Text size:

Review: 'P.O.V.: Traces of the Trade'

Verne Gay | Off Camera

June 23, 2008

P.O.V.

Tomorrow night at 10 on WNET/13

Reason for watching: TV's reigning indie doc series returns with Katrina Browne's film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North," about her painful exploration of her family's slave-trading past. Bowed at Sundance to some acclaim in January.

What it's about: With the bluest of Bostonian blood flowing through her veins, Browne one day discovered how her Brahmin forbears attained their wealth and stature - they were the GE and Microsoft of New England slave traders rolled into one. From 1769 to 1820, they shipped about 10,000 slaves to these shores, and half a million of their descendants are alive today. Browne had a thought - contact living relatives of the DeWolf dynasty, some 200 of them, to see who would accompany her on a trip tracing the slavers' route, from Rhode Island to Ghana to Havana and back, in the hope of coming to grips with this basic question: "What is our responsibility?" A few respond, and they embark on a voyage of self-discovery, while asking a couple more questions along the way ("Can one atone for the sins of one's ancestors?"

Verne Gay Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

"Is the past really past?") Ends with (of course) a debate on the merits of reparations.

Bottom line: Fascinating, at first, then gradually an exercise in tedium. Browne is a wonderful narrator - her calm, clipped, almost girlish voice betrays the merest hint of horror - but her boon companions are swaddled in their collective liberal guilt. You may admire, deeply, their compulsion to understand their responsibility for America's greatest sin. You may also be bored, deeply, by it.