Traces of the Trade airs tonight
PBS will air the national broadcast premiere of Traces of the Trade on P.O.V. The film was also shown at the Sundance Festival.
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North is a unique and disturbing journey of discovery into the history and "living consequences" of one of the United States' most shameful episodes — slavery. 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.
Many Episcopalians who attended General Convention in 2006 saw the first cut of this film. It is a moving story that ranges from Rhode Island to Africa as her family tries to come to terms with its complicity in slavery.
As the film recounts, the DeWolf name has been honored through generations, both in the family's hometown of Bristol, R.I., 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.
The film is scheduled for 10 p.m. June 24. Check your local schedule for times in your area.
Read more here.
Interview with filmaker, Katrina Browne here.
More on another member of the family in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.
...Hale, a Superfund project manager with the Environmental Protection Agency in downtown Seattle. She was curious and felt compelled to explore the moral questions Browne raised. But it was not a trip she undertook lightly."I felt the heaviness of it," Hale said. "It felt complicated. I was kind of ashamed to tell people where I was going and what I was doing. It's not something you wear with pride."
Viewers will share that sense of disquiet as Browne's quiet, somber storytelling lays bare the tangible horrors of the slave trade and the extent of Northern involvement. It's impossible not to be moved, for example, by the sight of Cape Castle, Ghana, where a grim, windowless dungeon held 1,000 captives at a time for delivery to slave ships.
Equally powerful is the effect on the DeWolf descendants, who grow frayed and emotional as the trip wears on. At one point in the film, Hale dissolves into tears, fearing the group is just a bunch of "pathetic" white people trying to absolve their guilt.
In some places the film is showing later in the week.
Here are the dates and times it is being show in Boston (I looked it up for my family there):
Thu, June 26, 3am, WGBH 44
Sun, June 29, 9pm, WGBH 44
Mon, June 30, 10pm, WGBH 2
Our public TV station, UNC-TV in North Carolina, has only one showing, on the 27th at 2 a.m.! The Vice-Chair of our diocesan Anti-Racism Committee (which I have the honor of chairing) has already written to the station to complain and a few of us are doing the same. It's important for us in the South to see this film too. Our local TV station also neglected to show the documentary "Sisters of Selma" a year or two ago, about Catholic nuns in the Civil Rights Movement.
Do see the film if you can. And please complain to your local PBS station if it is showing it at a ridiculous time.
We're having a daylong event on the racial history of the Diocese of North Carolina in early September (I suspect I'll be writing about it in my column here that month) and although the event will be very much focused on the details of our particular region, we are showing "Traces of the Trade" as a conversation starter. (Our event will be called "Traces of Our Trade."
It would be great to hear from folks who have viewed the movie in both North and South. We're grateful to Katrina Browne and her family for telling this important story.
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June 24, 2008 10:03 PM