Slavers In The Family

How Philly native Katrina Browne confronted her ties to America's original sin, and why the nation should follow her lead.

by Sam Adams

TRAIL OF FEARS: Browne (left), with director of photography Liz Dory, retraced her family's steps, starting in Bristol, R.I. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Growing up, Katrina Browne took American ideals personally. Raised in Society Hill, she felt connected to the principles that had been laid down two centuries earlier and mere blocks from her front door. At school (St. Peter's, then Springside, and later Princeton), she gravitated toward civics and history, puzzled that others thought such subjects "a yawner."

"I think I just took to the ideals of the founding of our nation," she recalls by phone from Boston, where she now lives. "'Why wouldn't I?' was the feeling. Why wouldn't anybody?"

So when Browne found out she was descended from the largest slave trader in American history, it knocked her for something of a loop.

In 1996, when Browne was in her late 20s, her maternal grandmother compiled an amateur family history, tracing their lineage back to James DeWolf, a prominent Rhode Island businessman and politician. Born in Bristol, R.I., in 1764, DeWolf served in the Rhode Island House of Representatives for 40 years, on and off, and as a U.S. senator. His ships were outfitted as privateers to fight for the U.S. in the War of 1812. In Bristol, the DeWolfs were revered, the family home preserved as a museum. Visiting the town, Brown says, was a mythical experience, like stepping into a fairy tale.

But a single sentence in her grandmother's chronicle with regard to the origins of DeWolf's fortune set Browne reeling: "I haven't the stomach to describe the ensuing slave trade."

As she began to research, Browne discovered that the DeWolfs were not just any slave traders, but the most prolific slavers in U.S. history, shipping tens of thousands of Africans to the West Indies and returning home with ships full of molasses, which could be converted into rum. In The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker relates a voyage in which DeWolf tied a sick African woman to a chair and threw her overboard rather than risk infecting the rest of his human cargo. He was tried for murder and acquitted. When asked if he repented his actions, DeWolf said he was sorry to lose a fine chair.

In family lore, James DeWolf and the descendents who followed in his footsteps were memorialized as rascals and rapscallions, or as pirates sailing the high seas. But lurking somewhere underneath was a tacit, almost vestigial understanding of the family's dark past. Although Browne to this day cannot remember the conversation, her college roommate remembers them discussing Browne's family ties to the slave trade long before she received her grandmother's booklet.

"At first, I was shocked," Browne recalls. "And then I realized I already knew, and the shock was that I had repressed it."

As Browne delved further into the subject, she saw that she was not alone in her amnesia. She began to see her family's whitewashed history as part of a larger pattern of erasure, obliterating the history of slavery in the North in favor of the myth of slavery as a uniquely Southern sin.

Browne, then earning her master's at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, was writing her thesis on the role of film in fostering civic dialogue. So rather than confronting her past on her own, she decided to turn her family's story into a documentary about the lingering wounds of slavery. She contacted more than 200 members of her extended family and asked them to explore the DeWolfs' ugly history with her.

Traces of the Trade follows Browne and nine of her relatives from Bristol to Ghana, where sugar that had been processed into molasses or rum was traded for slaves, and thence to the family plantations in Cuba, where slaves harvested sugar to be sent back to the States. Originally scheduled to screen as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival, Traces' screening has been moved to April 24 to avoid conflict with the Clinton/Obama debate.

Retracing their family's steps, the DeWolf descendents grapple not only with their historical ties to the slave trade, but the present-day legacy of slavery, and what, if any, responsibility they might bear.

Although the movie tells a fascinating and largely unknown story, its most gripping moments are those in which the DeWolfs grapple with their family legacy. In Ghana, in Cuba and back home in Bristol, they hash out their own understanding of what it means to owe part of their current lives to the greatest inhumanity in U.S. history. In one discussion, Jim DeWolf Perry V, a retired Foreign Service officer, bristles at the notion that his family roots might have helped him get into Harvard. But a quick survey reveals that all but one of the 10 DeWolf descendents at the table attended an Ivy League school. (Browne herself is fourth-generation Princeton.)

The DeWolfs benefited directly, but Traces argues that the U.S. owes its very existence to the profits of slave labor. Historian Ronald Bailey says that, without slavery, there might have been no United States of America, quoting John Adams: "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence." Without molasses, and the slave labor that produced it, the colonies lacked the economic strength to break free of Britain. Adams, a lifelong opponent of slavery, allowed Thomas Jefferson's condemnation of slavery to be cut from the Declaration of Independence in order to assure its passage, and the budding nation further compromised on abolishing the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention, delaying it 20 years. Officially, 2008 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the American slave trade, although DeWolf and his heirs continued their business long after it was declared illegal.

