The Sunday Story: Honoring My Enslaved Ancestors

When we talk about tracing our roots, I know where I'm from, pretty much the South North Carolina, to be more exact. But if you try to get really specific, there's a lot I don't know.

I can tell you who my great, great, great grandmother was. And I think that that's the one thing. Somerset taught me the importance of knowing your ancestry, because, you know, most white people know.

They can trace all the way to the Mayflower mayflower, daughters of the Revolution.

But a lot of times, Black families can't do that.

So what happens when you can visit the very place where your Black ancestors lived and breathed, but it's also the same place where they lived and died as slaves? This year, B.A and her mom decided it was time to honor their ancestors and take B.A to where it all started Somerset Plantation.

Lately, I've been trying to figure out what kind of descendant I want to be. Knowing that I come from enslaved people is a crucial part of who I am. And wanting to honor my ancestors kind of looms over everything I do, which is no big deal, just the weight of generations of ancestors towering over me and who I choose to be. But I'm only one person, so I'm choosing to focus on one ancestor. And I think that's how she would have wanted it. I appreciate you helping me, gramps.

I don't know what I did.

You just spoke with me, that's all, that's my gramps. She helped raise me. In fact, she was my kindergarten teacher, and for the longest time she was my main interview subject. Because it was just me and her hanging out during the day.

Doing interviews.

Like, that's what I'm learning how to do. But I'll sit with somebody and we'll talk about a specific story or whatever. Grandma's specific story always started with where she's from.

I was born in Creswell, North Carolina.

Gramps grew up in farming country in Creswell.

I grew up there just farming gray, long roads and clods, big clods of dirt.

Creswell is small, I mean, its main street is a block in my lifetime. A freeway was built in the middle of the town to get to the outer banks faster. And of the about 207 people currently living there, a significant portion of the population is related to me. It's a place that my gramps loved fiercely.

Some say the place is an old slave plantation just out of Creswell.

Down the line, we come from Richard and Patience, that's the origin story my mom and I always got. My mom remembers Somerset the way most of the family remembers Somerset as a sign you pass on the way to church.

I had spent every summer of my life in Creswell and I saw the signs that said Somerset, but we never painted no line.

No one in our family ever felt the need to go to the plantation.

I had never been to Somerset Place before 1986.

That was the year another descendant of Somerset, Miss Dorothy Sproul Redford, organized a homecoming. She said she'd grown up ashamed of her ancestors who'd been enslaved, saying During the Black Pride movement of the 1960s, there was a tendency to ignore our slave ancestry. But then, in the late 70s, when the phenomenon that was, Alex Haley's miniseries Roots, came out, she was inspired.

There were a whole lot of people and it was attended by both white and Black. Oh, a whole lot of avatars. Alex Haley was there. Oh yes, it was national news, it was all across North Carolina.

1,000 descendants of slaves gathered today at the North Carolina plantation, where their ancestors worked more than 200 years ago. Media swarmed onto Somerset place. Their ancestors came here as slaves, and they drained this swampland, and then they farmed this land generation after generation of them as slaves.

21 families.

You may not have caught it, but that was my Grams on NBC News coverage. In fact, Grams was interviewed by CBS Sunday Morning, too.

Mommy calls and tells me that Bill Whitaker, from CBS, was coming to Baltimore to interview her and cousin Laura. And I was like, for what? She said, they're doing this big thing. Down in Crestwell, the descendants of the Plantation of Somerset.

The TV crew traveled with grams from Baltimore to North Carolina. My mom went down with some of my grandmother's siblings.

I took a bus with Aunt Louise and Aunt Lorraine, Uncle Haywood, from Washington, D.

My great-uncle, Haywood, was heard trying to connect the dots between new family members, she said. Your brother is her grandfather. It also was a homecoming. My family had this life-changing experience where they got to see long-lost relatives and confront their family's history in a way they never had before. Even the more difficult parts. Two direct descendants of the original plantation owner were on hand.

It was a touching scene to see, to see the canals that slaves built and the trees that ran alongside the canal that the slaves sit at.

It was a new way of holding this history. I asked my mom what it meant to her when you went, what had you anticipated? what did you think was going to happen the first time y'all went to this big event?

