Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Honoring My Enslaved Ancestors

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

B.A. Parker had always known about the plantation called Somerset Place, but she had never been. It's where her ancestors had been enslaved, just a short distance from her family's farm. On a journey to explore what it means to honor her ancestors' legacy, Parker and her mom decide to go back to the plantation where it all began. On the ground her ancestors once walked, Parker asks herself: what kind of descendant does she want to be? Today on The Sunday Story we bring you the second episode of Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker's two-part series about her journey back to her roots. Listen to the full series on Code Switch.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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. B.A. Parker is the co-host of NPR's Code Switch. She knows exactly where her ancestors came from, a plantation in North Carolina called Somerset Place. She's been told her relatives were among the 13 original slaves. Before B.A. was born, her mother and grandma went to a homecoming there for thousands of descendants of the plantation. 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. The 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. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. Here's B.A. with the story of her journey to the plantation. You can hear more about B.A.'s efforts to trace her roots on NPR's Code Switch podcast. 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, Grams. I don't know what I did. You just spoke with me, that's all. That's my Grams. 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. Grandma, legit, that's all I'm doing for this job. Getting interviews. Like, this is 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 Cresswell, North Carolina.

Graham's grew up in farming country in Cresswell. I grew up there just farming. Great long roads and big clods of dirt. Cresswell 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 grams loved fiercely. I don't care who don't want to come here. That's right, but I don't. And on the edge of Crestwell is a plantation. Sunset Place is an old slave plantation just out of Crestwell. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were slaves there. They had their children there, some of their children there. The Blunts, Richard Blunt, Patient Blunt.

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 Crestwell, and I saw the signs that said Somerset, but we never paid it no mind. 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,

Ms. 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. Ms. Redford spent the next 10 years researching where she and other descendants came from and planned a reunion in August of 1986 for all the descendants of the enslaved she'd found from Somerset.

There were a whole lot of people, and it was attended by both white and black. A whole lot of Irish townies. Alex Haley was there. Oh yes, it was national news. It was all across North Carolina. 1,000 descendants of slaves gather 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, and they drained this swampland, and then they farmed this land, generation after generation of them, as slaves. Yeah, but you've been here. 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 Lorene, Uncle Haywood, from Washington D.C. to Somerset. My great-uncle Haywood was her trying to connect the dots between new family members. 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. I can't take any credit for it, and I hope people won't give me any blame for the fact that my ancestors lived there and owned slaves. I think we can only be responsible for what we do. For the 1980s, this was considered progressive, just to have the descendant of a plantation owner meet the descendants of the enslaved. But hearing this now, it doesn't sound progressive. What I hear is a white woman taking no accountability for what was done. Yeah, it was a different time. But now, when I think about present-day divides, the idea of a reunion like this feels impossible. There would be the white descendants angry that the history of

slavery was even brought up, or the white descendants who feel beholden to apologize and take up too much space. But over 35 years ago, when this homecoming took place, over a thousand descendants of the enslaved, all land kin, were reunited to honor their shared ancestry. It was transformative for everyone there. It was a moment of healing. It was a touching scene to see. You see the canals that slaves built

and the trees that ran alongside the canal that the slaves set 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 like 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?

The cypress trees. They were all adorned with yellow ribbons. Even the bus got kind of quiet as we saw the yellow ribbons. Because, you know, yellow ribbons are a symbol of welcome home. And so seeing the yellow ribbons and we were like, oh, welcome home. And despite the circumstances of slavery, this is where our family began. There's a bitter irony in coming from a place hell-bent on denying us our culture and personhood becoming the actual wellspring of our culture and personhood.

Somerset had become our linchpin. 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 then. You were running around the plantation like you owned it. 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 land kin has been achieved. So these big reunions aren't happening anymore in the plantation. For my generation, that knowledge

and connection is just part of who I am and how I was raised. That was this gift from people like Miss Redford and my grams of holding all of my family's connections close and passing them on to folks like me. But I don't have that fountain of familial knowledge that my grams had, or my mom. And if I'm not the holder of all this information, then what can I be? I'm learning that it's not just about holding the family tree in my brain. It's about the things that I can actually do. Coming up, I go to Somerset Place. So we are currently locked inside of the master's house? Stay with us. Kind of ironic. That, I, all right. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. This $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future.

Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with the Sunday story. 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. But it's also where all the people who sat with me at those revivals and on that

front porch are now buried, including my grams. She passed away a couple years ago. She was 98, a respectable age to go if you ask me, and I want to honor my grams the way she honored her ancestors. She and her nine siblings came together in the 1970s to get a gravestone for their grandmother, Ma Bell. And I've been trying for a year to get a gravestone for grams. I'm calling to check if there's any kind of update. I ordered my grandmother's tombstone through y'all. It'll be ordered in August.

Yep, got it. It takes eight to ten months. Eight to ten months. How are we looking? May or June. May or June. Mm-hmm. Wow.

All right. It takes a long time now to get them. Is it because of COVID? It's because of everything, sweetie. Not just the tombstone, but the cement slab to cover her. I've been trying for months to find a cement truck. Everything is on back order. And so my Grams has just been resting with just this little blue flag in the ground with her name on it,

waiting for her confirmation number to come up in five to six months. Grams is now in the cemetery where her parents are buried and her grandparents are buried. With Graham's there, I've got to take her place in continuing the family tradition that she and her sister, my great-aunt Louise, did every August. I've started picking up flowers for the graves. Good. So when we get to Crestville, me and you can clean off the graves and put the flowers on. Oh, okay. The graveyard at the church is where the town of Crestwell did end. If you go the other direction on Main Street, you hit the sign to go to the plantation. Growing up, I didn't go to the Somerset side of town.

It was nice to know it was still there, but I wasn't going to go. The existence of it was enough. But my Aunt Louise takes great pride in Somerset and being able to represent our family there. She even bought the family membership. Well, I told you we are members of a Somerset Foundation. How's that work? I pay $30 a year. What does that give us? Well, 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 Crestwood 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?

Do you think that ever happens? I've always wanted to do it. You are not taking advantage of the road trip experience, ma. I'm trying. Crestwell is about 365 acres of land, and for a long time was my family's whole world. Let's see, Somerset Place, exit 558. Oh, right.

Wait, 558? Was that it? Yeah. And we'd almost forgotten just how small the town is. 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.

You don't get to see it that often. Where, for a long time, the only business was a flower shop. Now that's gone, but we finally got a sandwich shop and a coffee bar. One square block of townness that has been missing for a while. It just looks so, what's the word, like sprawling? Like it's just so wide open. Being on horse and buggy. Having to come all 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? Mm-hmm. 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. All right, we are here. A white man just showed up. We thought he was going to give us a ride to the visitor center, but no, he was just the groundskeeper doing his job. As we walked up, I was taken aback by the charming pastoral nature of the place. The kept lawns, the breeze from the lake, the birds sweetly twittering overhead.

For a brief moment, I almost understood why wealthy white people get married in places like this. Until I passed the slave quarters on my way to the visitor center. When I opened the door, an older white couple was leaving, and I wondered if they paid for a $2 tour of the grounds. Well, since they were probably seniors, the $1 tour. My mom and I tried to pay for our tour, but the guide wouldn't let us. Our tour guide was a young college graduate named Lily. She's 22, white, and only been on this job for two months. You're 40-hour weeks just, like, on this land?

Mm-hmm. 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 Crestwell. She had a house across from the supermarket, and she really loved her job. Now, she's buried next to my grams. I feel like I was going to breath way more than I should. Wait, take a breath and take a sip of water. Yes. All right, and then we can do the question. Wait, Lily was nice. What's overheating? She just got her degree in forensic anthropology,

but decided she'd rather be an historic interpreter right now. I found myself smiling a lot with her. Not in a weird way, just in a, I don't know how many Black people she's giving a tour to today, and I guess I want her to be okay kind of way. And we were the only Black people there so I kind of had to ask the question I am curious like demographically wise with the visitors what do they usually look like so uh it is pretty mixed in fact we do get a lot of groups, especially of descendants that come here. A little bit more of the white population, but still a good amount of African-American as well as other nationalities.

I got 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? I think there's a part of me that's worried about an influx of white people discovering Cresswell, an overwhelming Somerset place with their curiosities, with their tourist dollars, with their land interests. I guess because when I stand at the canals,

I see what that kind of curiosity led to before. Somerset's canals were built for transportation. It was a massive project foisted on the enslaved. The canals are six miles long and six feet wide, opening up to 30 feet when they reached the Scuppernong River. It was the job of those 80 enslaved Native Africans to hand dig this canal. And this was a project that started in 1786. And so we see that this was a project that was proposed to take five years to complete. However, the overseers here worked these individuals so hard that it only took two and a half years. Yeah, and so there are stories of, at the end of the working day, individuals who were too tired to climb out of the canal, and their bodies were removed the next morning. Lily would later tell me a story that I

didn't fully process at the time 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. My great-great-great-grandfather, Richard Blunt, had been the enslaved person made to take the children out of the canal. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. We're back with The Sunday Story. 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. If you need to leave at any point, let me know. We 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, alright. I feel safe. So this is the escape room portion of the tour.

