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How To Make Narrative Nonfiction Span Centuries 

AN image of a ship with a historic map of mobile bay and the coast of Alabama overlayed with a green tinge

Laura Tillman in conversation with Nick Tabor 

In his recent book, Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, Nick Tabor took on a story spanning centuries and continents through characters alive and long dead. It’s an intimidating project, but, remarkably, none of this effortfulness shows up on the page. Africatown is an evenhanded, highly-detailed telling, one that reads more like a third or fourth book than a debut. 

I’m always fascinated to learn the origin story of a literary nonfiction book, in part because it’s simply instructive to hear how other authors have navigated this disorienting process. But I’m also curious because the making of a nonfiction book often has its own drama. A rabbit hole opens up, drawing a writer into an obsessive relationship with a subject. There are often setbacks, anxieties, conflict. But if the book is in your hands, ultimately there is a triumph, and a letting go. 

I first met Nick when we were both enrolled in an MFA program at Goucher College in 2011. Many years had passed by the time I read Africatown, and in the interim Nick had done all kinds of interesting work. But I didn’t know how he’d come to this story and how he had come to produce a book of such confidence and clarity of purpose, so I sent him some questions about the project via email. 

Laura Tillman: I’d love to begin at the beginning, for you, working on this book. How did you find this story, and how did you know it was THE story that you wanted to pour your time into?

Nick Tabor: In 2018 I was working at New York Magazine, and my editor Laurie Abraham told me about Barracoon, the forgotten book manuscript by Zora Neale Hurston about to be published by HarperCollins. It was based on Hurston’s interviews with Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the last slave voyage to the US. Hurston met Cudjo in the late-1920s, when he was quite elderly. 

Laurie wanted me to figure out what had become of Cudjo’s descendants, ninety years after that encounter. NYMag had arranged to print an excerpt of Barracoon, and Laurie thought a story about the descendants would make a cool pairing.

Finding the descendants was harder than I expected, because they had intentionally kept a low profile. I called lots of people and organizations in Mobile, and no one had any promising leads. However, in the course of my reporting, I learned about Africatown, the community that Cudjo and his shipmates had created after emancipation. It’s an amazing historical treasure—the only US community established by survivors of the Middle Passage—and in the 21st century, it’s still intact. But it’s hedged in by heavy industry and filled with pollution.

Eventually I did find a descendant: Cudjo’s great-great-grandson, Garry Lumbers. As soon as I got Garry on the phone, he said, “You don’t need to be writing about the descendants—you should be writing about the town.” He said that when he was growing up,  in the 1950s and ‘60s, Africatown was a thriving community; but now it looked like a “war zone.” He thought this was clearly the result of deliberate choices, made by the local power elites. He wanted me to figure out exactly what had happened.

I went to Mobile a few days after that call. As it happened, on the morning I arrived, a law firm had set up shop in one of Africatown’s churches. They were suing a paper factory that had operated near Africatown for decades, arguing that its pollution had given people cancer. Staffers from the firm were taking people’s testimonies about cancer cases in their families. I interviewed a bunch of these residents myself, and their stories were harrowing. 

After I got back to New York, I kept thinking about Africatown for months. I wanted to know the answer to Garry’s question: how had it gotten to be that way? Of all the neighborhoods in Mobile, how exactly had this one been singled out as an industrial dumping ground? I felt like, if I could answer that, it would reveal a lot about how this phenomenon we call environmental racism works everywhere.


I love it when I can use reporting to try to solve some kind of anthropological mystery. Like “What are the unseen forces at work here?” Eventually I realized this was a viable book idea.

At first I had concerns about doing this as a white journalist—but people in the community told me, “We need all the attention we can get,” and many of them were excited about the idea. That gave me the confidence to commit.

LT: Other books have been written about the Clotilda. Tell me about your process of realizing you had a space to do something different and important with this story.  How did you define for yourself what you were setting out to achieve? Did that shift during the reporting and writing process? 

