If you’ve ever wondered what a ‘holding space’ actually looks like, Margaret Brown’s very careful documentary Descendants offers a moving example. The film tells the intertwined story of the search and rescue of the Clotilda, the last ship that brought enslaved Africans to the United States, and the descendants of those people, many of whom live in Africatown, Alabama. talking about experience. of mobile.
Kamau Sadiki, a scuba diver at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Slave Shipwreck Project, holds a small shell as part of a ritual to hear the “voices of the ancestors.” Or how folklorist Dr. Khan Jackson lovingly watches a videotaped interview with descendant Martha West Davis as he recounts how Africatown got its name. with young children walking toward the grave of Kajo Kazoura Lewis, the last living POW and a direct relative of Emmett. Or the inspiring resident reading “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo'” by Zora Neale Hurston, who interviewed Lewis in 1927 and told his story in his own lommily trope. Hurston, an anthropologist, folklorist, and filmmaker, wrote this book in 1931. Published in 2018.
According to descendants, Clotilda came to lie at the bottom of the Mobile River because trafficker Timothy Meeher believed he could bring enslaved people into the country after transportation was banned. because you bet. He did it in his 1860 and tried to cover up his evidence.
In fact, Descendants has a river of exploitation and lies running through it, drawing links to slavery, post-Reconstruction land grabbing, and the pollution of Africatown by nearby industry. The film is brimming with empathetic and insightful subject matter. Native environmental organizer Ramsay Sprague sits in front of a computer screen pointing to parcels of land around Africatown that are zoned for heavy industry and owned by the Meer family. (The family did not respond to the director’s request, but issued a statement in 2021.) Joycelyn Davis, a cancer survivor and another of Lewis’ descendants, was initially indifferent to the shipwreck search. There is one thing she admits: she focuses on local polluters.
Brown’s critically acclaimed 2008 documentary film The Order of Myths, which tells the story of Mobile’s quarantined Mardi Gras celebrations. Here Brown, who was born and raised in Mobile and is white, not only speaks to the blacks who live in Africatown, but to other stewards of the more complete American history still coming to light, like Sadiki of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian. Prioritize talking. Curator Mary Elliott. She gently reminds some descendants that even with the physical evidence of the schooner, the community must continue to tell their story and continue to make Oral Her history.
descendants
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. watch on netflix.