There’s a moment in Margaret Brown’s new Netflix documentary, Descendant, where four men gather in a sunny backyard in Mobile, Alabama. Though the meeting is informal, their mission is anything but: as descendants of the survivors of America’s last known slave ship, the men have resolved to form an association for the living relatives of those whose ancestors were illegally enslaved. “If and when that boat gets raised up,” says folklorist Dr Kern Jackson, “it ain’t because someone just discovered it. It’s because it was time for the boat to get raised up.” Fellow Mobile resident Garry Lumbers agrees. “The boat’s been there all the time. It’s just the idea of the consequences and the dirty little secrets that everyone been hiding. When you raise that Clotilda… oh my god.”

Brief though the exchange may be, it gets to the heart of a story that has for years been shrouded in shame, secrecy and silence. On the surface of things, Descendant tells the story of the search for the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive illegally in the Unites States in July of 1860, more than fifty years after the US had banned the importation of slaves. After betting that he could smuggle a slave ship into the country and escape the consequences, wealthy Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher sailed to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey, captured 110 Africans and returned to Mobile, where the captives were split up and sold into slavery. To conceal the evidence of his crime, the Clotilda was burned and sunk in the Mobile River, where its wreckage lay in the riverbed until its discovery in 2019. 

But Descendant isn’t so much about the search for the fabled vessel as it is about the way the contours of injustice linger on far past a devastating historical moment. After the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, the newly freed survivors of the Clotilda founded Africatown, a tight-knit community just north of Mobile, where many direct descendants still live today. For generations, stories about how their ancestors were brutally torn from their homeland have been passed down by word of mouth, preserving the tale for Africatown’s current residents even as the shipwreck remained submerged from view. But the documentary proves that reclaiming history can be a tough fight when those in power are loathe to acknowledge its existence.

Although the descendants of the Clotilda’s passengers have always been assured of their family history, the story had long been dismissed as urban myth until the remains of the ship were unearthed in 2019. Margaret Brown, a white native of Mobile and the director behind Descendant, remembers nothing of the story growing up. “It’s certainly not something that there was any attention paid to,” she tells Stylist on a Zoom call. “In fact, there were many families, white families, that would say that communities were trying to just get attention”. While physical records of the voyage sit in the genealogical museum in Mobile, Brown encountered the same resistance from locals when she returned to her hometown to document the story of the Clotilda. “Even when we started filming, people would say to us off camera: ‘That’s not really true.’ Like, they’re just trying to get attention.”     

Brown first learned of the Clotilda while working on her eye-opening 2008 documentary The Order Of Myths, which explores the legacy of segregation in Mobile through separate Mardi Gras celebrations for the white and Black communities. The year before, Helen Meaher, a descendant of the prominent Southern family who brought over the Clotilda, had been crowned the white Madi Gras queen. “My mother said to me, ‘Oh, you know, the Meaher family, they brought the last slave ship,’” she recalls. But when she was filming with the Black Mardi Gras queen, Steffanie Lucas, and her grandparents, there came a startling revelation. “We were talking about Helen, and her grandfather said, ‘Oh, my people came off her people’s ship.’ So the two Mardi Gras queens were connected through the Clotilda, which then was a little bit less than 150 years ago. I looked at the cinematographer, and we were like, this is just the South in a nutshell, you know? That is wild.”   

Fast forward 11 years and Brown felt in a strong position to document the story when the search for the Clotilda got underway. Since making The Order Of Myths, she had been engaged in an ongoing discussion about the ship and Africatown with Dr Kern Jackson, an esteemed folklorist and director of African American studies at the University of South Alabama. Plus, having established links to the Meaher family years before, she also expected that they would agree to participate in the documentary. “But it turned out they didn’t talk to me, you know, in the same way that Helen did for The Order Of Myths,” she says. The stony silence would grow to be a regular occurrence when she attempted to gather stories about the Clotilda in Mobile. “It was sort of like, ‘Oh hi, I’m busy this week, call me again in four years,’ you know?” 

If the white community were reluctant to discuss the history of the Clotilda, the residents of Africatown displayed no such amnesia. The documentary tells the story of the ship through the lens of the descendants, who relay stories of their ancestors, share memories of their lives in Africatown, and read evocative passages from novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story Of The Last “Black Cargo”, which chronicles the life story of Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last surviving passengers of the Clotilda. Cudjoe’s great-grandson, Emmett Lewis, also appears in the film to explain how the legacy of slavery continues to reverberate in the present. In one potent scene, he visits Oakleigh, a historic house museum in the heart of Mobile, contemplating how his ancestors would have been forbidden from entering the property. “In the South, you know, the losers sort of get the last word,” says Brown. “Like, we lost the Civil War, but we’re still celebrating these monuments to slavery. And why are we making them into these museums, lauding the old South? It’s nuts”.

