By Terri Finch Hamilton
The Grand Rapids Press
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) -- Katrina Browne stood in the slave fort in Ghana, a film camera documenting her journey with nine relatives to learn how their ancestors became the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.
"Our feet were on the hard-packed dirt that contained human excrement from hundreds of years before," Browne recalled.
"We were told about the circumstances of the people who were held there. Suddenly, the battery on the camera light went out, and we were in complete darkness. Everybody started making their way to the exit, but I said, 'Let's just stand here.' We knew the horror of where we were standing.
"It was the longest 10 minutes of our lives.
"Before that, I didn't allow myself to try to feel what it was like to be a slave," Browne said. "It's too overwhelming, so you don't go there. Going to those sites, I let my heart break.
"Then, I thought, 'I can't imagine being a black person in America and not being angry all the time.'"
The 43-year-old Browne poured her passions and energies into directing and producing a documentary film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North," about her family's strong ties to slavery.
She appeared in Grand Rapids on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to show the film and lead an audience discussion with co-producer Juanita Brown.
The issue surfaced for Katrina Browne when her grandmother sent her a family history that included a reference to three generations of slave traders in the family. Curious, since her family was from Rhode Island.
Wasn't slave trading a Southern thing? Browne started exploring her family's past, and what she found haunted her. Her family was the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history, transporting more than 10,000 enslaved Africans.
Browne is the seventh generation descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, the family's first slave trader. From 1769 to 1820, the DeWolfs sailed from Bristol, R.I., to West Africa, where they traded rum for slaves.
Some of the thousands of captives were shipped to the five coffee or sugar plantations owned by the family in Cuba. Most were sold at auction in the United States.
The family grew wealthy, opening a bank, insurance company, auction house and distillery, and continued buying and selling slaves illegally well after the federal ban in 1808.
In 1998, Browne decided to make a film about the family's past and her efforts to come to grips with it.
She wrote to 200 DeWolf descendants, asking them to accompany her on a trip to Bristol, Ghana and Cuba, all stops on the slave trading route of their ancestors. Sixty relatives replied, she said, and nine decided to go with her.
The award-winning Emmy-nominated documentary traces their journey and its profound effect on them.
"I had incredible shock and upset that my ancestors were slave traders," said Browne, who lives in Boston. She tells of a group of school girls in Ghana who came to see her family while they were there. One said to her cousin, Ledlie Laughlin, 'Are you not ashamed to be here?'
"The other girls laughed nervously, like they couldn't believe she asked that," Browne recalled. "He said, 'Yes, I am ashamed. This is how I'm trying to make sense of my connection.' "
"None of us created it," Browne said, " but we're stuck with this legacy."
She and co-producer Juanita Brown have shown the film, which debuted in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, all over the world.
Most viewers are shocked to learn about the extent of slavery, said Brown, 37, who lives in Oakland, Calif.
"We know slavery was an integral part of the economy everywhere, including in the north," Brown says. "When people in the north hear this, they're blown away. We get a really strong reaction. We don't get taught this history at all."
When the film is over and the lights go up, the real insight begins, she said.
"It's good to show the film, but the discussion is everything," Brown said. "It gives white viewers permission to talk about the negative beliefs they grew up with, things they heard from white family members.
"We hear African-Americans say, 'This is really hard history to watch and relive but there's something trust-building about white people authentically acknowledging the past.
"It's huge," Brown said. "It feels like a gag order is being lifted."
She says there is some squirming in the audience.
"It's a radical act to sit together and talk about this thing that's been pressing against us for years. It's an opportunity for healing, for greater awareness, for greater honesty."
Published: Tue, Jan 18, 2011