Even those who did not profit directly could not avoid paying into the slave economy. Slave-farmed cotton helped fuel the textile revolution, and the fortunes of slave-owning and slave-trading families were channeled into industry. "The people who come as turn-of-the century immigrants to work in the factories, who think of themselves as totally disconnected from slavery, are actually coming to the land where the streets are paved with gold precisely because of how slavery was underpinning the economy," Browne says. "That was definitely a revelation in my mind."

GHANA, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: Browne and nine of her relatives traveled to Africa to acknowledge their ancestors' misdeeds. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Descended from a different branch of the family, Thomas Norman DeWolf was tied only indirectly to the family's legacy. He attended the University of Oregon; his father worked his way through night school. By phone from his home in Portland, Tom DeWolf says that what prompted him to accompany the others on the trip was not a sense of personal culpability, but the chance to explore the connection that the country as a whole has to slavery, whether through blood ties or collateral prosperity. "More important than the familial connection was the impact on our nation," he says. "That's really what I was seeking."

It was also, he admits, to fulfill his longstanding desire to write a book. Inheriting the Trade (Beacon Press) was published earlier this year, to coincide with Tracing the Trade's Sundance premiere.

For much of his life, DeWolf admits, racism seemed like an important but vague issue, like the conflict in Northern Ireland or divesting from apartheid South Africa. "It wasn't like I was completely oblivious," he says. "But the reality is that it was an arm's-length situation for me, which I think makes me pretty typical of white people in this country."

Talking to DeWolf and Browne, Barack Obama's Philadelphia address on race matters is never far away, and DeWolf's words bring it to the surface. His willingness to describe himself as "typical" evokes the furor that erupted when Obama, in the middle of trading pleasantries with Angelo Cataldi, referred to his maternal grandmother as a "typical white person" who experiences an ingrained discomfort when she sees people of a different race. Within hours, the blogosphere was boiling with accusations that Obama had finally shown his true colors. "Seriously, Barack Obama thinks all white people are racist," went one Huffington Post response.

Browne, who refers to Obama's address as simply "the speech," says her experience bears out his notion of a racial stalemate. For white Americans, she says, "The feeling is that at a very primal level if we're going to show up for this conversation about racial equality and the lingering effects of slavery, we're going to have to feel bad. So we avoid the conversation." Although Obama explicitly said that he was not accusing his grandmother of harboring racial animosity, merely raising the issue was enough to provoke an outpouring of resentment.

Browne has had her own struggles with white guilt. In college, she cut her blond hair short after reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, feeling that her pale skin and blue eyes were an affront to ideals of black beauty. She sang in Princeton's gospel choir, but kept to herself, worried about "bothering" its mostly black membership.

It would be easy to dismiss Traces of the Trade as an act of liberal self-flagellation, and there are times when the combination of roundtable discussions and self-reflective voiceover verges on self-indulgence, a concern the youngest member of Browne's group raises in the film. But while she admits the danger for solipsism, she says that internal dialogue — whites talking to whites — is a vital step, if only the first of many.

"I'm a firm believer in the interconnection between the psychological, emotional terrain and the external, more bread-and-butter concerns: public policy, social conditions, politics," says Browne. "People, including some of my relatives, have said to me, 'You should just be out there helping black people. Roll up your sleeves and get to work.' But the inequality issues are structural and systemic, and to solve them, we need more commitment to solving them in legislative and economic and structural ways. It doesn't look to me like most white Americans are committed to that. And I think the reason for that is more in the realm of the stories we tell ourselves about whether this is our problem or not."

Tom DeWolf, who served as a city councilor and arts commissioner for nearly 20 years, says that, while an individual's guilt may perish with him, a country's responsibilities never die. Like most of Traces of the Trade's participants, he emerged from the experience believing that the U.S. needs to formally acknowledge, and preferably apologize for, the harm done by slavery. "It isn't to make any one person feel better," he says. "It's more of an attempt at cleansing the wound, so that collectively we can release the guilt and start over." He also supports the idea of reparations as formulated by Charles Ogletree, who favors establishing a trust fund to distribute money on the basis of need, with particular emphasis on what he calls the "bottom-stuck."

DeWolf quotes the Ghanian poet Kofi Anyidoho, whom they met with on their journey. Slavery, Anyidoho says, is "a living wound under a patchwork of scars." For it to heal, the scars must first be removed, and the wound cleaned. "That means getting into this stuff deeply," DeWolf says. "It's not just acknowledging. It's a multistep process, and becoming aware is only the first step."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Traces of the Trade screening and discussion with Katrina Browne and Thomas DeWolf, Thu., April 24, 6:30 p.m. (for Constitution Center members only) and 8:30 p.m. (open to the public, $15), National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St., 215-409-6700, constitutioncenter.org.