Word: slaving
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...houseboat where Cunanan put a bullet into his own skull after setting off one of the most intensive manhunts in recent history. A book published this fall, Death at Every Stop: The True Story of Andrew Cunanan--The Man Who Murdered Designer Gianni Versace, by Wensley Clarkson (author of Slave Girls), added a few new details to the once inescapable but now nearly forgotten Cunanan legend: he reportedly fathered a child and starred in two "graphic, low-budget, sadomasochistic gay pornographic videos." In a tribute to the speedy turnover of news cycles, few media outlets paid much attention...
Many in Ball's family protested the project. "You're going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!" shrieked one cousin. Blacks met Ball with suspicion, sometimes with anger. "The name Ball meant enemy," says Charlotte Dunn, whose rebel slave great-grandmother barely escaped murderous Ball pursuers. Blacks, left with few documents or oral information, can rarely trace their lineage more than a few generations. Ball's discoveries took them back to first contact. The exchange was painful, with stories of stolen 10-year-olds or slaves beaten or killed. "I came bearing terrible tales," Ball sighs...
...freed by a Supreme Court decision. Worse, their case became a playground for special interests: abolitionists not at all certain their cause wouldn't be better served if they allowed the blacks to be martyred; a President, Martin Van Buren, running for re-election and trying to appease the slave states by suborning justice; Spain's child Queen furious over the loss of one of her ships; the slaves' owners' demanding return of their property; even the officers of the ship that intercepted the Amistad claiming salvage rights...
...recognize that slavery is something far worse than nonfreedom, that it is an institution that grants some men the right to utterly dehumanize other men. It completely justifies the bloody murders that ensue when this figure, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), frees himself and leads the human cargo of the slave ship La Amistad in revolt. And slammed at us at the start of Amistad, Steven Spielberg's movie about that incident, it signals the director's intention to ignore the principle--lofty sentiments excusing clunky filmmaking--upon which most morally instructive movie epics are built...
Legal maneuver and political maneuver, the dank gloom of the prison into which the Africans are crammed, awaiting their fate, an astonishing evocation of the terrors of the slave ships' notorious Middle Passage--Spielberg permits himself time to explore every aspect of his saga in rich detail. And he grants his actors--among them a warily compassionate Morgan Freeman as a black abolitionist; Matthew McConaughey as a puppyish lawyer growing into an attack dog; Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, bent with age and crotchets, but finally lending his eloquence to the cause--a similar latitude. It's a shame...