Descendant. 2022. USA. Directed by Margaret Brown. Screenplay by Brown, Kern Jackson. DCP. 109 min.
Some histories refuse to stay buried. Congress abolished the international slave trade in 1808, in a gesture that should have stopped the Atlantic slave trade in its tracks. But in 1860 slave trader Timothy Meaher nevertheless embarked to Africa, returning to Mobile, Alabama, with over 100 souls. Evidence of the ship that carried them, known as the Clotilda, endured in photographs, oral histories (including those documented by Zora Neale Hurston), and the small Black enclave called Africatown. But the ship itself remained hidden away in the depths of the Mobile River.
Using a stunning array of interviews and documentary footage, Margaret Brown’s Descendant tracks the efforts of the descendants of those enslaved people—among the very last Africans to arrive in the United States as slaves—to recover evidence of that storied ship. Stunning drone shots of this these environs push further contexts to the forefront, as visible traces of the enduring inequalities of the region—disparities exacerbated by Katrina and the legacy of environmental racism and zoning laws—remind us of just how proximate these living descendants remain to the enslavement of their ancestors.