Emmett is just one of the descendants highlighting the inequality that continues to plague the local community. For years, the residents of Africatown have been subjected to toxic chemicals and noise pollution from industrial sites in the surrounding area, which many believe have precipitated a higher incidence of cancer. Even the presence of the factories is an an example of how the past continues to shape the present: after refusing to compensate the survivors of the Clotilda after emancipation, Timothy Meaher profited further by selling them undesirable land bound by lax zoning laws that facilitate the heavy industry in the area today. “What person want to wake up knowing that they sitting on historic land,” says Emmett in the documentary, “but they gotta smell the chemicals from a factory?”

To this day, the Meahers remain prominent landowners in Mobile, with the family name inscribed on street signs and stone posts staking the boundaries of their property. But despite their presence in the neighbourhood, they offered no word on the actions of their forebear during filming. To Brown, their silence is indicative of the shame and guilt the US feels about the slave trade. “You know, it’s interesting. People are just afraid to touch the wound, you know? But for the wound to heal it has to be paid attention to.” Still, she is hopeful the documentary will contribute to the growing discussion around the legacy of slavery in America. “I think certainly as a white person, I feel like this is my work to look at what made me in a truthful way. And I think that’s part of the healing we have to do as a country. Like, look deep, and have hard conversations; and I hope the film is part of a difficult conversation or, you know, frankly, very painful conversation.”

The shame of the slave trade certainly runs deep. Despite the fact that some 12,000 vessels were involved in the international slave trade, only five or six have ever been recovered; their histories purposefully buried just like that of the Clotilda. Since Descendant was released on Netflix, however, there’s been a plot twist. Last month, members of Timothy Meaher’s family broke generations of public silence with a statement decrying the “evil and unforgivable” actions of their ancestor on the eve of the Civil War, and said that they have begun meetings with leaders of the community of Africatown. “Our family has been silent for too long on this matter,” read the statement. “However, we are hopeful that we — the current generation of the Meaher family — can start a new chapter.”

The question of what justice looks like for the people of Africatown, meanwhile, is complicated, and opinions differ greatly in the community. In the documentary, an illustration of the Clotilda and the harrowing conditions endured by its captives is unveiled to expressions of dismay from the audience. “The pain and suffering that my people have had to endure throughout this whole process is a tremendous burden for us to have to deal with,” says one resident. “We need to be taken care of; some dollars need to come to the descendants.” Clotilda descendant Veda Tunstall, meanwhile, looks on at a celebration marking the discovery of the ship with ambivalence. “This community is not the only community that has this story,” she points out. “I still don’t know what my idea of justice is. As long as Timothy Meaher isn’t here, I don’t think there’s anyone to punish.”

Brown, for her part, is cautious of speaking about what justice looks like for the residents of Africatown. But there are unmistakeable signs of progress for the community. “A lot of the justice looks like environmental remediation,” she explains. “We’ve recently found out, strangely, that the Canfor plant, which is historically owned by the mayor of Mobile’s family, they’re moving. They’re leaving Africatown is interesting timing, since they’ve been there for a very long time.” A strange coincidence indeed, especially since Descendant has now reached a global platform with a streaming giant, and has been executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who is himself a descendant of Charlie Lewis, one of the enslaved passengers of the Clotilda. “It seems like shame works,” says Brown. “And like, you know, the Netflix effect. You know, of billions of people watching and seeing what you’ve been doing kind of quietly?”

Now that the remains of the ship have been located, there are ongoing discussions about how best to commemorate the story of the Clotilda. While plans are in the works for a heritage house museum in Africatown, Brown is sceptical of how local government will monetise new initiatives, and whether they’ll work in partnership with the wider community who have been touched by the history. “I’ve certainly seen the city do some things to support the community,” she says. “But by the most part, I see the potential for the city to be extractive rather than additive to what’s going on in the community.” The city and state, she adds, have an opportunity to “bolster the activism and support the storytelling” that’s been going on for 60 years, although it remains to be seen whether Africatown, like so many other historically Black communities across America, will be successful in getting permanent protections written into law, especially as invasive and polluting businesses continue to push for the most permissive industrial zoning in residential areas.

But as many residents of Africatown point out in the documentary, this is not just the story of a slave ship or its remains. For over 150 years, the descendant community has been on a quest to reclaim their identity; and now that the stories of their ancestors have been vindicated by the discovery of the Clotilda, there is hope that the next chapter in the story will move beyond simply addressing historical wrongs, and celebrate the people who created Africatown for the next generation. “It’s not just about the brutality,” says Mary Elliott, curator of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, towards the end the documentary. “This is an American story, what brought this nation into being. There’s human suffering, there’s the power of the human spirit: resistance, resilience, survival.”

Images: Netflix