Margaret Brown is a Mobile, Ala.-born documentary filmmaker who directed the feature documentary “The Order of Myths” (2008) that won many awards, including a Peabody Award a Cinematic Vision Award at the Silverdocs Documentary Festival and Truer Than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Her latest documentary film, “Descendant,” was shown at the New York Film Festival (and can be seen on Netflix) and perceptively observes how the descendants of the last US slave ship in US history, the Clotilda, use the discovery of the ship’s wreckage to create their own memorial to the past. Brown doesn’t place herself in the story, allowing the voices of the descendants to dominate the screen.
Many of the descendants, who live in a neighborhood called Africatown, are knowledgeable about and committed to embracing their history—wanting to discuss how the memorial should look and even mention the possibility of reparations. It’s not anger that moves most of them, however, but preserving a permanent legacy to the past. They talk about the story as not only about brutality, but they are survivors, and there are visits to the local cemetery where their ancestors are buried. (Still, one black expert diver speaks about the burning of the Clotilda as “a crime against humanity.”)
Brown, who is white, augments work done many decades earlier by the late Black author and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston, whose book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo'” focuses on Africatown founder (and Clotilda survivor) Cudjoe Lewis. Both Hurston—who recorded oral histories in the region—and Lewis serve as inspirations to Brown in her treatment of the subject.
The story of the Clotilda and Africatown begins in 1860 when Timothy Meaher, the ship’s owner, orchestrated the one-off smuggling mission (the slave trade had been declared illegal in the U.S. in 1808) dividing the 110 slaves the Clotilda carried between three plantations when it reached land. He then destroyed all the evidence and documentation, and Timothy Meaher and his captain, William Foster, went free.
The family of Meaher has remained silent about their role in the history of the Clotilda, which also involved selling parcels of land to the freed slaves, which became Africatown—a section of Mobile. The family maintained control of the surrounding real estate, which was zoned for factories, whose polluting practices have been linked to high rates of cancer in the area.
Brown, in her understated manner, evokes the complexities of a situation that could have been turned unto inspirational and sentimental clichés. We meet a number of the Black descendants of the Clotilda in the film, who view the story as not limited to the salvaging of the boat, but as a tale of a community’s survival. Some of the descendants are eloquent and reflective, and so are even a couple of the white people who are involved in the boat’s salvaging and the community’s well being. In fact, they help tell the story, and fight against destroyers of the environment.
Still, there are white politicians and their reps who appear before the community and talk in platitudinous terms about “casting our eyes to the future.” There is nothing empathetic in their speech, and though the museum/memorial may help the community by becoming a tourist destination, some feel they don’t want their history to become another “form of entertainment.” Brown’s film reflects all the complexities of the subject and conveys that hopefully the narrative will be controlled by the descendants, not by people who want to profit from the situation and have no link to our concern for the descendants’ history.