I had no expectations, I was just going to be nosy. Because when the bus pulled in, we were all taken aback and we were like, Oh my God, as we were driving up to Somerset. Those trees that the slaves had planted, the cypress trees, they were all adorned with yellow ribbons. Even the bus got kind of quiet as we saw the yellow ribbons, because yellow ribbons are a symbol of welcome home.

There's a bitter irony in coming from a place hellbent on denying us, our culture and personhood, becoming the actual wellspring of our culture and personhood.

You weren't feeling sad, you were just feeling just happy that all these people were related to you some kind of way. And then, two years later, they had another reunion, I took you see, you were born.

As a toddler, I roamed around Somerset for the second homecoming. I've seen pictures but have no real memories of it. Pictures of me running with other kids around a sign that reads Sight of slave quarters. Of my cousin Danny carrying me along the brick walkway past families wearing African prints. In the late 80s, Somerset held this place of great importance in the lives of descendants like my grandma and my mom. But since then, the point of the reunions to connect people to their ancestors and their landkin has been achieved, so these big reunions aren't happening anymore on the plantation. For my generation, that knowledge and connection is just part of who I am and how I was raised.

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Parker Just Parker Code switch. My relationship with Crestwell, North Carolina, is pretty much wrapped in death now, don't get me wrong. I love the place. I've spent every summer there since I was born, hanging out with octogenarians, going to feed the ducks with my grandpa, apple picking with my great-aunt Emma and Uncle Norman. I love the sunsets and the dogs barking in the distance and going to church revivals and reading Zora Neale Hurston on the front porch.

What does that give us?

Well, I think you can get 10 discount if you want to buy something.

All right.

So my mom and I went on a road trip, me from New York to Baltimore, to meet my mom. And we drove to Crestwell to tour Somerset. And to check on my grams. And make sure that tiny blue flag with her name on it was still there. Do you think it's accurate if you put your arm out and you do the bump, bump, that the truck will do bump, bump? Do you think that ever happens? I've always wanted to do it.

Yeah.

And we'd almost forgotten just how small the town is. We just drove past the exit. There are two Crestwell exits, the first leads to Somerset and the last to the city limits. We missed our exit, but it led us on to Main Street.

Being on horse and buggy, having to come out on dirt roads.

Isn't that how Grammy said they would go to church? On our way to Somerset, we drove down this never-ending road, not unlike the one my grandma would have ridden in a horse and buggy. And my mom began reminiscing about the reunion from 1986..

Remember, I told you we drove up and all the trees had yellow ribbons, it was over there.

Oh, those are the cypress trees. Yeah, see, oh, that's pretty. When we pulled up, we thought there was someone greeting us in a golf cart. Alright, we are here.

So we're going to start over here.

We're going to do about a 10-minute walking tour and we'll go through the different buildings. Our tour guide was a young college graduate named Lily. She's 22, white and only been on this job for two months. Your 40-hour week's just like on this land.

Yeah.

How is it for you? It's nice.

Yeah.

It was an adjustment. When they told me that there were rattlesnakes here and I was like, there are, huh, in the where?

Have you seen any?

Luckily, no. If I see a rattlesnake, I don't know what I'm going to do.

She knows her stuff.

The formal garden here would have been something that Mary Collins would have been in charge of.

But taking this tour with Lily was a little bittersweet.

And behind you, you've got your formal garden area, okay?

Now Mary Josiah's wife, she was an avid gardener.

That's my cousin Alicia, she gave me the tour last time I was here, back when I was in college. For almost 20 years, she had Lily's job. Alicia was one of my only direct cousins who lived in Creswell. She had a house across from the supermarket and she really loved her job.

I feel like I was going to go way more than that.

We're going to go like this. Wait, take a breath and take a sip of water.

Yes, all right.

And then we can do the questions.

Wait, Lily was nice. What's over here? She just got her degree in forensic anthropology, but decided she'd rather be an historic interpreter right now.

Yeah, in fact, we do get a lot of groups, especially of descendants, that come here. Mm-hmm. A little bit more of the white population, but still a good amount of African American, as well as other nationalities.

I asked you, I mean, the last time I was here, there was like an Australian couple that came here, and I was like, you came all the way from Sydney to come to Somerset.

It was the job of those 80 enslaved native Africans to hand-dig this canal, and this was a project that started in 1786.

