NewEnglandFilm.com

The hidden legacy of Katrina Browne’s wealthy, influential, politically-connected Rhode Island DeWolf ancestors is that they were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.  This knowledge exploded into Browne’s life nine years ago when she discovered that from 1769 to 1820, the DeWolfs became wealthy by trafficking in human beings.   

Rum made in Bristol, RI distilleries was sold for African women, men, and children, who were then taken to DeWolf-owned sugar plantations in Cuba.  DeWolf sugar was then brought back to family-owned rum distilleries in Rhode Island.  Slaves were either sold at auction in Cuba,  in Charleston, NC, or held until their price rose before they were sold.  Thousands of Africans were transported and exploited in this way while the DeWolf fortune and influence grew.  It is estimated that a half a million descendants of the Triangle Trade, the route between Bristol, West Africa, Cuba and back to Bristol, are alive today.    

Although the U.S. Congress passed a federal law outlawing the slave trade in 1808, many ignored this law and clandestine trading continued in the North.  In 1820, a federal law passed that equated slave trading with piracy, punishable by death.  Yet, Rhode Island did not formally abolish slavery until 1843 and it was not until 1865 that slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.  The DeWolf family, pillars of the Episcopal Church and personal friends of Thomas Jefferson, traded slaves long after it was declared illegal and they owned plantations in Cuba years after the Civil War ended.   

Browne’s feature length film, Traces of the Trade:  A Story from the Deep North, documents her remarkable personal journey as she and nine family members uncover the hidden enterprise of slave trading in the North and their family’s role in it.  In the film, they retrace the Triangle Trade route:  Bristol to a slave fort in Ghana, to ruins of a family owned sugar plantation in Cuba, and back to Bristol.  At each step on the way, they attempt to confront the exploitative racism, bigotry, and complicity of their forebears.   They grapple with this history, expressing deep anguish as they uncover the enormity of the trade’s evils.   

They also worry that they’re just a bunch of white liberals trying to assuage their guilt about their ancestral family rather than dealing with the living consequences of what their findings might mean in today’s world.  A relative of Browne’s says, “I buy things made by people not being paid what they’re worth all the time.”  Browne’s film demands audiences to consider her family’s journey in relation to how Americans define home, family, and freedom everyday.  Traces of the Trade premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month.  NewEnglandFilm.com interviewed her when she returned to her Boston home. 

Hermine Muskat:  What is the main message of Traces of the Trade? 

Katrina Browne:  The film is about setting the record straight regarding the massive role the North played in the slave trade.  It follows me and my family members as we uncover both our Rhode Island ancestors’ and the North’s complicity in that.  We try to show that slavery was part of the economic foundation of our country and it was not just, as we have been taught, in the South.  The struggles we encountered in making the film reveal how difficult private as well as public conversations about slavery, racism and inequality can be, even in our times.   

HM: What were some of the influences on you for the making of this particular film? 

Browne:  My director’s statement explains that I wrote an undergraduate thesis about Vichy France’s complicity in the Holocaust and the country’s subsequent amnesia.  While it’s a crude analogy, France is to Germany with regard to the Holocaust, as the North is to the South with regard to slavery.  Victors write the history books and thus forget their guilt.

At 28, when I was in seminary, I received a booklet from my grandmother about our family history.  When I read a sentence about the DeWolf’s slave trading in Bristol, I was shocked but realized immediately that I already knew about my family’s role in the slave trade, but had somehow buried it.  So the bigger shock was my very own amnesia.  I  didn’t go to film school and wasn’t even an aspiring filmmaker but was interested in how to use film to dialogue.  

HM:  How was your recent experience at Sundance?   

Browne:  It was terrific.  We hosted a panel with Congressman John Conyers who has been proposing legislation since 1989 to create a national truth and reconciliation process for the U.S. to look at the legacy of slavery and stimulate national debate about continued inequalities for African Americans.  He came to Sundance on behalf of our film, which was a huge honor since 2008 is the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade.  