NT: At the time, there weren’t so many—just two scholarly books, plus Barracoon. More have come out since. But the difference was that I wanted to write about the neighborhood, rather than just the voyage and its survivors; and unlike the other books, my narration would not stop in the 1920s. It would go all the way up to the present day. I knew that besides the traditional tools of a historian, this would require a lot of investigative reporting—and that would demand a skillset the previous authors (who are excellent scholars) didn’t necessarily have.

It was also kind of novel to frame this as a story about environmental racism. My main question was: “What’s the connection between the slave ship and the pollution?” 

I have to say, that question did not shift during the reporting and writing. I went deeper into it, of course, but I never changed my focus.

LT: Your work included a temporary move to Mobile to do the reporting. How did you first contact the descendants of the people forcibly brought to the US on the Clotilda? What have those interviews and interactions been like? How did they change the more time you spent working on this project and since it was published? 

NT: Some of the descendants—not so much Cudjo’s relatives, but people linked to other survivors—have a constant presence at community functions in Africatown, so I would see them all the time. Before I moved down, I was surprised at how welcoming they were and how much they encouraged the project. Of course, our bonds deepened once I moved there. I attended services at Africatown’s churches; I showed up to volunteer on clean-up days. And as I was unearthing new stuff in the historical records, I often shared documents and photos with people in the community. Through all of that they came to trust me more.

To give an example, as Joycelyn Davis and I became friendly, she started calling me to ask historical questions. I didn’t always have the answers, but some of her questions ended up informing the book. In particular, she often said that people didn’t talk enough about King Glele, the leader of the West African country Dahomey, who had sold her ancestors into slavery. She felt like there was too much focus on the white culprits, and Glele and his West African collaborators were getting a pass. I ended up devoting quite a few pages to Glele, and Joycelyn was certainly an influence.

I should also note that after I quit my job and moved down there, I was mainly living off of my advance; but I also received a grant from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which I was grateful for. I’m a fan of the EHRP—they fund so much excellent journalism. They also funded some beautiful photography for a story I wrote years ago. The great Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in 2022, was the organization’s founder, and I’d like to think Africatown is the kind of book that honors her legacy.

the cover of Africatown which is mostly sky with a river at the bottom

LT: Some of the passages in which you describe Mobile are beautifully written. This one has an asterisk in the margins of my copy: “In winter, the busy season, Mobile’s temperature was often balmy, and by February, the flowers were usually in bloom, filling the city air with a perfume that mingled with the scent of magnolias. In the summertime, everyone who could afford it — around two-thirds of the population — left for places with cooler weather. The city slept during the hottest months, then roused itself again each September.” Tell me about your impressions of Mobile as a city when you came to report there? What was it like to unravel its history, some of it very ugly, some of it inspiring, and be there in person? 

NT: I love Mobile. I assume that when people hear “Alabama,” they tend to think about pickup trucks draped with Confederate flags. Mobile does have some of that culture, but in many ways it’s different. It’s often been called “the least Alabamian city.”

For one thing, it’s all the way down on the Gulf of Mexico, and some of the landscapes are incredibly beautiful. When I talked to my friends on the phone, I was always raving about the trees. I felt like Agent Cooper. For another, it shares a lot of history with New Orleans (which is only two hours away). It has a French Catholic heritage, and it’s been celebrating Mardi Gras since the eighteenth century. 

At the same time, having lived in both Mobile and New Orleans, I can tell you, Mobile is a much more segregated city. A lot of its establishments are distinctly either white or Black, in terms of their clientele. There’s a barbecue restaurant where Black people tend to eat, and another that where white Mobilians go (guess which one is better). Its Mardi Gras is still largely segregated too. 

In terms of meeting people and making myself known, I definitely proceeded with caution. At first, my attitude was like “I’m not going to talk about my reporting with anyone who’s not from Africatown, because I don’t know where they stand or who they know.” I didn’t want avenues to get closed off for me. But over time I did expand my social circle and even made some good friends. 

LT: There are some moments in the book that made me curious to hear the backstory of how they were reported and written. For example in Chapter 3, you write of Kossola, that in a frightening moment, all he could think about was his mother. This is a person long dead, you can’t interview him and know his thoughts. Then I flipped to the endnotes and saw that this was attributed to Zora Neale Hurston’s account. But later in the book you describe the way that Hurston sometimes took artistic liberties in her work. How did you decide which moments to rely on Hurston for? Can you tell me about the concept of “essential truth” in Hurston’s work and what it means to you?

