Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North is a unique and
disturbing journey of discovery into the history and “living
consequences” of one of the United States’ most shameful
episodes — slavery. Click to see video excerpt (hit “refresh” to
see image): In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of
the slave trade, one might think the tragedy of African slavery
in the Americas has been exhaustively told. Katrina Browne
thought the same, until she discovered that her slave-trading
ancestors from Rhode Island were not an aberration. Rather, they
were just the most prominent actors in the North’s vast
complicity in slavery, buried in myths of Northern innocence.
Note: the film will be shown on PBS, Channel 13, Tuesday, June
24th at 10 am. Browne — a direct descendant of Mark Anthony
DeWolf, the first slaver in the family — took the unusual step
of writing to 200 descendants, inviting them to journey with her
from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back, recapitulating the
Triangle Trade that made the D