HM:  Were you approached by distributors for the film? 

Browne:  We did not get any theatrical offers at Sundance and we are applying to other festivals now.  But we’ve had hundreds of requests to screen the film from all over the country, from museums and historical societies, from schools and churches, groups and conferences on anti-racism, the national parks service.  Our hands are more than full with community screenings and schools and if any theatres want to book us directly, that would be terrific.   

I don’t know the final figures but only one or two docs have a theatrical release from Sundance this year.  After An Inconvenient Truth and Sicko, docs did so poorly at the box office last year that distributors weren’t buying this year at Sundance.   

We have been talking to POV — that was made official and final at Sundance — so we’re going to be on the air in June.   

HM:  What were some unexpected things that happened during production of the film?   

Browne:  At first I assumed my DeWolf ancestors were the only exception — that they must have been the only slave traders in RI.  But, the more I dug, the worse it got.  They were just one part of a slave trade based primarily in the northern states, a trade that was a cornerstone of Northern commercial life.  Textile mills used slave-picked cotton from the South while banks and insurance companies played key roles while citizens bought shares in slave ships for profits.    

The slave trade was illegal for most of the time that the DeWolfs were involved.  Thomas Jefferson was a personal friend of James DeWolf and a brother-in-law of the customs officer he appointed in Bristol who then turned his head to slave ships that were coming in and out of the harbor.  This is pretty amazing information.  It was the classic experience. You pull one thread and more facts emerge and then everything begins to unravel.  

HM:  How long did it take to make the film? 

Browne:  Nine years. 

HM:  How large was your crew? 

Browne:  We had two camera crews for each country we were in.  We were also committed to people feeling less self conscious-when we had interracial dialogues so we had a Ghanian crew in Ghana and a Cuban crew in Cuba and when we had any interracial dialogue and that really did make a difference, particularly in Ghana.   

HM:  What would you like viewers to take away from the film?  

Browne:  An important thing viewers respond to is that almost all of us have grown up being taught that the North was the good guy and the South — the perpetrators of slavery.  When I take the train from Boston to New York, and go through the northeast corridor’s New England port towns, I now know they were all totally tied into the slave trade.  This is mind boggling to me.   

Peeling through these emotionally-loaded layers reinforces my sense that there’s so much here that still needs to be untangled, so much healing that still needs to take place and we have to be creative in how one part of our inheritance is to encourage white America to take responsibility for our ancestors.   

HM:  What has become of your family traveling companions? 

Browne:  All of those who signed on for the journey trusted me to be fair in how they were represented in the film.  There was a lot of sensitivity about [perceptions of being] monied.  Some of them were well off and others weren’t.  This was a highly charged issue since people did not want it to seem that their money was inherited from slave trading. 

We had a follow-up meeting and some family members who didn’t take the journey [decided to come] and it was striking.  Like a family reunion but one that dealt with important moral issues.  Everyone was amazed at how powerful it felt to combine family with being a citizen of a larger community.  It’s a potent combination that has been a side effect of this journey — that we’ve found each other by coming together to do this public work.   

HM: What is your hope for the film? 

Browne:  I would definitely like to see it shown in schools.  And, my greatest passion is for adults to see it and get to the heart of the matter, to the black-white divide, so that it goes beyond the usual Q & A at screenings and festivals…so that people have the chance to respond strongly, so that it will trigger important conversations that move way beyond me and my family to where people really talk to each other.  We have this fear of talking in public places about racism.  Many people say ‘How can I be a racist.  I never even interact with black people.’  They aren’t aware of or don’t look at societal outcomes that are still unequal, that we all still need to deal with.   

HM:  Will there be another film?  

Browne:  I don’t know.  I’m on the fence.  I’m involved now with outreach and distribution that’s going to keep me busy for at least a year.  I’m really interested in getting it out to all different types of community groups…churches and schools…so I’m going to see where that leads me.  Whether it’s to another film or not, I don’t know.  

For more information see www.tracesofhtetrade.org.