Descendant Review: The Weight of Water

With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic. Her nonfiction bricolage remains firmly anchored in the fight against injustice in the neighborhood of Africatown on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. The film joins the community as they brace to learn the long-awaited waterlogged whereabouts of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to America that brought their ancestors here.

Brown’s gaze consistently returns to the horizon at the edge of the water, a visual motif that would seem to contain all the contradictions of the community’s current status. The vista naturally evokes a connection to their origins prior to their ancestors’ forced migration to America. Yet a glance over the Clotilda’s watery grave represents more than just a submerged piece of their history that they cannot properly process or claim. It retains a liminal quality of providence and possibility in the promise that their story extends beyond a painful past.

As stated by Kamau Sadiki, a diver who explores wrecked vessels, the Clotilda is a “conduit not only to the past of that story and this community but […] to a very powerful future.” The Africatown community’s desire to discover the physical evidence of their first point of contact with America is linked to their confidence in reclaiming dominion over the ground that they claim as their own. Descendant movingly marks the discovery of the vessel not with dramatic maritime footage but with intimate portraiture. In a beautiful montage of the film’s subjects shot in tableau against the natural beauty of Africatown, Brown establishes the inextricable connection of present-day residents to the land they have come to occupy.

The film’s delicately textured tapestry reinforces the rhyming patterns of history as the original sin of slavery and white supremacy still echo throughout Africatown. From readings of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, a posthumously published work about a Clotilda passenger, to home movies of the descendants on VHS or handheld film cameras, the story remains stubbornly the same even as the forms of expression through media change. The community must tell its own story to preserve the legacy of their ancestors given the flagrant disregard with which the town of Mobile has regarded their heritage and health.

Looming over Africatown’s battle for recognition and respect are the unseen but ever-present Meahers, the once-slaveholding family that trafficked over a hundred Africans on the Clotilda over a half-century following the United States’s prohibition of slave importation. The present-day Meahers couldn’t be reached for comment during the production of Descendant, but Brown makes the best of their non-participation by turning them a powerful avatar for systemic racism. Their vast land ownership to this day and influence within the area perpetuates both the inequality of opportunity and outcome. Africatown’s alarmingly high cancer rate speaks to how the past and present of environmental racism, as manifest in the zoning of heavily polluting industry that encircles the community, attempts to squelch their future.

The far-reaching tentacles of the Meaher clan continue to exert power to set, obfuscate, or erase the narrative. The family burned and sunk the Clotilda to conceal evidence of their criminality in the 19th century, and they misled the community as to the ship’s location into the 20th century. Brown could easily make a separate film that elaborates on the aside about how the Meahers, not the state, own the last battle site of the Civil War where Black troops won a decisive victory. Their prolonged gatekeeping of historical sites further estranges descendants from their history and impedes further interrogation of the Meaher legacy.

Descendant centers the widely unheard voices of Africatown’s predominantly Black population but begins to incorporate more voices of white townspeople as it progresses. These interviews widen the frame but do little to deepen the story because their verbose attempts to absolve or excuse centuries of mistreatment amount to little more than the repetition of overwrought talking points. While their presence underscores the rhetoric’s hollowness, Brown belabors the point until it becomes rote static noise pulling focus from the descendants.

Traditional talking head-style interviews like these permeate the film but don’t overpower its aesthetic and thematic majesty. Cinematographers Zac Manuel and Justin Zewifach rarely capture their interviewees head-on, filming from oblique angles that make the subjects feel like they’re talking with, not merely at, the audience. Brown leaves their observations remarkably raw as Africatown’s Afro-descendant population sorts through their complicated web of feelings in front of the camera. At one point, subject Veda Tunstall states, “I don’t think I want to say that,” before launching into a lightly sanitized version of her long-simmering frustrations with how flippantly people dismiss the descendants’ cries for justice. Watching them sift through the uncertainty proves more valuable than any self-assured grandiloquence.

These candid conversations present an invitation to join Africatown’s struggle and a challenge to change the story for the next chapter. Especially after archeologists dredge up the Clotilda’s remnants, recognition is a given. The conversation about reparations that resurfaces along with the wreckage becomes real in a new way, and Descendant nimbly captures the community’s shift in mood as the pieces click into place to demand centuries-absent accountability.

With the Africatown Heritage Museum nearing completion at the time of Descendant’s release, Brown’s choice of where to end the film feels somewhat artificial. The community consistently voices concerns that capitalizing on the Clotilda’s discovery will reduce them to props—or, worse, pawns for tourism dollars whose benefits flow elsewhere. A curatorial lecture while the film’s subjects traverse the grounds of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture feels like superficial satisfaction given how unresolved the issues explored in the film are when the cameras stop rolling. The story may reach a crescendo, yet it never really concludes. Leaving a chronicle of American racism unfinished may be the only possible way to reflect the inherent twists of fortune within a nation’s persistent problem.