Woods Hole Film Festival 2008

In this first-person documentary, filmmaker Katrina Browne tells the story of her forebears, the largest slave-trading family in early America. From 1770 to 1820, three generations of DeWolfs transported over ten thousand Africans into slavery. They sailed the ships, made the rum to be traded in West Africa, operated sugar and coffee plantations in Cuba, had an auction house, an insurance company, and a bank.

Contrary to the national myth that stigmatizes the South for slavery and credits the North with abolition, Browne's ancestors were from Rhode Island. While the DeWolfs were unique in terms of the dynasty they created, the constellation of ventures operated by them and other elites involved an enormous portion of the Northern population. Middle class citizens bought shares in slave ships; New England farmers sold foodstuffs to plantations in the West Indies; immigrant textile workers processed Southern cotton in Northern mills.

In the film, Browne narrates a remarkable journey with nine family members that brings them face-to-face with New England's hidden enterprise. The family (ages 32-70) retraces the steps of the Triangle Trade--journeying from their old hometown in Rhode Island, to slave forts in Ghana and former plantations in Cuba. Browne pushes them forward as they bumble their way through the minefield of race politics, and debates about reparations and repair. In the end, they come face-to-face with their love/hate relationship to Yankee culture as they struggle with how to take public action given all that they now know.