Secret History

After learning that her Yankee ancestors were slave traders, Boston filmmaker Katrina Browne, 40, decided to confront her family's painful past in a new documentary.

(Photograph by Geordie Wood)

Here's a myth your film Traces of the Trade (which airs June 30 at 10 p.m. on PBS) exposes: The South is to blame for slavery.

It is to the extent that the winners write the history books. It's not surprising, but it is surprising to me as someone who grew up in the winning region.

So was the North just as bad as the South?

We didn't have enough land good for growing crops-too many rocks. So people in New England owned slaves, but just not as many-one two. They typically worked in the home or in the blacksmith shop. The part that was worse was that, in terms of the slave trade, New England was responsible for bringing more Africans here than the South.

You're descended from the DeWolf family Bristol, Rhode Island. How did you discover that your family was involved the slave trade?

My grandmother, as she was getting old, wanted her grandchildren to know more about the family history, so she wrote sort of Cliffs Notes, and she mostly focused on proud tales, but to her credit, she did not neglect to put in a couple sentences about the slave trade.

How old were you when you read this?

Twenty-eight. The first shock was learning that I was descended from slave traders and the second was that I already knew but had repressed it. I must have found out when I was a teenager, because a friend from college remembers me mentioning it.

So you contacted 200 distant family members and told them that their ancestors were part of one of the largest slave-trading families in US history. Then you asked them be in your movie. I imagine not many invited you over for martinis.

We have all sorts of politeness patterns in our family, so I tended to not hear from people who were upset about it. There is one relative who was really upset and let me know.

What upset him?

He is of the view that it's better to deal with the present-day problems and roll up your sleeves and get to work, and felt this type of exploration was going to dig up too many skeletons. The other part is this fear that black colleagues would treat him differently - which is part of this larger fear that we will be judged by what our ancestors did.

I had mixed emotions watching the film. appreciate your family members' willingness to wrestle with your history. But I felt uncomfortable at times watching them realize what slavery really involved.

There's always this tension between the fact that as white people we will never understand what it means to be a black American today. It's always important to have humility as a white American and not to be scared off . I think we're scared of saying the wrong thing, and I don't think we should be. Show up and be willing to put your foot in your mouth.

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