Katrina Browne was shocked to discover that her Rhode Island forebears had been the largest slave-trading dynasty in American history. For two hundred years, the DeWolfs were distinguished public servants, respected merchants, and prominent Episcopal clerics, yet their privilege was founded on a sordid secret. Once she started digging, Browne found the evidence everywhere: in ledgers, ships' logs, letters, even a family nursery rhyme. Between 1769 and 1820, DeWolf ships carried rum from Bristol, Rhode Island to West Africa, where it was traded for over 10,000 enslaved Africans. They transported this human cargo across the Middle Passage to slave markets from Havana to Charleston and beyond, as well as to the family's sugar plantations in Cuba. The ships returned from the Caribbean with sugar and molasses to be turned into rum at the family distilleries, starting the cycle again.

Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North explains how the New England slave trade supported not just its merchants but banks, insurers, shipbuilders, outfitters and provisioners, both rich and poor. Ordinary citizens bought shares in slave ships. Northern textile mills spun cotton picked by enslaved labor, fueling the Industrial Revolution, and creating the economy that attracted generations of immigrants. It was no secret at the time; John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president, noted dryly that American independence had been built on the sugar and molasses produced with slave labor. The film decisively refutes the widely-accepted myth that only the South profited from the nation's "peculiar institution."

Browne invited two hundred descendants of the DeWolfs to join her on a journey to explore their family's past; only nine came, ranging from a 71 year old Episcopal priest to a County Commissioner from Oregon. Intrepid, intellectually and morally engaged, and a little too polite and "Protestant" for at least one among them, they retrace the Triangle Trade from their ancestors' Bristol cemetery to the slave castles of Ghana and the ruins of a family plantation in Cuba. In Ghana, they discuss the impact of the slave trade on Africa with leading scholars, meet students who pointedly ask if they are ashamed of their family's past, and encounter African-Americans on homecoming pilgrimages. They are surprised and humbled when their good intentions are sometimes met with hostility but, exhausted and shaken, they press on.

Upon their return, the descendants gain a clearer insight into this country's persistent racial chasm, why Black and white Americans have two versions of their common history. The film provides vital context to ongoing movements for restorative justice and racial reconciliation. In the documentary, the late Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, co-chair of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, argues for a fund to benefit the descendants of enslaved people still excluded from American prosperity. Conversely, Brown University economist, Glenn Loury, counters that reparations might alienate more Americans than it would attract. But Harold Fields, facilitator of a decade-long multi-racial, city-wide dialogue in Denver, points out that "maybe reparations is a process not necessarily an event." This compelling film became a valuable part of that process.

Katrina Browne concludes: "In Traces of the Trade, we were trying to decide: what is our responsibility? It's important to roll up our sleeves to deal with what we have inherited from our country's history." This film especially asks what the legacy of slavery is for white Americans. It points to the fundamental inequity and institutional racism that persists and to the broken relationship between Black and white Americans. It invites every viewer to consider what it will take to move beyond the guilt, defensiveness, fear and anger which continue to divide us.