Descendant
Margaret Brown’s Netflix documentary traces the descendants of the very last slave ship, the Clotilda.
Margaret Brown's film is a document of historical importance. It’s a work centred on a single community – that of Africatown, Alabama – and on one event, the significance to its citizens of the fate of the slave ship named the Clotilda. However, this specific focus serves to illustrate vividly the wider issue of the USA and its African-American citizens: what they have experienced over the years, their place in and contribution to American history and the belated recognition being given to that.
America had outlawed the slave trade in 1808, but the sale of slaves only became illegal in 1865. It was in 1859 or 1860 that the Clotilda reached Mobile Bay carrying 110 Africans and it was clearly done against the law. What happened illustrated how the sale of slaves continued after 1808 but it was the last known voyage of that kind. Due to the illegality involved and in an effort to conceal it, the Clotilda having once reached its journey’s end was set on fire and scuppered. The residents of what is now Africatown are the descendants of those brought over in that ship and stories of the Clotilda and of those responsible for her voyage, Thomas Meacher whose family remain prominent landowners in the region and William Foster the ship’s captain, have remained key concerns in their lives.
For a hundred years or more there was pressure not to talk about this illegal voyage and, while a book about it entitled Barracoon was written by Zora Neale Hurston in 1931, it was not published until 2019. This film includes extracts from that book quoting directly the recorded words of Cudjo Lewis who was one of the Africans aboard. However, the first half of Descendant is largely a community portrait which allows numerous other voices to be heard since so many who speak here are indeed descendants of the slaves who arrived on the Clotilda. Among them is a young man named Emmett Lewis who can trace his ancestry back to Cudjo.
The attempts made to cover up evidence of the crime continued into recent times with misleading suggestions being given as to where in the Mobile River the wreck might be found. But in May 2019 it was located and the film’s second half is built around that and around the reactions that have ensued. The discovery is evidence that validates the history and gives these African-Americans a true sense of their ancestral roots and of their place in Alabama. Descendant speaks of the past but also of the present bringing out the continuing power of landowners like the Meachers and the fight of those living in Africatown against industrialisation in the region including issues of cancer death caused by pollution from chemical plants. Moving right up to date it also raises questions about reparations for the crime that the Clotilda’s last voyage constituted. It discusses too what true justice would amount to now given that those who were guilty are long dead even if their families may be said to have benefited. What is certain is that this history, the largest forced migration in the world, should not be forgotten even if some fear that related museums or exhibitions, however well intended, will encourage tourism without really making visitors confront what such history tells us about society both past and present.
Descendant enables its audience to view these matters through the eyes of African-Americans and does so without ever suggesting propaganda rather than truth. This is so valid, so necessary, that it is a pity that if judged as an example of film craft Margaret Barton’s documentary should so clearly be lacking. Before the title appears, there is a prologue which is terribly bitty and that foreshadows a failure to structure the film compellingly. At 109 minutes but with less impetus and urgency than one would expect, Descendant seems to meander at times and thus comes to feel overlong. Fitting in so many participants and bringing back some of them but not others calls for deep consideration as to how the material can be shaped to best effect. In that respect Descendant sadly falls short although it is an apt call when the final credits are accompanied by an old recording in which Zora Neale Hurston is heard singing. But this is a clear case in which content is far, far more important than any shortcomings. What is recorded here makes this a significant film, one that has to be recommended.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Kamau Sadiki, Emmett Lewis, Joycelyn Davis, Venetta Henson, Karlos Finley, Kern Jackson, Joe Womack, Lorna Woods, Ramsey Sprague, Darron Patterson, Ben Raines, Veda Tunstall, Anderson Flen, Mary Elliott, James Delgado.
Dir Margaret Brown, Pro Margaret Brown, Screenplay Margaret Brown and Kern Jackson, Ph Justin Zweifach and Zac Manuel, Ed Michael Bloch, Music Ray Angry, Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell.
Higher Ground Productions/Participant/Two One Five Entertainment-Netflix.
109 mins. USA. 2022. US and UK Rel: 21 October 2022. Cert. PG.
