[8] Interviewers Emma Langdon Roche and Zora Neale Hurston, and those who used their work, referred to Lewis and his fellow-captives as "Tarkars," based on his account.

[9] In April or May 1860, his village was attacked and Lewis was taken prisoner by female warriors led by King Glele of Dahomey, during an annual dry-season raid for slaves.

[10][11] Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, an American ship recently built in Mobile, Alabama, and owned by businessman Timothy Meaher.

[12] Some reports allege that Meaher fully intended to break the law, and that he had bet a businessman $100,000 that he could successfully evade the prohibition on the Atlantic slave trade.

[13] In a similar situation, the owners of the Wanderer, which had illegally brought enslaved people to Georgia in 1858, were indicted and tried for piracy in a U.S. Federal court in Savannah in May 1860, but were acquitted by the jury.

[14] By the time the Clotilda reached the Mississippi coast in July 1860, the United States Federal Government had been alerted to its activities, and Timothy Meaher, his brother Burns, and their associate John Dabney were arrested and charged with illegal possession of the captives.

[15][16] Until the end of the Civil War (1861–65), Lewis and his fellows lived as de facto slaves of Meaher, his brothers, or their associates.

He later explained that he suggested "Cudjo," a day-name commonly given to boys born on a Monday, as an alternative to his given name when James Meaher had difficulty pronouncing "Kossola.

[13] Their eldest son, Aleck (or Elick) Iyadjemi (which translated from Yorùbá means "I suffered"), became a grocer; he took his wife to live in a house on his father's land.

[28] Although native-born American former slaves became citizens upon the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in July 1868, this change in status did not apply to the members of the Clotilda group, who were foreign-born.

[30] In the first quarter of the 20th century, Lewis began to serve as an informant for scholars and other writers, sharing the history of the Clotilda Africans, and traditional stories and tales.

Emma Langdon Roche, a Mobile-based writer and artist, interviewed Lewis and the other survivors for her 1914 book Historic Sketches of the South.

According to her biographer Robert E. Hemenway, this piece largely plagiarized Emma Roche's work,[33] although Hurston added information about daily life in Lewis' home village of Banté.

Based on this material, she wrote a manuscript, Barracoon, which Hemenway described as "a highly dramatic, semifictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader.

"[36][37] After this round of interviews, Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, learned of Lewis and began to send him money for his support.

Since his death, his status as one of the last survivors of the Clotilda, and the written record created by his interviewers, have made him a public figure of the history of the community.