P.O.V. "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North"

- Filmmaker and Relatives Retrace Global Slave Trade Conducted by Their New England Ancestors -

"Powerful is an inadequate word to describe the impact of Katrina Browne's 'Traces of the Trade' ... Browne's clear-headed film represents an intense and searing call for national dialogue."

- Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, one might think the tragedy of African slavery in the Americas has been exhaustively told. Katrina Browne thought the same, until she discovered that her slave-trading ancestors from Rhode Island were not an aberration. Rather, they were just the most prominent actors in the North's vast complicity in slavery, buried in myths of northern innocence.

Browne -- a direct descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, the first slaver in the family -- took the unusual step of writing to 200 descendants, inviting them to journey with her from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back, recapitulating the Triangle Trade that made the DeWolfs the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Nine relatives signed up. "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North" is Browne's spellbinding account of the journey that resulted. The program airs Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 10:00-11:30 p.m. (check local listings) on PBS, launching the 21st season of P.O.V.. American television's longest-running independent documentary series, P.O.V. is public television's premier showcase for point-of-view, nonfiction films and a 2007 recipient of the Special News & Documentary Emmy Award for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking.

As the film recounts, the DeWolf name has been honored over the generations in the family's hometown of Bristol, Rhode Island, and on the national stage. Family members have been prominent citizens: professors, writers, legislators, philanthropists, Episcopal priests and bishops. If the DeWolfs' slave trading was mentioned at all, it was in an offhand way, with reference to scoundrels and rapscallions.

Then Browne's grandmother opened the door a crack. She wrote a DeWolf history booklet with a brief but pointed reference to the slave trade, which prompted Browne to look deeper. What she learned, and the journey she undertook with other DeWolf descendants, retracing early America's infamous trade in rum, slaves and sugar, revealed secrets hidden in plain sight. Archival documents -- from logs and diaries to detailed business correspondence, cancelled checks and sales records detailing a global economy -- unsettle not just a family, but a nation's assumptions about its not-so-distant history.

With the exception of Tom DeWolf, who wrote a book about the trip, Inheriting the Trade, several of the 10 DeWolf descendants are Ivy League graduates. The family's preponderance of elite alma maters shows that its privilege endures. The DeWolf slave fortunes were plowed into other, legitimate businesses, a pattern matched in the larger U.S. economy.

From this extraordinary family angle, "Traces of the Trade" sets out to plumb contentious questions: What is the full story of the northern slave trade? What responsibility does white America bear for the past wrongs and contemporary legacy of slavery? Why is it so difficult for black and white Americans to have this conversation? Intrepid, candid, intellectually engaged and, for better or worse, "unfailingly Protestant and polite," Browne and her relatives set out to face the facts -- and themselves.

The family gathers in Bristol, where the DeWolf name is writ large as traders and rum distillers whose entrepreneurship built the city. Traces of the slave trade are few, but include the gravestone of an enslaved African girl, Adjua. In 1803, she and a young boy, Pauledore, were "given" as Christmas gifts by James D'Wolf (the spelling at that time) to his wife. They are remembered in a family nursery rhyme.

Browne and her relatives fly to Ghana, where the old slave forts provide discomfiting lessons in slavery's cruelty and injustice. They learn that local West African tribes have a tradition of naming children for their day of birth: so Adjua was born on a Monday.

In Havana, where the DeWolfs either farmed out enslaved Africans to the sugar plantations they owned (which supplied their Bristol distilleries) or sold the slaves for large profits on the open market, Browne's group is nearly overcome by frustration and a sense of helplessness. Worn down by travel, tension, the accumulating weight of slavery's detailed brutality -- and more antagonism than their good intentions led them to expect -- they confront the questions that have been haunting them: How has their experience affected their views of the black/white divide in America? If they accept some responsibility for the "living consequences" of their ancestors' crimes, what can they do to make amends?

One "secret" excavated by "Traces of the Trade" is that the DeWolfs were not just participants in the slave trade -- they were the largest slave traders in American history. This one family, whose name adorns the stained glass windows they donated to Bristol's St. Michael's Episcopal Church, brought more than 10,000 African slaves to the Americas. Up to half a million of these Africans' descendants are alive today.

Another fact obscured by post-Civil War mythologies is that the entire northeastern seaboard was deeply implicated in the trade right up to the war. The Triangle Trade sustained the growing economies of northern seaports like Bristol. Locals may have thought of the DeWolfs as distillers and traders who supported ship-building, warehousing, insurance and other trades and businesses, but it was common knowledge that the basis was the cheap labor and huge profits reaped from trafficking in human beings.

"In 'Traces of the Trade,' we wanted ask this question: What is our responsibility?" says Browne. "I'm less concerned with understanding the extreme inhumanity of my ancestors than with understanding the mundane, ordinary complicity of the majority of New Englanders who participated in a slave-based economy. That had more parallels to me and my family today: well-intentioned white folks who are still part of systems that do harm. It's important to roll up our sleeves to deal with what we all inherited from our country's history."

"Traces of the Trade" is a probing essay into divergent versions of a history that continue to divide black and white in America, North and South.

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