The Long Shadow Of Slavery

For nations, like people, distant memory of trauma can be submerged and repressed but never extinguished. It surfaces in words, in politics and sometimes in the movies. In the middle of Steven Spielberg's new film, ""Amistad,'' which opens next week, comes ""the Middle Passage''--the journey of Africans to the New World. Like the Nazi rampage through the Jewish ghetto in ""Schindler's List,'' these spare scenes are among the most wrenching ever put on film. They take us closer than we have ever been to a realistic depiction of slaves being beaten, whipped, shot to death and thrown overboard, of African mothers giving birth and committing suicide. You can almost smell the fetid conditions belowdecks, where slaves, fed only a small handful of yams a day, are stacked like coal, only to be buffed up when the ship lands and the auction nears.

The ""peculiar institution'' of slavery is experiencing a peculiar revival of interest. Not just in Hollywood, but in the debate over everything from whether the United States should apologize for it to whether to rename schools that commemorate slave owners. Long described as America's original sin, slavery is also our shadow: dogging our steps forward, projecting in black against the sunlight of democratic ideals. For a time, the civil-rights movement seemed to subordinate slavery to its own fresher, more redemptive narrative. But the shame and confusion keep pushing out of the past, insistently ringing what Thomas Jefferson, our slaveholding author of freedom, called America's ""firebell in the night.''

If slavery is ""bursting at the seam of our historical memory,'' as author Michael Eric Dyson puts it, how best to explain it in popular culture? How to remember that America won a war that ended slavery, then managed to lose the peace? What is owed American blacks for a legacy of degradation that began, but hardly ended, with involuntary servitude? Where does acknowledgment of pain stop --and excuse-making begin? No clear answers are on the horizon, of course. But raising the questions--with all sides checking their spleens at the door--might inform the larger dialogue that President Clinton hopes to help stimulate at this week's town meeting on race in Akron, Ohio. The goal should then be, as Abraham Lincoln said, to ""think anew and act anew.''

With the country--or at least much of the white majority--tired of constant recriminations over present-day racism, slavery might offer another, more cathartic way to confront deeper race issues. ""America has never come to grips with slavery,'' says Jesse Jackson. ""It's a hole in the American soul.'' Others argue we're gripping too hard and drilling the hole ourselves. ""You can't win by constantly thinking about your injuries,'' argues Robert Woodson, a black conservative who runs the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. ""What are the lessons to be learned that we haven't been told over and over again?''

But have we truly been told? Slavery is such a gash in the national psyche that mainstream American culture rarely dares to touch it; the ""Roots'' mini-series was more than two decades ago. So Spielberg will try to do for slavery what he did for the Holocaust--to bring a vast audience face to face with both the horror and the subtlety of the crimes of history. Americans, alas, now absorb historical information less from books than from popular entertainment. That makes any Spielberg film about the past an important event--and a genuine opportunity for education.

""Amistad'' is actually the director's second run at African-American themes. He tried once before with ""The Color Purple,'' but by remaining faithful to the Alice Walker novel he antagonized those who disliked that film's depiction of black men. This time his lens on the subject is the true story of a bloody 1839 slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship, La Amistad, off the coast of Cuba. The 53 slaves, led by a Mende tribesman named Joseph Cinque (played powerfully by Djimon Hounsou), end up captured by the U.S. Navy off New York's Long Island, and imprisoned. The Amistad case becomes an abolitionist cause celebre that goes to the Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) makes an impassioned plea for the slaves and wins. The Supreme Court decision is read by a justice played by retired real-life justice Harry Blackmun.