of other obligations, which may have
contributed to the end of Hurston’s
friendship with Langston Hughes.
Hurston’s relationship with Mason
also deteriorated. Mason stopped sup-
porting her financially, but continued
to send money to Kossola. Cep finds
Hurston “barely visible” in “Barracoon,”
but the book was crucial to her life-
long efort to celebrate black history,
including attempts to recover the slave
ship Clotilda, on which Kossola had
been transported from Africa, and to
erect a national cemetery for “the il-
lustrious Negro dead,” as Hurston
wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois. Her de-
sire to protect black history from “in-
conspicuous forgetfulness” (especially
poignant given that she was buried in
an unmarked grave) was part of the
fierce black pride that guided her life
and led to many misreadings of her
complicated politics.
Carla Kaplan
Davis Distinguished Professor of
American Literature
Northeastern University
Boston, Mass.
1
FREE TRADE AND THE POORIn Caleb Crain’s essay about whether
capitalism poses a threat to democ-
racy, he discusses Robert Kuttner’s
views on the impact of free trade but
leaves out a key consideration (Books,
May 14th). Beyond the impact that
free trade has on Americans, its benefits
for the developing world should not
be ignored. Hundreds of millions of
people have been helped out of pov-
erty by an American-led system of
trade liberalization. Perhaps this will
not convince American voters, but it
should count for something.
Simon Lester
Falls Church, Va.THE A.I. YOU KNOW
Tad Friend’s giddy roundup of the
farthest-out possibilities in artificial
intelligence is a testament to the
heated enthusiasms and fears of our
time (“Superior Intelligence,” May
14th). It’s telling that most of Friend’s
examples of threatening, triumphant,
or all-seeing A.I. come from aesthetic
sources—movies, books, TV—where
anything is possible. In actuality, self-
conscious and self-directed A.I. is very
far away, and may well not be possi-
ble at all. For A.I. to “extend mean-
ing in the universe that gave life to
us,” A.I. itself must understand and
experience meaning, and there is no
real evidence of how it might develop
this capability.
On the other hand, we have already
constructed an omniscient, omnipo-
tent, deathless A.I. that holds all of
our fates in its power: God. It took
millennia for us to build and shape it
into something that extends meaning
in our universe. It has caused wars and
dictated peace, has won fierce alle-
giance, and can’t be (or hasn’t yet been)
turned of. It is instantiated in works
that for centuries have absorbed the
thought, labor, and substance of hu-
mankind. We who are not members
of the new clerisy are now waiting to
see if the A.I. we fear displaces the A.I.
we have.
John Crowley
Conway, Mass.
1
UNDERSTANDING HURSTON
Casey Cep does not fully explain the
troubled history behind “Barracoon,”
Zora Neale Hurston’s book about
America’s last slave, Kossola, which
was published nearly nine decades
after she wrote it (Books, May 14th).
Part of the story is Hurston’s complex
relationship with her wealthy white
patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who
believed that native Africans held the
key to restoring modern culture. Mason
urged Hurston to work on Kossola’s
story in secrecy and to the exclusion
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