DESCENDANT FOLLOWS the members of Africatown in Mobile, Alabama, a small community composed of the descendants of the Clotilda, the last-known slave ship to dock on the shores of America in 1860. The ship arrived decades after it became illegal to import enslaved humans — the result of a flimsy "bet" between two arrogant white men, a Plantation owner named Timothy Meaher and the Captain named William Foster. Approximately 110 Africans were kidnapped from their homelands and brought in the vessel to Alabama, before the owners ordered for an empty Clotilda to be burned to wipe out all evidence of their 'journey'. The victims were enslaved until the Civil War ended chattel slavery in 1865, after which the freed men and women founded their own small community on the outskirts of Mobile.
But with no official accounts or "proof" of their arrival — and with a general lack of agency afforded to Black people — it was left up to the residents themselves to pass down the facts about Clotilda to subsequent generations. It was left up to them to lend these stories the aura of mythmaking and gatekeeping at once. It wasn't until 1927 that an anthropologist named Zola Neale Hurston met with Cudjo Lewis, the ship's last living survivor. Yet, even then, the book she wrote — Barracoon — wasn't published until as recently as 2018. Passages from the book double up as a voiceover for the documentary. For more than a century, though, the residents kept their history alive through word of mouth, pride and self-education alone — a feat all the more impressive in an era of not just White America's disenfranchising of immigrant stories but also the increasingly revisionist subtext of new-age democracies.
With countries like India using their film industries to revise religious folklore in tandem with the political landscape, a film like Descendant is profound for the course-correctional antidote it aspires to be. Several folklorists are interviewed in Descendant, as are a few white journalists, one of whom seems to be very pleased with himself for making a difference to Africatown. His presence suggests that Descendant is, in part at least, an investigative "thriller" about the 2019 discovery of the remains of the slave ship — damning proof that the rest of the nation needs in order to officially crown the town (and turn it into a tourist trap). The film is shot across these few years of cautious optimism, chronicling the today leading up to the uncovering of the remnants of a haunting yesterday.
Thankfully, Descendant is much bigger than this one event, and it doesn't shy away from expressing its thoughtfulness through the residents it speaks to. The older ones are melancholic and relieved, but the younger ones are not entirely convinced that they can be defined by evidence of where they came from. That the governor and the shipwreck experts and the do-gooders are all white only fuels a sense of resentment — and belief that only they should be in charge of deciding how their story is presented to the watching world. The access of the film-maker is impressive, because her gaze is what prevents their story from descending into a passionate footnote of ethnic activism. These are people who are well aware of the bittersweet contradictions of being lauded by a country that needed the sight of debris to take them seriously.
At one point, the camera quietly follows one of them as she looks in wonder at her own segment in the Smithsonian Museum, letting viewers take in the enormity of generational trauma. At another point, the camera interviews one of the aged descendants of the oppressors — a reluctant symbol of white guilt — in his sprawling property, letting the viewers draw their own conclusions about the economic disparities and the very tangible spoils of 'blood money'. At yet another point, a descendant of a survivor meets with a (sheepish) descendant of Captain Foster on a boat, a moment planned by the journalist whose work led to the discovery of the wreckage. It may look and feel like a staged scene, but it also evokes the film's perceptive reading of closure — and how it's really in the eyes of the sufferer. It's an awkward scene at best, which further goes on to renew the shattered link between ancient history and modern-day storytelling.
Most of those in power want to rewrite history, in its most literal form, instead of creating more of it. And the 'characters' in these stories are thanked for their contributions and courage, before being relegated to the sidelines of capitalist ships that have sailed long before any balance is restored. Descendant is a moving testament to this tragic circularity. It chooses the right way: to listen to the storytellers rather than spotlight their story. Not all of it is easy to watch — the narrative is fluid and slow-burning — but not once did I feel like using the term "talking head" while writing about this documentary. If that isn't a sign of Margaret Brown's rare marriage of art and archive, I don't know what is.
Descendant is streaming on Netflix
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