Unique Homecoming : Descendants of Slaves Gather at Plantation

Here, in the rural marshlands of North Carolina’s coastal plain, stands a pale yellow house that became the site of a unique “homecoming” on Saturday.

The people, about 2,000 of them, came not to remember this house, a plantation called Somerset Place, but to celebrate their ancestors who lived and died here--in slavery.

There were Spruills, Baums, Bennetts, Littlejohns, Honeyblues, Collins, Cabarruses, Rowsoms and Normans, with the Spruill family predominating.

“This is a time in America where we have had so much negativism and so much of the news is bad that this coming home to Somerset is a getting back to good news and a celebration of family,” said Dorothy Spruill Redford, the descendant of a Somerset slave family and organizer of the reunion.

Redford’s idea was to commemorate the contributions of her ancestors at Somerset, not, she said, to dwell on their pain and hardships as slaves.

She wanted the descendants to know of their family ties, some dating back to the original group of 80 slaves brought from West Africa by Englishman Josiah Collins to clear and work the swampy plantation fields in 1785.

Canal Builders

In their first two years at Somerset, those 80 black men built a 6-mile canal from the plantation to a nearby waterway where Collins’ ships could pick up the plantation’s rice and other grain for transport north to Boston.

The slaves, too, built Somerset Place’s main house, an early Greek Revival home, and its outer buildings, but not until 1830, when Josiah Collins III was master of Somerset.

The 14-room yellow house is now administered as a state historic site in Pettigrew State Park. It was surely a mansion in the early south, but the plantation house is not as large as some estates in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air.

But its size is of little matter. Somerset Place is an important part of the history here, and Redford wanted its descendants to know of their families’ place in that saga.

Through Saturday’s homecoming, the end result of Redford’s 10-year search into her family background, a genealogical quest inspired by Alex Haley’s “Roots,” Somerset’s descendants would find their home ties.

Haley, in fact, made a surprise visit to the homecoming in mid-afternoon, much to the delight of Redford and the others gathered on the grounds of the 5,870-acre plantation on the edge of Lake Phelps, eight miles back in the mosquito-ridden swampland surrounding the little town of Creswell.

Earlier this year, Redford had written to Haley at his Los Angeles home, asking if he could attend. Haley had sent his regrets, saying he would be in Morocco at the time.

Acting on Impulse

“I’m just thrilled that it (“Roots”) has taken this form,” said Haley. “I was flying back to Los Angeles from Morocco to meet two buddies and I saw the story in USA Today. I showed it to my friends and said, ‘What the hell, let’s go.’ It was purely impulse.”

Speaking to the crowd gathered under the shade of huge old holley trees that once bordered Somerset’s formal gardens, Haley said: “Your forebears, no matter who you are, prayed for a better day. . . . I can’t imagine a better thing to have happened to prayers than a day like today.”

Haley’s words and the smiling faces of the crowd at Somerset made Dot Redford cry.

It wasn’t the first time this day her eyes had filled with tears. And the same was true for many other slave descendants.

For her work, Redford received a state proclamation from Gov. James G. Martin and a sincere thank-you from Maryland State Sen. Clarence W. Blount, who did not know he was a Somerset slave descendant until Redford told him of his ancestors.

‘People in the South have a long way to go to overcome the pain and burden of suffering because of slavery,” said Gov. Martin. “But we are here to celebrate a new theme, of recognition and respect of those very slaves themselves--for they were very real people who built this place. Through the evil system they survived, they built strong ties, and that is the reason you are here today.”

“It’s taken such a long time, and it’s so important for people to be able to find their roots,” Redford said. “If you’re doing something like this that is very personal, you never see the broad scope. I knew in August last year that I was going to have the coming home to Somerset, but this is beyond what I dreamed it would be.”

Redford also had no idea her dream of a Somerset Place homecoming would almost turn into a media nightmare. Neither did Josiah Collins VI, who came from his home in Seattle for the event, nor his cousin, Frances Inglis from nearby Edenton, also a direct descendant of the Collins family.

