In the murky waters of an Alabama river, diver Kamau Sadiki said he had to pause before entering the last known slave ship to the United States, where 110 people were confined in hellish conditions.
“You feel the reverberation, the pain and suffering, and the screams and the hollering,” said Sadiki, a diver who works with the Smithsonian Slave Wrecks Project. “We do this work to understand the science and archeology and collect all the data we can to help tell the story. But there's another whole dimension here that we need to connect with.”
Slavery ended five years after the arrival of the Clotilda captives. They saved money to start an community that came to be called Africatown. Some of their descendants continue to live there in the historical hamlet deeply tied to its heritage but now surrounded by heavy industry in south Alabama. In the film, descendants discuss their family's effort to not let the Clotilda fade into history, showing home videos of relatives recounting the story to younger generations. Some read from “Barracoon,” the posthumously published 1931 manuscript in which former Clotilda captive Cudjo Lewis recounted his story in an interview with author Zora Neale Hurston.