BRISTOL –– There will be bands, floats and puppets, the trill of bagpipes, smart-stepping sailors, Sousa marches, wide-eyed tykes and military veterans in too-tight uniforms. The harbor will fill with hundreds of majestic white sails. The pols will march, smiling through their “hihowareyas,” their arms aloft in Queen Elizabeth waves.

There will be tables piled with steamers and shrimp, grills searing hot dogs and hamburgers and house parties, lots of parties. Families will reunite from the far corners of the globe. Icy lemonade and beer will be quaffed and tens of thousands of revelers will ooh and ahh as the 223rd edition of Bristol’s celebrated Fourth of July parade winds 2.6 miles tomorrow through the streets of this storied New England community.

And there will be American flags, thousands of them. Old Glory will fly from the lawns of the sturdy white clapboard homes that date to the 18th and 19th centuries. The red, white and blue stripe marking the parade route will glow on Hope Street.

The blue hydrangeas will shimmer on the sloping lawn of the town’s signature mansion, the stately white Federal-style Linden Place.

The nation’s oldest Independence Day parade will once again present a tableau straight from a Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell illustration, circa 1948.

There is much to affirm about America on this Fourth. In Bristol, the evidence abounds. At Aidan’s Pub, the town’s cracker barrel, two of the many U.S. Navy sailors in town to march talked Tuesday evening of how wonderful it is to be here.

“This town is great,” said Seaman Tony Bebco. “People come up to you, shake your hand and say thanks for your service. They buy you a beer. Everybody’s so friendly.”

Bebco knows of where he speaks. He has served in parts of the world where American soldiers and sailors are not so well-received. In places like Somalia and Bahrain, “they hate us, people throw rocks at us.”

Bebco, who hails from a rough neighborhood near Philadelphia, credits the Navy with “saving my life. I was going nowhere until I enlisted,” he says. “I grew up in a neighborhood full of drugs and people who drop out of school, mess up their lives, end up in jail. In the Navy I feel I’ve made something of myself and I’m serving my country.”

His petty officer, Hermes Valle, is from a dusty farm in Puerto Rico. “Coming to a place like this shows you how great it is to be in the United States.”

This is Old Home week in Bristol, a time when families and friends get together to share their roots and chew over old times. “I know I’ll run into at least 10 people I haven’t seen since high school before the week is out,” says Bristol native Tom Mack, 39.

There is no better place to think about what it means to be an American than this Narragansett Bay community. No more fitting community to consider the greatness of the USA and whether our country lives its promise and ideals.

This year, Bristol has been asked to confront its past. Just this week PBS has broadcast Traces of the Trade, a movie depicting the town’s central place in America’s original sin, the African slave trade. Inheriting the Trade, a recently published book, covers much the same territory, describing the role in the notorious trade played by the DeWolf family, pillars of the Bristol community who rode the slave trade to become one of the richest families in the nation in the early 19th century.

2008 is the 200th anniversary of the end of the Atlantic slave trade, but the DeWolfs illegally ran slaves until 1820. Between 1769 and 1820, the DeWolfs sailed from Bristol to West Africa, where they traded rum for African slaves. Some of the thousands of captives were shipped to the five coffee or sugar plantations the family owned in Cuba. Most were sold at auction in the United States at such ports as Charlestown, S.C.

Bristol’s economy in that era was moored to slave trading, which provided jobs at distilleries and in the boat-building and maritime supply industries.

Reminders of the trade in human flesh are everywhere in Bristol, from Linden Place — built by the DeWolfs in 1810 with the proceeds of slave dealing — to the DeWolf Tavern, a waterfront restaurant built in the old warehouse district where the rum was distilled.

The movie, directed by filmmaker Katrina Browne, and the book, authored by Thomas Norman DeWolf, both descendants of the slave-trading DeWolf family, are attempts to come to grips with their ancestors’ tortured past.

The book reminds us that in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included in his list of “unremitting injuries and usurpations” committed by England’s King George III, that the king “has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to endure miserable death in their transportation thither.”

When Jefferson’s wrote that, he owned slaves. The author of the famous words that “all men are created equal” owned slaves until his death. He fathered children with Sally Hemmings, one of his slaves.

This isn’t to puncture anyone’s Fourth fun, just to remind people that we cannot forget that our past is more complicated than flag-waving, patriotism and parades. Especially in Bristol.

smackay@projo.com