Descendant (Brown, 2022) is streaming on Netflix
The first steps towards the ending of slavery in the United States was the banning of the importation of enslaved people into the country in 1807 – 55 years before the Emancipation Proclamation and 57 years before all slaves were effectively freed by the end of the Civil War.
The banning of importation effectively made existing slave owners even richer because the only legal way to produce more slaves was to breed them. Thus, a black market was born with slave traders still finding their way to Africa for people and then smuggling them ashore to be hidden away on plantations where they may never be seen again.
The Clotilda, the last illegal slave ship, arrived in the Mobile River, Alabama, in 1860. She was disguised as a lumber ship with a false deck hiding 110 souls. The human beings were taken ashore and then the boat was torched and then sunk, the evidence of the (capital) crime sitting at the bottom a muddy river.
Five years later, the Clotilda-enslaved people were freed and many returned to the place where they had landed, still owned by the wealthy Meaher family who had procured them from across the sea.
With no way to return home, they negotiated the purchase of a small amount of land from the Meahers and attempted to start lives as free people. The community became known as Africatown, and it still exists, surrounded on all sides by land still owned by the Meaher family (their company is known as Chippewa Lakes which gives you an idea about how they felt about the original occupants of the land as well as these new ones) and corrupted by toxic heavy industries that made the people sick.
The lives of these two communities – Africatown and the Meahers – are thus still entwined many generations later and the title of Margaret Brown’s superb documentary (Descendant) relates to both: enslaved people and their former owners.
The discovery of the wreck of the Clotilda in 2019 ignited another controversy as it became clear that the Meahers had known about its location for decades and concealed it, therefore leaving the Clotilda descendants in ongoing ignorance about their history.
Superbly constructed and full of wonderful, articulate characters, Descendant builds on the story of the discovery and gives the people of Africatown visibility to the world for the first time.
I think it’s essential viewing.
