slave, once lost to history, was found again
Updated Apr 12, 2019; Posted Apr 05, 2019
Redoshi (Sally Smith
A Department of Agriculture called “The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living" featured Redoshi.
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By Christopher Harress | charress@al.com
Aunt Sally Smith screamed with joy when she spoke with someone who understood her native language for the first time since she was kidnapped as child from her native Benin nearly 80 years earlier.
The pair spoke about their shared country and culture, a village, and recalled rivers that flowed near where the two had once lived. They excitedly dipped in and out of Smith’s native Bantu, a language spoken across sub-Saharan Africa.
The conversation is believed to have taken place between Smith and a visiting African academic in Dallas County, Alabama, in 1936 when Smith was nearly 90-years-old.
“She was filled with joy,” wrote a tearful Amelia Boynton Robinson, a prominent Civil Rights activist who observed the conversation when visiting the former slave, according to her 1979 memoir “Bridge Across Jordan.”
It was an unexpectedly poetic and final connection to Smith’s homeland before she died sometime in 1937.
But the joy for Smith, also known as Redoshi in her native Bantu, was short lived.
Smith retold the horrors of the perilous crossing from Africa, chained to a ship and the abuse she endured for the years she spent as a slave, and then the next 70 years as a black woman living in the South under Jim Crow.
Redoshi’s story has come to prominence in recent weeks as newly discovered evidence, paired with existing documents, revealed she may have been the last surviving Trans-Atlantic African slave to have lived in the United States. Using books, letters, census data, and 80-year-old government film, an English professor has slowly pieced together some of Redoshi’s life before and after she came to Alabama aboard the slave ship Clotilda.
“No one will ever know about her”
“I first became aware of Redoshi’s story in a 1928 letter from Zora Neale Hurston to her fellow African American writer Langston Hughes,” said Newcastle University’s Dr. Hannah Durkin, who first published her work on Redoshi in the Slavery and Abolition Journal in late March. “However, Hurston did not name Redoshi in her letter. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Redoshi’s name in Hurston’s posthumously published book, Every Tongue Got to Confess, that I managed to identify her. I then trawled through census records until I found records of her and drew most of my other research from a newspaper interview, books, and a 1938 educational film.”
For generations historians believed that Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kazoola, was the last African slave to have lived in the United States. He resided in Mobile County for the entirety of his life in America and is buried in Africatown, the first U.S. town to be continuously run by black people and the only one to be founded by Africans, notes Durkin in her research.
Cudjo Lewis and pipe
This is Cudjo Lewis, known in his native land as Kazoola. He was the last survivor of the Clotilda incident. He lived in Africatown until 1935, when he died at age 94. (Courtesy of the Mobile Library)
Kazoola’s own story had been known for years in the small and picturesque confines of his reluctantly adopted home. Africatown, located north of Mobile, still operates as a functioning settlement with a school and local government.
Hurston had first met Kazoola in 1927, interviewing him for an article that was published in The Journal of Negro History one year later – the year she met Redoshi. A book about Kazoola’s life and the SS Clotilda was later rejected by publishers. It wasn’t until May 2018 that Hurston’s work was eventually published, becoming a New York Times Bestseller as “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo.’”
But Kazoola’s story had already received a new lease of life when in early 2018 an AL.com reporter, using historical records and local accounts, found what was thought to be the wreck of the Clotilda buried in mud somewhere in the Mobile Delta. The ship is believed to have been set a light to hide any evidence that it had been used to transport slaves, something that had been outlawed since 1808. Slavery was completely banned in 1865.
Wreck found by reporter may be last American slave ship, archaeologists say
"This would be a story of world historical significance, if this is the Clotilda," said John Sledge, a senior historian with Mobile Historical Commission.
Archeologists ultimately determined that the wreckage was not the Clotilda. However, the discovery did unearth a new enthusiasm for the story of the 115 slaves who made the journey from the West Coast of Africa to Mobile back in 1860.
Archaeologists have since discovered a new site they believe could be the final resting place of the ship. But that is yet to be seen.
Hurston, who was a hugely influential African-American writer and anthropologist throughout the early 1900s, was aware of Redoshi’s significance but apparently had no plans to write about another former African slave after having her manuscript rejected. Durkin suggested that she wanted to instead use Redoshi’s experience for fiction or stage work.
In her letter to Hughes she admitted that she had no plans to publish details of Redoshi’s life and wanted it to remain a secret.
