Katrina Browne
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The day after Barack Obama’s nomination became assured, a pertinent film was screened at the Newport International Film Festival. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North charts the early history of the DeWolfs, a prominent Bristol family whose first three generations were prosperously involved in the slave trade. The documentary will open the up-coming season of P.O.V., available nationally to PBS stations on June 24 (broadcast on Channel 36 on July 3).
Descendant Katrina Browne co-wrote, co-directed, and narrated the film, in which nine fellow DeWolf relatives accompany her to a slave fort in Ghana and a sugar plantation in Cuba that was once owned by the family.
But the effect of the film ends up being not as much about the past, with breast-beating over whether these family members can forgive their ancestors, as about the future, and how they can contribute to healing wounds inflicted by the first DeWolfs on this country. Toward the end of the film, this comes out in discussing reparations.
The subject was in the air when Browne began working on the film, largely because of Randall Robinson’s book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.
“My brain would freeze, would freeze when the word reparations came up,” the filmmaker says, after the film festival screening. “I literally couldn’t think. So I’ve come a long way from that.”
The impact of the film has been small-scale, affecting one person at a time at numerous showings around the country. That’s been especially so when there have been question and answer sessions afterward, at church, school, and other groups, to audiences black, white, and mixed.
Tom DeWolf, one of the travelers in the film, is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. He especially ap-preciates open-ended time periods for discussion, after readings or screenings.
“That’s what I feel is our main mission in this project — that invitation into this deeper conversation,” DeWolf says. “You need to have the time and the space for the conversa-tion. It’s challenging to do in a busy world, but we’re working on it. A lot of people are working on it.”
The state Department of Education, for example, has sponsored screenings of the film for teachers.
The central conflict of the documentary, the tension between white guilt over racism and the frustrating inability to change the past, makes the film a metaphor for the coun-try at large. But we have the ability to repair the past, Browne learned.
She recalls one particular Q&A session. The audience looked evenly black and white, so there was minimal defensiveness or embarrassed silence during discussion of making reparations.
“The first black woman who spoke said there are as many definitions [of how to make amends] as there are black people in America,” Browne says. “And for me, what we’re do-ing right here, right now, is reparations. For me.”