The week of the reunion, this remote area of North Carolina, not far from the seashore resort towns of the Outer Banks, was crawling with print and TV journalists. There were interviews on top of interviews by national media representatives.

One day Redford and Inglis were asked to appear at Somerset for a 6 a.m. television interview. They did.

By week’s end, another popular interviewee, Ludie Bennett, an 83-year-old Creswell native whose father was born a slave at Somerset Place, couldn’t remember how many times he’d talked to the media.

There also were endless interviews at Somerset, before and during the homecoming, and still more at Inglis’ home in Edenton, bought by Josiah Collins when he emigrated from Somersetshire, England in 1773.

“This is absolutely preposterous,” said Ross Inglis, Inglis’ husband of 32 years, as he answered yet another phone call from the media on Friday.

“I had no idea it would be like this,” said Josiah Collins VI, 78, a retired real estate broker and appraiser who lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington state.

Collins’ son Josiah VII and another son live in Seattle. A third son, Charles Stimson Collins, resides in Fountain Valley.

The elder Collins reiterated the family history to the various press and TV commentators: A few years after the Civil War, the family had lost the plantation and moved to Hillsborough, a small town near Durham, where Collins’ grandmother’s family owned “a house, a cow and a garden.”

Collins’ grandfather, Josiah IV, died shortly thereafter, and the family was raised on meager means. His father, Josiah V, headed west in 1882, finally settling in Seattle to practice law.

“My father was born at Somerset Place in 1864,” said Collins. “His only recollection of the place was a story about taking quinine because of the malaria threat from mosquitoes.

“He was about five years old when he lived there, and he told a story about hiding outside under a hydrangea bush every morning until his nanny came to get him and made him go in the house for his coffee. They put quinine in the coffee. My father never drank coffee again after he left the place.”

Dot Redford, a 43-year-old social-services supervisor for the state of Virginia in Portsmith, Va., began searching for her ancestors and ended up completing a genealogy of the majority of slaves who once toiled at Somerset and their descendants.

She found 21 different surnames of Somerset’s original slaves, and 37 of those who were the first generation of blacks born free after their emancipation at the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Redford said she couldn’t have done it so completely without the meticulous records kept by the Collins family. Her painstaking research, boxes and shelves full of documents that nearly filled her Virginia home, culminated in a 350-page manuscript.

She had the volume, “Somerset’s Slave Community: An Antebellum Genealogical Study,” published at a cost of $6,800 for 500 copies, plus another $1,000 for typing.

“I couldn’t have not completed this study,” Redford said last week as she and her daughter Deborah, 23, sat in their motel room in Creswell, going over last-minute details for the homecoming. “There are some things you’re compelled to do.

“I had a break period of about two years. I was getting divorced and moving and my daughter was getting out of high school and going to college. But then I went back and picked it up again four years ago, and I became obsessive about it.”

The more Redford researched and the more she talked with descendants of slaves she found, the more she became convinced that the people needed to be brought together for “a healing” homecoming at Somerset Place.

Most of the people she talked with didn’t know their forebears came from Somerset. Some had never heard of the plantation.

“This is a fantastic idea,” said Nettie Norman, who had come to Somerset Saturday to help her husband, Henry, look for lost relatives. The couple had recently moved to nearby Roper, a small town Henry Norman grew up in before moving north to New York. They had not been to Somerset.

Ironic Homecoming

“It’s not really a slave homecoming,” said Henry Norman. “But it is ironic being here looking for relatives.” Norman, who retired as chief of police in Tuckahoe, N.Y., in 1984, and his wife had returned to his family home, built in 1901.

From lists of original slaves and those born free that he saw in a newspaper, Norman found his family name, and that of Rowsom, another family he believed to be distant kin.

