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Born in 1841 to the Yoruba people in West Africa, Kossola told the story of how he was captured at age 19 during a brutal massacre at his village by Dahomian warriors and put on a slave ship. He was interviewed in his old age in 1927 by Zora Neale Hurston whom he trusted with details of his life that he hadn't given to any other interviewer. Kossola was, then, the last known survivor of the last slaveship that arrived in America before the Civil War, and he was lonely in his old age, his wife and children having predeceased him. He recalled many details of daily life and culture in his original home in Africa although he had lived for 67 years in America. He described his dual identity as “Edem etie ukum edem etie upar”: One part mahogany, one part ebony. Insightful historical commentary was provided by the current editor, Deborah G. Plant, bookending the interview transcription, and Alice Walker's helpful foreword gives a frame to help understand the impact of this narrative: "It resolutely records the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other...This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read. We are being shown the wound....And we have suffered so much from this one [lie]: that Africans were only victims of the slave trade, not participants." Kossola also suffered at the hands of white people — having been enslaved until the end of the Civil War, lived under Jim Crow, and had a young son killed by a policeman — but this narrative is more heavily weighted toward his memories of Africa and how his sense of himself as an African impacted his life in America. Many of his traumatic memories are gruesome. All of his retelling is frank. A lot of thought has surrounded the curation of Hurston's interview manuscript over the years, and its publication today will surely be of great interest to many.