Lily would later tell me a story that I didn't fully process at the time. About two sons of the plantation owners and two of the enslaved children having an accident in the canal.

In 1843, in February, two of the boys, Edward and Hugh, were canoeing in the canal with their two enslaved claimants, Anderson and Zacharias. An accident occurred in which the canoe capsized and all four boys did drown.

It was only when I got home that I read a letter written in 1843 by a clergyman named William Pettigrew that I found this tidbit, it said. Quote James Newberry and Dick Blunt. A Negro man took out the children. They had been drowned a half hour when they were taken from the canal. End quote.

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It was here when my mom decided to sit down on a bench. Instead of going into the home of the plantation owner, it was three floors and artifacts galore.

You have to lock it, because if we're on the third floor, we can't hear anyone coming on the first floor, and we don't want to accidentally lock anyone in. Later, all right?

So we are currently locked inside of the master's house. Kind of ironic that I all right, I feel safe.

So this is the escape room portion of the tours.

Oh boy.

All right.

Everything had been preserved. Bear claw, China cabinets, four post bids, original oil paintings of each generation of plantation owner. The antique chamber pots weren't original, though they were brought in. And so this next room here is the office.

And so Josiah would have kept all of the records for the plantation in this room. A lot of the information that we know from this plantation is because Josiah was an avid record keeper. He kept track of the temperature at three different points of the day, the prices of crops, crop rotations, as well as the number of enslaved individuals assigned to each task in order to make sure that no labor was wasted.

So he was doing something. During the day. As we left the Master's house, down a back stairwell, through the service entrance, I was watching my head with every step. Lily finally unlocked the door. I was thankful for the fresh air after the creaky suffocation of over 230 years of oppression within those three floors. I'd rather be out here on this land and deal with the rattlesnakes.

Rules.

Yeah, when we got to the visitor's center, we met Karen Hayes. She's the historic site manager for Somerset and the only Black employee that we saw that day. The job used to belong to Ms. Dorothy Sproul Redford, the creator of Somerset Homecoming.

Now she's buried at.

St. John.

So I don't know if her mother.

Her mother and father.

They had to be buried here, my grandmother's.

We don't know where.

But I still can't lay a wreath anywhere on the property because no one seems to know where my great-great-great-grandparents are buried out there.

Anthropology or something, because she should be able to go out there and find them graves.

Maybe she could use her degree to find them. Indiana Jones style Ma, you got any more questions? You sure you want me to go buy you a magnet?

Hi.

Who's that? And along the way, a random cousin saw us on the street, they coming over.

Hey, how you doing?

I had no idea who this lady was, but I hugged her anyway. I just knew that we're related. My mom knew who she was, just like my grandma would've, and that's enough. And then we continued on the conveyor belt of Main Street, all the way to my family's church to visit Grams.

Wait, ma.

I was so excited the flag hadn't flown away that I'd almost skipped over something important.

Grammy, you've been cemented, we got cement.

Who did this?

Who?

Someone had cemented my grams, the slab that covers her from the elements. She was protected. Now, no more backorder.

Well.

I thank God they did it.

I don't know.

To honor my ancestors, this is what I can do. I can try to do right by my grams. I can help my great-aunts buy flowers for the graves and sweep them off. I can call the gravestone people and ask what's taken so long? I can just maintain?

Yep.

We almost done.

They are.

Mm-hmm. Oh, thank goodness. okay. thank you so much. you're welcome.

All right.

It only took the better part of a year, but I feel a sense of relief now because things are settled. I can honor my grams in the way that she honored. Her family even set a flower down for Ma Bell.

Going through your grams stuff.

Part of my grandma's legacy is her collection of things, things she saved for me, that my mom recently passed down. A box full of grandma's books and official papers, all centering Somerset. This is a record.

It's a record.

It's a record.

Are we? Are we children of the ones who came before?

I said, we.

Are the children of those who had the courage to survive?

And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR CodeSwitch. If email is more your thing, ours is CodeSwitch at Npr..org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Just wanted to give a quick shout out to our CodeSwitch Plus listeners.

You've been listening to The Sunday Story? The Sunday Story is edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our producers are Andrew Mambo and Justine Yan, Henry Hottie and Emily Silver are our fellows. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer.