...I was kind of cringing reading the patois-ified spelling of his words until I read it was the insistence of the original interviewer. That's an... awkward decision.
Journalists make this decision all the time: Do they take out the wrong words, grammatical errors, the 'umms' and 'ahhs', or vernacular, and make the speaker look less intelligent (for errors) or simply look like they are trying to characterize the speaker (vernacular), or do they insist on total accuracy? Note that most quotes in print are in perfect English.
Anyway, the article addresses your comment:
[Zora Neale] Hurston’s use of vernacular dialogue in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was often controversial, as some black American thinkers at the time argued that this played to black caricatures in the minds of white people. Hurston disagreed, and refused to change Lewis’ dialect—which was one of the reasons a publisher turned her manuscript down back in the 1930s.
Note that Hurston was a leading African-American intellectual of that era.
It's unlikely that this is a true reflection of the phonetics of what he said.
Better?
But really even without the journalistic [corrections], the tone is still very different from Hurston's original transcription:
> “We were very sorry to be parted from one another,” Lewis told Hurston. “We went seventy days crossing the water from the African soil, and now they part us from one another. Therefore we cry. Our grief was so heavy it looked like we can't stand it. I think maybe I will die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
As a Scot who has been to southern US, I strongly disagree. There are a number of accents and dialects in Scotland, and not one of them is even remotely reminiscent of a southern US accent or dialect.