When slaver Timothy Meaher chartered his ship Clotilda to illegally capture and transport African slaves to three Alabama plantations in 1860, he succeeded. After offloading and selling his human cargo, he burned and sank the ship, concealing the evidence of his crime and injustice. But secrets don’t die; they just wait. And sometimes they wait for a very long time.

It wasn’t just the recent locating and raising the Clotilda from her watery grave that cracked open the book of secrets. As documentary film director Margaret Brown knew, the story had been held by the descendants for generations. Her powerful documentary, Descendant, builds a bridge between history, community, story, archaeology, and justice.  Screening at Sundance and picked up by Netflix, the film is now reaching a broad audience.

Citizens of Columbia, Missouri, enjoyed a screening of Descendant and the appearance of its director at the Missouri Theater on Sunday, September 11. Columbia is the home of the True/False Film Festival and the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri.

In liminal studies, forced migrations and slavery fall under the broad rubric of involuntary liminality. This is the type of passage one is forced to cross, without volition. Genocides live here, as do natural disasters. We do not step over the line, we are pushed from behind.

Some forms of liminality remain indefinite or permanent. They are intractable. And covering up abuse and violation contributes to persons and communities remaining in a type of suspended animation. The travesty is so well hidden that the story remains unresolved. This takes place through intentional coverup, such as in the case of the Clotilda, and intimidation, which has always been a go-to tactic used by those with power attempting to silence those without it.

The descendants of the slaves brought to Alabama on the Clotilda now have the remarkable opportunity to resolve, to complete or finish, the story of their ancestors. And so they tell the story, present and dramatize it, dance and sing it. They ritualize the truth, the whole story, through every method at their disposal. By doing so, the Clotilda is raised, as is the community created by its injustice in the first place. Raised and freed. Freed to unambiguously tell the story, so that the middle passage that became an unending passage might become a completed passage.

In the film, one of the descendants was interviewed after an artistic rendering of the ship Clotilda was revealed. She said that she couldn’t take her eyes off of it, couldn’t stop looking. This is the power of truth-telling, when the hidden is finally made visible, the unresolved finally resolved, and the spirits of the ancestors are set free to fly up and around and away.