“Oh! almost forgot," wrote Hurston. "Found another one of the original Africans, older than Cudjoe about 200 miles up state on the Tombig[b]ee river. She is most delightful, but no one will ever know about her but us. She is a better talker than Cudjoe.”
Wreck found in Delta not the Clotilda, the last American slave ship
A previously unexplored 19th century shipwreck discovered in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, which archaeologists had suggested might be the Clotilda, has been ruled out as the ill-fated ship after further examination this week.
Her failure to acknowledge a second Trans-Atlantic survivor, and the only known woman to have survived, meant that Redoshi’s experience was largely lost to history.
“She remained anonymous, her life unknown,” said Sylviane A. Diouf, a French historian with expertise in the African Diaspora.
But Durkin’s efforts at piecing together Redoshi’s life now offers one of the most complete composite views of an African woman slave living in the United States.
“Overseers beat us for every little thing”
One of the first mainstream accounts to have mentioned Redoshi appears in a 1932 interview with a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser. It was the first instance of evidence that brought Redoshi and Kazoola’s stories together. They were from the same West African country and arrived in the United States on the Clotilda at the same time. Durkin also noted that Redoshi and Kazoola stayed in touch periodically throughout their lives.
The Montgomery Advertiser article reveals that on arrival from Africa Redoshi was bought by Washington Smith, founder of the Bank of Selma and owner of the Bogue Chitto plantation in Dallas County. He also happened to be part of a group of men that sought to make Selma the capital of the new Confederate States of America.
While one of the first published accounts of Redoshi, Durking contends that much of the writing was based in the writer’s romantic fantasies of the African continent. The author of the article described Redoshi as a ‘dark, supple princess … imbued with the love of life in the jungles’ and said that she had dreamt about being taken across water the night before she was kidnapped. His account was largely written in a positive narrative.
But Durkin’s research says that this description of a happy life “contrasts starkly with the unhappy accounts given elsewhere by her fellow Clotilda survivors.”
Redoshi’s conversation with Boynton Robinson four years later was vastly different.
The civil rights activist wrote about the tears “that stream down her face” as the former slave spoke about her separation from her home and the brutality of life in the United States, first as a slave then as a so-called free woman living as a cotton farmer on a plantation in Dallas County, about 10 miles west of Selma.
While speaking about the agony of being chained inside the SS Clotilda for “many weeks,” Redoshi described being beaten, whipped and witnessing killings at the hands of white men.
“The slave masters and overseers beat us for every little thing when we didn’t understand American talk,” said Redoshi in her conversation with Boynton Robinson.
So horrific was the journey from Africa to Mobile, Redoshi believed that it took a year, as well as believing and hoping she would die on the journey. Upon arrival in Mobile, Redoshi told Boynton Robinson she was forced to eat grass before being sold to Smith.
She was quickly married as a child bride to a fellow slave bought by Smith. However, the two did not share the same language or culture. He is known in historical writings as “Uncle Billy,” although it’s believed his real name was Yawith. He worked as a share cropper after the pair were freed.
Census data from 1910 noted that the couple did not know which part of Africa they were from, further emphasizing how disconnected they had become from home. Census takers stamped “Alabama” as their birthplace instead.
They raised a daughter together and, according to Durkin, had great-grandchildren. Some of whom went on to become teachers and ministers, according to Durkin.
“Exceptionally rare, tremendously inspiring”
While historical accounts painted a fragmented picture of Redoshi’s life, Durkin still had very little idea what she looked like. That changed when she came across a rare video of Redoshi recorded a year or two before her death by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Tuskegee Institute, a leading black agricultural college. The video was released in 1938 and showed vivid images of a woman the narrator referred to as “Aunt Sally Smith,” which was the name she went by in most historical accounts of her life.
For Durkin it was the moment the pieces of her research began to fall into place.
“Not only did that bring home who she was an individual, but it also gave me enough information to begin to tell her story,” she said.
While it now appears that Kazoola has been transplanted as the last African slave to have lived in the United States, Durkin said that their combined stories are both rare and incredibly important in understanding an important time in American and African history.
“Redoshi may have lived slightly longer than Kazoola, but all the Clotilda survivors were incredible men and women whose stories are exceptionally rare, but nevertheless tremendously inspiring, first-hand accounts of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath.”
Clotilda, the last American slave ship, exact size of new Alabama wreck
A new shipwreck found by AL.com is “exactly” the size of the Clotida, the last American slave ship, according to the archaeologist leading the effort to excavate the vessel. The excavation began Wednesday near Twelve-Mile Island in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
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