Oh boy, alright. Yeah. 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. Oh, she had to lock me in the master's house, Rhonda. Why? She said because there are rules.

Rules? Yeah, that's pretty fresh. When we got to the visitor 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 Miss Dorothy Sproul Redford, the creator of Somerset Homecoming. Miss Redford felt that her job was done. Families found each other. Descendants flocked to Somerset to pay homage to their ancestors.

But they can't find those ancestors. That's the biggest thing that bothers me here. We don't know where the graveyard is. At all? No. Because the place is so big. Right. That's the issue. Records show more than 400 people who were enslaved died at Somerset between 1785 and 1865. The owners of this plantation were such fastidious note-takers about the weather and the crops, and even those who died. But it was never passed along where these souls rested. Now what? But it was never passed along where these souls rested. Now, my great-grandmother was born here, but she's buried at St. John's. So I don't know if her mother, her mother and father, they had to be buried here. My grandmother's grandmother, Maabel, was born on this plantation

And Mabel's parents and grandparents are buried on this plantation And since a majority of the land is now owned by private farmers It's possible they could be under the crops Karen thinks they might be buried at the highest point by the lake. So they gotta be back here somewhere if they're buried here. 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. After the tour, my mom was thinking about Lily and her forensic anthropology degree. Anthropology or something. Because she should be able to go out there and find the graves. Maybe she could use her degree to find them, Indiana Jones style.

Ma, you got any more questions? You sure? Want me to go buy you a magnet? All right. On our way out, I bought two magnets to commemorate the experience. We didn't use Aunt Louise's discount. On the straight line from the Somerset sign down Main Street, my mom and I grabbed a sandwich at Barnyard Betsy's. 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 have. 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. I see your flags a lot. I'm a chick. The little flag that rested where Grams' gravestone should be was still there. That was the only way to find her for a long time, and it hasn't budged. Neither had the flowers we'd placed

there from last August. 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 backwater. I wonder who did it. Well, thank God they did it. I don't know. That was great.

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 because that's what they did. We're almost done., we almost done. Yeah? We almost done. I'm going to try to call Jamie in the car.

All right. Grammy, we'll be back. Hi, someone just called me? Yes, Ms. Parker, this is Jamie. How are you? Good, and yourself? Good. They are going to install Ms. Owens' memorial on Wednesday, May 31st. They are? Mm-hmm.

Oh, thank goodness. Okay. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. Only thing we need to do is make sure that it's flagged. It is, but the flag's still there. 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. For me, the town of Cresswell can be both a family heirloom and a family tomb. And I'm fortunate that I know my family history and that I have this place that I get to go to once a year and pay homage. One day, I'll be old. And I'll still be coming back to this place. Because as Grams always put it, it's home. It's why I've got a slight southern drawl that I can't get rid of. It's ingrained in me.

Wait, so what is this stuff, ma? Going through your grandma's 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. Another descendant, Jeffrey Littlejohn, wrote a theme song for the Somerset homecoming. And my grams had saved the record. Even had an autograph. I'm your grandma. These people were our forefathers. We are the children of the one who came before. They were our ancestors. The first ones on this shore.

I said we are the children Of those who had the courage to survive The spirit was never broken It gave us the vision To keep their dreams alive. And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. 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 Code Switch Plus listeners. We appreciate you and thank you for being a subscriber. Subscribing to Code Switch Plus means getting to listen to all of our episodes without any sponsor breaks. And it also helps support our show. And if you love our work, please consider signing up at plus.npr.org slash codeswitch. This episode was produced by Jess Kung, Christina Kala, and me. It was edited by Courtney Stein.

Our engineer was Maggie Luthar. And a big shout out to the rest of the Codeswitch Massive. Leah Dinella, Lori Lizarraga, Gene Demby, Steve Drummond, Dahlia Mortada, and Verlyn Williams. Our art director is L.A. Johnson. Special thanks to Brittany Luce, Tracy Hunt, Miss Dorothy Sproul-Redford and her book, Somerset Homecoming, Karen Hayes and the staff of Somerset Place,

and thanks to my mom for going on this journey with me. I'm B.A. Parker. Hydrate. 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 and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.