Henry and Nettie Norman, like many other reuniongoers, checked different tables for descendants’ names and chatted with possible relatives.

Most bought Redford’s paper-bound manuscript (sold for $20 apiece to cover printing costs and help finance research for a second volume that she hopes to finish by January, 1987).

Many descendants toured the house, refurbished by the state and furnished with period furniture donated by North Carolina residents. Three oil portraits of the family remain--one of Josiah Collins I, of Josiah III and his wife, Mary Phelps Collins--along with four pieces of original furniture.

Several of the plantation’s outbuildings, among them the slave quarters and hospital, barn and smokehouse, had been destroyed over the years.

‘Mind-Boggling’

“It is a mind-boggling experience,” said Virginia Douglass, a social worker in Bronx, N.Y. Her family can be traced back to original Somerset slaves named Cabarrus and Collins.

During her research, Redford discovered that slave families did not assume the surname of an owner each time they were sold, but retained that of their first owner.

“That explained why I found 21 different surnames instead of 21 different family lines with the name Collins,” Redford said.

“I do a class in black culture at home for senior citizens,” said Douglass. “And I tell them ‘Don’t ever let people tell you you are lazy. You have a lot to be proud of.’ You come down here and you see what they built. We have a lot to be proud of here. I try to look at it in that respect, not in anger.”

After they were freed, most of the Somerset slave families stayed in this area or went up the East Coast. Many of those descendants at the reunion knew their roots were in North Carolina, but they did not know the roots stretched back to Somerset Place until Dot Redford told them.

“I just ran into James Blount, whom I grew up with in my hometown, Elizabeth City,” said Cecil Rouson Jr., 45, a businessman from Greensboro. “I’ve known him all my life and I just found out today we’re second cousins.”

Rouson’s family traces back to the Rowsom group, members of the first generation of Somerset slaves born free. His son, Cecil Rouson III, known as Lee, is a running back for the New York Giants.

Rouson’s second cousin, Wilbur, an artist in Chicago, said he thought that his late father, George Thomas Rouson, a former minister and school principal in Murfreesboro, was instrumental in changing the family name. “There are Rowsoms and Rowsons and Rousons, but we’re finding out we’re all related,” said Wilbur Rouson.

Several of the Murfreesboro Rousons stood this late afternoon near the site of the old slave hospital--two small piles of bricks that had been uncovered by archeologists--awaiting the arrival of their brother Bill from Riverside, Calif.

There had been a mix-up in plane-flight reservations in Los Angeles, and Rouson and his 15-year-old son, Itiri Songo (an African name meaning Black Forest), were long overdue.

Food and Festivities

Like the other descendants, the Rousons earlier had lunched on fried or barbecued chicken dinners or hamburgers and hot dogs sold by area volunteer firemen, church women and several independent vendors.

They had enjoyed spirituals by the Evelyn Johnson Community Singers, the reenactment of a 19th-Century slave wedding, a dramatic interpretation of Harriet Tubman by actress Gloria Lowery Tyrrell of New York, an African drum concert and a blues concert by Littlejohn and Co. The band’s leader, like Dot Redford, was related to an original Somerset slave family of Littlejohns.

Bill Rouson arrived just an hour before the Somerset homecoming was to end. In his mid-50s, Rouson serves as coordinator of career planning and youth work for the Riverside County school system.

“I’m really sorry to have missed so much,” Rouson said. ‘But I got here in time to talk with Haley and have my son talk with him and Dorothy. My son really wanted to come to see where we came from. Alex Haley asked him what he wanted to be, and he said ‘I might like to be a minister.’ I never heard that until we got here.”

Talking with his two brothers and sisters and several cousins he found, Rouson said of Somerset Place: “This is kind of eerie, everyone being related, family. But it has to do with people not being so remorseful about slavery, but reaching for a heritage. Not dwelling on the hurtful things, but looking for something positive. . . . I just feel good about it. I think it made a lot of people feel good about themselves.”