On Cudjo’s Pipe: Smoking Dialogs in Diasporic Space

Summary

As a survivor of the last slaver to make the Atlantic crossing and a community leader in the Jim Crow-era American South of Mobile Alabama, Cudjo Lewis stands as an iconic diasporic figure.  We know of Cudjo’s life on both sides of the Atlantic from extensive interviews by Zora Neale Hurston, local historians, and reporters from the New York Times.  These reports describe a sullen patriarchal figure who spent the last years of his life morning the death of his children and the impossibility of returning to his home in modern-day Ghana.  This paper uses artifacts recovered from in and around Cudjo’s home in Africatown Alabama as well as items excavated from sites along the West African coast to revisit the materiality of Cudjo’s later years.  It argues that aesthetic registers of West African smoking rituals and elite bodily comportment offer more robust interpretations of Cudjo’s last years.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Directions in African Diaspora Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 419