[1] Taken captive in warfare at age 12 by the West African kingdom of Dahomey, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States in violation of U.S. law.

[2] Redoshi survived slavery and the imposition of Jim Crow laws during the post-Reconstruction era of disenfranchisement, and lived into the Great Depression.

She lived long enough to become acquainted with people active in the civil rights movement; she is the only known female transatlantic slavery survivor to have been filmed and to have been interviewed for a newspaper.

[5] Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher had commissioned the captain and ship for a slave-buying mission to Ouidah, a port city in what is today Benin.

Hurston returned to Alabama to interview him over a period of months and wrote a book about him, but it was not published until 2018, long after her death, as Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo".

[3] Durkin noted the limited number of sources that refer to the West African woman: notes and a letter by Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, not published during her lifetime; a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper interview from 1932; a federal government educational film from 1938, in which she briefly appears; a brief account in the memoir of a civil-rights activist, and various data from the U.S. Census and other records.

She said that Lewis was not the only survivor of the Clotilda: she had also met a "most delightful" woman, "older than Cudjoe, about 200 miles up state on the Tombig[b]ee river".

Hurston did not write further about Redoshi, but she included the name "Sally Smith" and biographical details in an appendix of her manuscript for what was posthumously published as Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States (2001).

[3] Redoshi, referred to as "Aunt Sally Smith", was interviewed in 1932 by the Montgomery Advertiser, when she was living on a plantation then owned by the Quarles family.

[3] In Documenting Racism: African Americans in US Department of Agriculture Documentaries, 1921–42, J. Emmett Winn describes the footage, saying that the silent portrait of "Aunt Sally Smith", whose abbreviated biography is provided by a white narrator, underscores the poor living conditions of Southern farmers in the Black Belt.

It is part of an effort to promote agricultural improvements guided by the USDA's guidance and to emphasize the film's message that "blacks should stay on Southern farms".

[3] Historian Alston Fitts included a short biography of Redoshi in Selma: A Bicentennial (1989, rep. in 2017), which was based on "Quarles family tradition" and on the account in Robinson's book.