NT: Yeah, that was a bit tricky. Hurston spent more time with Cudjo than just about anyone else who wrote about the Clotilda history, and in Barracoon, she quotes him at length, describing his experiences—including his thoughts and feelings as those horrors unfolded. 

Now, as you note, I do think Hurston took artistic liberties. In some areas, I can pinpoint those; but in others, I don’t know how much she was acting as an ethnographer, as opposed to thinking like a novelist. Keep in mind, this was for a manuscript she didn’t even publish in her lifetime—and from that perspective, she had the right to take whatever liberties she wanted.

I decided I would cite her freely for information that she might plausibly have gotten straight from Cudjo; but I would also be transparent with the reader about my assessment of Hurston’s methods. That struck me as a better solution than not using her as a source at all.

That line about “essential truth” comes from the prologue of Barracoon: Hurston wrote that her aim was to “set down essential truth rather than fact of detail.” All told, I think there’s no question that she captured Cudjo’s experiences—and also his demeanor, and his thoughts and feelings—better than anyone else did. 


LT: Throughout the book, you talk about the Meaher family—starting with Timothy Meaher, the business magnate who arranged the slave voyage, and then continuing through the generations, as his descendants continued to make money by leasing and selling the property around Africatown. Toward the end, you discuss Timothy Meaher’s great-grandsons, Gus, Joe and Robert. You write that there are virtually no photos of them online, and that they tend to stonewall the press. “However, from a broad range of public records and other documents, and from interviews with people who know them, it’s possible to assemble a portrait of their lives and identities.” I’d love a more detailed walk through of that process—a few of the details you were able to assemble through these methods, and just how you found them. I think it would be a fascinating window into the larger process of assembling Africatown. 

NT: From the beginning, I knew that family would be a throughline in the book. You can’t understand the environmental degradation of Africatown without looking at the Meahers. Because they owned all that property, they’ve been instrumental in bringing all that heavy industry to the area. And of course, if I wanted to tell a story about structural racism, they were almost too perfect an emblem.

With regard to the current generations, I learned a lot about their personalities from white Mobilians who have lived in the city for decades and are well connected socially. I remember when I met Suzanne Cleveland, who has been called “the Gertrude Stein of Mobile,” at a party. Another person said, “It’s good that you met Suzanne. She knows everybody.” I nodded. He said, “No—I mean, she knows everybody.” It sounded like he wanted me to read between the lines.

Suzanne and I lived in the same neighborhood, and I ended up spending a lot of time with her. We’d sit on her porch and drink wine. It turned out she had gone on a date with Joe Meaher when she was much younger, a story I relate in the book. She remembered him saying that the Black people (he used a rougher word) who worked for him had to use the back door. 

Other people confirmed that Joe Meaher was openly, unrepentantly racist. Some of them had been scandalized to hear how he talked about African Americans. I also had a big surprise when I looked up his will in probate court. He had left his estate to a friend; but he wrote that if for some reason, his friend couldn’t receive it, he wanted it to go to “the Jefferson Davis shrine” (as he called it) in Mississippi.

There was also a lawsuit that I made great use of. Two of Joe Meaher’s nieces had sued him, saying he had siphoned money from the family business. In the lawsuit records, all kinds of documents had been filed as exhibits, including one that gave an accounting of the business’s assets. You never know what you might find in court files.

LT: Has the book changed radically or subtly in its form, tone or structure? If so, can you describe what the process of moving from one version to the other was like? 

NT: My original vision for the book never changed significantly. From the moment I had the idea to write it, I knew roughly what the outline would look like.

But here’s something that did change: I had to get the knack of constructing scenes from historical records. For instance, I had no idea how I would write scenes of Cudjo’s early life in West Africa, because the descriptions he left behind are scant. 

