Plantation ‘Reunion’ Hits Home

Some came with reluctance but to others, the idea was irresistible as more than 2,000 descendants of slaves gathered on the plantation where their forebears toiled. “I know if any of our ancestors are buried here, they are turning over in their graves and singing, ‘Hallelujah!”’ said Mabel Phelps of Norfolk, Va., at the Somerset Plantation in Creswell, N.C. Others were less enthusiastic at first. “My first reaction was, ‘By golly, why should we be digging up those kind of memories?’ (but) I’ll go away with a renewed interest and renewed energy to find my own roots,” said James Steeley of Jacksonville, Fla. “There’s something almost irresistible about a reunion,” said another participant, author Alex Haley, whose recounting of a black family’s genealogy in the novel “Roots” became a popular television mini-series. At the outset of the Civil War, more than 300 slaves worked on the 10,000-acre, coastal estate founded by Josiah Collins. The “reunion” culminated a decade of research by the organizer, Dorothy Spruill Redford, 43, of Portsmouth, Va., who traced her mothers genealogy.