Mark Reviews Movies: DESCENDANT

Descendant, Netflix

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | October 20, 2022

Some artifacts of history may be lost, but history always reveals itself in one way or another. For the members of the community who are the focus of Descendant, they are evidence of a history that some want to forget or hide.

The people of Africatown, near the city of Mobile, Alabama, are descendants of prisoners aboard the Clotilda. In 1860, that ship arrived in Alabama with 110 men, women, and children from West Africa. It was, to the best available knowledge (which isn't always accurate, obviously), the last ship to bring enslaved people from Africa to the United States—a practice that had been outlawed in the country more than 50 years before the vessel's arrival.

That federal legislation did not stop Timothy Meaher, who owned a shipyard in the area, or the schooner's captain William Foster from their plan, but it did mean that the ship was scuttled immediately upon its return. It was a piece of evidence that, in an American South where the practice of enslaving human beings was still common, could not be overlooked or ignored.

For more than 150 years, then, people knew about the Clotilda, if only as a matter of local folklore, passed on through the generations of the prisoners it held. For them, finding the wreckage would mean to learn something about their ancestors and their history, and that search is how director Margaret Brown's documentary begins. It's a vital investigation, of course, but the power of this film is in how it finds history everywhere in this place and its effects still impacting this community in ways that—once again and as they always do—some people want to ignore or hide.

Brown, who originally came from Mobile, must have known at least some of this story before setting out to make this film around 2018. The Clotilda, its illegal activity, and the people it forcibly moved to the United States gained some broader attention with the long-delayed publication of a non-fiction book by Zora Neale Hurston.

She was a Black anthropologist whose work, we learn, only became more widely known following her death, when author Alice Walker discovered and championed her writing. Despite the endorsement of a popular writer, the book that propels the search for the sunken ship forward in earnest was only published more than 50 years after Hurston's death.

The book, titled Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" and published in 2018, is about the Coltilda and, more to the point, about the final survivor among its prisoners. He was Cudjoe Lewis, one of the people who founded of Africatown following the Civil War, and despite the historical importance of Lewis and his story, no one wanted to publish the account, because Hurston insisted that Lewis' words be transcribed accurately in his own dialect.

That's how all of this history—of Lewis, Hurston, the Clotilda, a crime that was covered up for more than a century, a vibrant community made up of people with countless stories to tell, and a pretty clear-cut case study of how a straight line can be drawn from the system of slavery in the United States to various systematic and systemic injustices against a Black population in this country moving forward— was lost, forgotten, or ignored on the level it deserves to be known. The film sets out, not only to provide that knowledge, but also to show how the fight for who tells which pieces of history in what way continues.

Here, we meet assorted locals of Africatown and Mobile—all of them knowing this story, how they fit into it, and how, if not to the full extent that, it has been hidden from wider view. Of key importance at the start is Kamau Sadiki, a diver and archeologist who has been looking for the remnants of the Clotilda, and with the belated publication of Hurston's book, he finally receives some help from other organizations, divers, and archeologists.

The hunt for the wreckage plays out in the backdrop for the most part, because there's simply too much history and so many stories on display in the here-and-now of Africatown. Emmett Lewis, a direct descendant of the founder who shares his surname, knows many of those stories. His father told them to him, as they would explore the local cemetery, although now it's overgrown and with the grounds only, it seems, maintained by Lewis. The area wasn't always like this, a few residents recall, such as how there was a downtown area to Africatown, which is now home to a highway that cuts between where a man's home once sat and the bustling shops that he could see from the porch.

None of these changes are accidental. That's a point made clear by the story of Joycelyn Davis, a cancer survivor among a population that is becoming ill with and dying from the disease in frighteningly high numbers. Parts of Africatown have been zoned for industry, and when the locals and Brown start digging into the names attached to those waste-producing factories, a familiar one, stretching all the back to the horrific start of this history, emerges.

The film unravels layers upon layers of old and continuing injustice, and the strength of Brown's film is how clearly and cleanly it makes those connections in such a way that they cannot be overlooked or dismissed. When the remnants of the Clotilda are finally discovered, though, the documentary finds even more dismissal—the way a historian calls a re-creation of the ship "wonderful"—and complications—particularly with the promise tourism money to be made—from those who suddenly seem to take a great interest in a story that had been right there all this time.

Descendant, then, isn't just about uncovering history and its continuing impact on this community. By maintaining such a tight and inspective focus on Africatown and its origins and the question of its future, the film becomes an intimate, thoughtful part of the larger conversation about who gets to tell whose history and why.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products