Descendant: the untold story of an illegal slave ship and the legacy it left behind
Still from Descendant. Photograph: AP
Margaret Brown doesn’t see herself as the director behind Descendant. “It’s not my story to tell,” she says about her Netflix documentary following activists in Africatown – a Black community in Mobile, Alabama – who rally to reclaim and preserve their history.
Many of Africatown’s citizens are descended from the Clotilda, the last recorded vessel to bring enslaved people into the United States in 1860. At the time, importing such human cargo was illegal. In her film, Brown, a Mobile-native who currently resides in Austin, Texas, interrogates the ways the narratives around the Clotilda and Africatown were recorded, framed or – like so much African American history – buried with intent.
Slaver-owner Timothy Meaher had the Clotilda’s captain William Foster burn and submerge the vessel in the Mobile River. They were getting rid of the evidence of their crime impacting the fate of the 110 captives they brought to the United States, along with their descendants. There was doubt and a shroud of secrecy cast over the Clotilda’s story – which was passed down orally among generations of descendants – until 2019, when its remains were found.
On a Zoom call with the Guardian, Brown describes her path to telling this story – and ultimately collaborating with executive producers such as Barack and Michelle Obama and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who is himself a descendant of the Clotilda. Brown’s 2008 documentary The Order Of The Myths explored her personal connection to the segregated Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile. The year she made that film, the Black Mardi Gras queen was Stefannie Lucas, a descendant of the Clotilda. The white Mardi Gras queen was Helen Meaher, a descendant of the enslaver. “(Helen) traveled all over the world with the movie,” says Brown.
Descendant tells the story of the Clotilda - the last known ship to smuggle stolen Africans to America - the unthinkable cover-up, and the impact of that crime on generations of descendants living in Africatown. Once the past is revealed, can the future be reclaimed? #Descendant
The filmmaker, who is also descended from slave-owners on her father’s side, assumed that given her proximity to the Meaher family she had an inside track. When the search for the Clotilda was underway, she pursued the opportunity to have those family members speak about their culpability, even though they have never done so in the past.
That didn’t pan out. The Meaher family, who own much of the land and exert a lot of influence in Mobile, remain a structuring absence in Descendant.
“I don’t think I would have made the film if I had known that’s where I’d be two years in,” Brown says. “I’m in a position that I wouldn’t have chosen. But I also knew at a certain point no one else can make this film. I have the connections. I already have the trust of the community. No one else is doing this. I really believe in their fight. So I’m going to fucking keep going.
“But I’m also going to be aware of the multitude of blind spots that I have as a (dyed) blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman.”
To cover those blind spots, Brown found a collaborator in her friend Essie Chambers – the Black daughter of civil rights activists – who helped shape the film as a producer. Brown also sought collective ways to tell this story while being mindful to always centre Africatown’s voices. In poetic passages, she enlists descendants Emmett Lewis to read testimonies from Clotilda survivor Cudjoe Lewis, which were recorded in 1927 by anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston (the first Black woman filmmaker) and published in her book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.
Brown’s ceaseless awareness about the lens framing history is felt throughout. The film regularly self-interrogates and sits in deeply uncomfortable moments where the white gaze needs to be checked.
In one particularly potent scene, the people of Africatown are gathered at a meeting after the Clotilda is found with officials from Mobile and the various organizations involved in the search. They’re listening to details from experts of what can be gleaned from the wreckage. National Geographic archaeologist Dr Fredrik Hiebert presents to the room an artist’s rendition of their ancestors’ voyage. The detailed illustration depicts naked Black bodies huddled and crowded below decks on their way to enslavement. Dr Hiebert, a white man who earlier told the people of Africatown that the Clotilda is “one of the great untold stories of American history”, describes the illustration as “wonderful”. He can barely contain a giddy enthusiasm, which starkly contrasts the grave faces in the audience processing the suffering and trauma rendered before them.
“That could have been the whole movie,” says Brown of a scene that encapsulated so much of what she was after. In that room was a collision of perspectives shaped by diverging agendas. Some were approaching this history to understand and preserve a part of their identity, while others to render it a spectacle.
“All I can see are people who are seeking a profit,” says Clotilda descendent Veda Tunstall, who Brown’s camera regularly returns to for a reality check. Tunstall is an activist and case management supervisor at the local hospital, speaking to the Guardian from her home in Mobile. She’s also a perceptive and skeptical voice when it comes to the intentions of those seeking to preserve or frame history.
Tunstall says “knowing the way Mobile works” informs her cynicism. The Meaher family are still deeply rooted in the area, which is a pervasive reason why descendants were raised to be quiet about the Clotilda and their history. Tunstall explains that the people who benefitted from enslaving her ancestors still hold power over their communities, whether it’s through zoning laws, tax structures or gentrification. She assumes that with such influence they stand to benefit again from any tourism money brought in by the Clotilda. “How are we going to fight against that?”
One person Tunstall isn’t skeptical about is Brown, despite the fact that the white director also stands to profit from the story of the Clotilda. Tunstall explains that she sees Brown as a helpful part of the community and affectionately describes the filmmaker as “a whole race unto herself”.
Meanwhile Brown, always on brand, raises an eyebrow at her own position: “That’s a major question right now in documentary? Who profits? I’m definitely thinking about that in terms of what the movie sold for and who gets that money?”
Questlove, Floyd Rance, Stephanie T. Rance, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and Margaret Brown attend the premiere of Descendant during the Martha’s Vineyard African-American film festival Photograph: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Netflix
Brown interrogates a generally accepted rule in documentary filmmaking. Subjects aren’t compensated because money may influence what they say on camera. But she doesn’t feel it’s fair that she gets paid to record people who aren’t. “You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. But in this case, our team is definitely going to give a lot of money to the community.”
Chambers, speaking to the Guardian from her apartment in New York, also describes the resources the Descendant team along with Participant Media will be pouring into Africatown and Black communities across the United States. To honor the way descendants from Africatown were able to pass along their history generationally, through word of mouth, they plan to connect communities across the US with tools to trace their ancestry and record the testimonies of elders. Michelle Obama teased the initiative when introducing Descendant at Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival in August. She encouraged audiences to use their phones for more than just food pics and the latest TikToks, and start talking to grandma and great-grandma instead, recording those histories that in the past they felt reluctant to share.
“This film is about the denial of history, but it’s also about the vitality of oral traditions,” says Chambers. “We want to celebrate that, particularly in Black families. This is a vital part of the way that we tell our stories.”
