St. James Episcopal Church hosted a screening of the documentary film, “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North” last Thursday. The film was presented in collaboration with Wooster’s Department of Africana Studies and the Center for Diversity and Global Engagement. The documentary was shown as part of a series on PBS, featured at Sundance Film Festival, won the Henry Hampton Award for Film Making and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Historical Film Making. This was the film’s second stop on its tour around northeast Ohio.
“Traces of the Trade” followed Katrina Browne and nine of her cousins on their quest to uncover the dark past of their wealthy New England ancestors, the DeWolfs, involvement in the slave trade.† The documentary followed the family as they traveled from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back ó the same route their ancestors traveled to fuel the slave trade.
Dain Perry, one of the cousins featured in the film, and his wife, Constance, spoke before the film began.† Dain Perry reflected on the film and explained how it is about the history of injustice and said, “If people were directed to know that this was wrong, this awful history could have been avoided.”
He continued, “We need to better understand the past so we can understand our relationships and current challenges.”
Constance followed up by sharing the quote, “We live our life going forward, but we understand our life by looking back.”
Unfortunately, as stated in the documentary, “there is an intentional amnesia about the way the story of slavery has been told.”† Major details about the slave trade have been left out of the textbook version of its history, making it difficult for Americans to fully understand the nation’s past and its current impact today.† The purpose of the documentary is to uncover the truths of the slave trade that have been buried in American history.
The documentary began with Browne explaining what she knew about her ancestors.† They were a wealthy, New England family who practically built the town of Bristol, Rhode Island. Browne remarked, “Looking around, they seemed like royalty in this town… I always wondered how they got so established.”
While in seminary, Browne’s grandmother revealed to all of the grandchildren that the family’s wealth came from the slave trade.† At one point in time, James DeWolf was the second richest man in the United States.† The DeWolf family alone brought 10,000 Africans to the Rhode Island ports ó the most slaves brought to the Western hemisphere by any slave trader in history.
The slave trade business stayed within the DeWolf family for three generations. One cousin stated in the documentary, “It’s embarrassing, you would think they would know it was wrong and put an end to it.”†† Everyone in the family who heard this news was shocked and upset, and they all wanted to figure out how to repair the damage their ancestors had done.
Throughout the film, the audience watched as the family realized how the traces of the slave trade are still very present in today’s world.† Things as small as mean-spirited nursery rhymes passed down from generation to generation of the DeWolf family turned out to be about the two child-slaves James DeWolf had bought for his wife as Christmas presents.
A major misconception about the slave trade that was revealed in the film was the depth of the North’s involvement.† Rhode Island was the most complacent state in the U.S. during the slave trade and a hub for trading. The majority of ships used in transportation were made in Massachusetts, and most wealthy New Englanders owned two to three of their own slaves.
According to a historian interviewed in the film, “everyone on the coast lived off the slave trade in some way; rather it be making goods for the travels, shipbuilding or actually slave trading.”† But, the North managed to create an identity of heroic abolitionists, even though, the documentary reveals, many of its citizens were still taking part in enabling slavery.
With 30 million people still enslaved in the world today, the documentary and its makers hope to draw attention to a past tragedy in order to help solve the challenges of the world’s current enslavement problems.