But it turned out this wasn’t so hard. In Barracoon, Cudjo tells Hurston about this time he saw a young woman in the marketplace. She was so beautiful, he tried to follow her, but she disappeared. He doesn’t say much more than that. But I realized I could use other sources to figure out what a market in Yorubaland in the 1850s would have looked and sounded like. That became the opening of my first chapter. I ran my description by a couple of historians who study that period, and they helped me fine-tune it.

I ended up using that same process again and again. I would pick some moment, or event, that was recorded somewhere, and I’d use other sources to build it up into a scene.

LT: Who are the writers that inspired you as you were working on Africatown? What about their work moves you? Are there any phrases or ideas about creative nonfiction writing and reporting that you went back to as you were working on this? 

NT: Every journalist I know reveres Robert Caro, but in my case it goes beyond admiration. I remember thinking, “If Caro moved to the Texas Hill Country to write about Lyndon Johnson, I don’t think I can write about Africatown without moving to Mobile.” To me his work is the apotheosis of journalism: he’s a dogged investigative reporter, but he also has rich literary sensibilities, and in his books, those traits are inseparable. Not only does the reporting inform the writing, but it also goes the other way. Caro has a vision of what he wants to write, and that shapes the way he does his research.

I guess you could say this is true of all journalism, but it’s rarely done at this level. I’ve always admired Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Katherine Boo for similar reasons.

Among traditional historians, Marcus Rediker was someone I kept in mind throughout the writing. His book The Slave Ship: A Human History, in particular, is a master class in how to write for a broad audience without sacrificing scholarly rigor. I also think Marcus and I are on the same page politically, and I like the way he works in his politics, but doesn’t alienate readers who would get spooked if he were to mention Karl Marx by name. So he was a model in multiple ways, and I was thrilled when he wrote a blurb for Africatown.

And then finally, I have a great love for nineteenth-century novels. I admire the way authors like Balzac or George Eliot depict the interplay of all these different social forces. I once heard Paul Auster say that Bach’s music has “great clarity,” but also “bottomless depth,” at the same time—and I guess I’m drawn to writing that has those same qualities. For me it doesn’t get much better than Middlemarch. 

Structurally, I think those books can be helpful as models. They’re often arranged in ways that are complicated, but from the reader’s perspective, they unfold with incredible clarity. A lot of us aim for that kind of thing in longform journalism.

LT: This is your first book. Was the publication process what you expected? What have been some of the most satisfying moments since the book’s release? 

NT: My experience in magazines and the connections I’ve made in New York City were a big help as I tried to promote the book. I managed to get excerpts published in Smithsonian and Grist; I wrote two op-eds for the New York Times, inspired by the book; and I wrote separate pieces for The Washington Post and The Paris Review, using research that hadn’t fit into the manuscript.

On the other hand, I did face some challenges in this area. Before my book came out (while I was finishing edits), another book on the Clotilda was published, and that one received a lot of the press attention that mine might otherwise have gotten. I was also involved in a Netflix documentary about Africatown, but Netflix wasn’t interested in promoting the book, so I think the film just overshadowed the book instead. By my pub date, the media clearly had a sense of fatigue with this story. The book was not reviewed in any national newspapers, and in general it was hard to build the kind of momentum I was hoping for.

I bring this up just to say that there’s only so much an author can control. You do what you can and leave the rest up to chance. But promo questions aside, writing this book was easily the most fulfilling experience of my professional life so far.

After it came out, I did a number of book events, including several where I was joined on stage by Clotilda descendants. One of the best moments came after Joycelyn Davis and I spoke at a bookstore near Mobile. Another woman with connections to Africatown said to Joycelyn afterward—while I was in earshot—“Do you realize how lucky we are that he’s the one who decided to write this book?” I could not have felt more honored.

Laura Tillman is a journalist and the author of The Migrant Chef and The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts. She began her career as a newspaper reporter at the U.S.–Mexico border in 2007, before moving to Mexico City in 2014. Her reporting, which focuses primarily on migration, justice, and food, has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in international studies and Goucher College with an MFA in nonfiction writing, where she is currently a member of the faculty. She lives in Mexico City with her family.

Nick Tabor is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Africatown is his first book. He lives in New York.

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