All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.
-Zora Neale Hurston

I don't think I can ever find the right words to describe this. Go read it. Remind yourself constantly that it is not fiction, but a first person account of a man's life. Embrace the complexity of his story and the way it challenges simplistic narratives about slavery and blackness and American society and culture.

I'll leave you with this quote from the editor's afterword: "If we view Barracoon as just another brilliant example of Hurston's anthropological genius, we are gravely mistaken and we do not fathom the full import of her objectives as a social scientist...The body of lore Hurston gathered was an argument against such notions of cultural inferiority and white supremacy, and it defied the idea of European cultural hegemony as it also questioned the narrative of white nationalism."