The Roots of Dorothy Redford

By Frank Trippett/Somerset

Alex Haley's Roots got her started. When she first read that epic reconstruction of a black family's odyssey from freedom in Africa to slavery and emancipation in Virginia, Dorothy Spruill Redford could trace her family only as far back as her grandparents. But Haley's genealogical pilgrimage impelled her to one of her own. For Redford, 43, a brisk, hard-driving welfare department supervisor in Portsmouth, Va., the quest would last a decade and grow into an obsession, an irresistible desire to light up the dark past.

Redford's off-duty hours and vacations turned into a blur of musty documents and marathon interviews of old people with tattered memories. The riddle of her origins, she discovered, lay in the North Carolina coastal plain around Edenton, Creswell and Columbia. Her research filled file drawers, boxes and shelves all over her house, and has finally been collected into a 350-page manuscript. What started as a digest of her own genealogy ended up being nothing less than a family tree of all the descendants of the slaves -- bearing 21 different surnames -- who once worked on one of North Carolina's grand plantations, Somerset, just out of Creswell on Phelps Lake.

As a result, 154-year-old Somerset Place, now a state historical site, will be the scene this Saturday of a homecoming unique in American history. Some 2,000 descendants of the Somerset slaves are expected to converge from all over the nation at the ancestral home most had never seen or even heard of until Redford contacted them. They are, says Redford, "people who have never truly been home before." The Aug. 30 gathering comes exactly two centuries after 80 slaves arrived from Africa aboard the brig Camden to help carve from the swamp a plantation where as many as 328 slaves would eventually labor.

Dottie Redford, whose high cheekbones once gave her the now abandoned notion that her family was part American Indian, walked the green grounds of Somerset last week with almost proprietorial ease as she helped prepare for the big day. She has spent so much time at the plantation that Bill Edwards, the site manager, finally slipped her a key to use at will. When some Somerset descendants moseyed up from nearby Creswell to eyeball the preparations, Redford greeted them, and they her, in the lilting tones familiar everywhere as the voice of kinship. "Hello there, sugar." "How you doin', darlin'?" Said Redford: "The whole thing's going to be like one big family reunion." In the program Redford and others have planned, even the feature events -- a concert of spirituals, an art exhibition, the re- enactment of a slave wedding, a blues performance, an exhibition of African dances, a display of Somerset artifacts -- are sure to be secondary. The day's highlights can only be the discoveries, surprises, delights, touchings and twinges that are bound to occur among people newly aware that they spring from a common past, a time carried forward in the sometimes accidentally transformed names of long-dead slave owners: Baum, Bennett, Littlejohn, Palin, Phelps, Reavis, Reevis, Blunt, Blount, Honeyblue, Horniblue and Dickson, among others.

An orthopedic surgeon from Richmond, William Brickhouse, 35, will be there, walking the grounds that his great-great-grandfather may once have tilled. So will a Rochester chemist, William Baum, 44. Likewise the Democratic leader of the Maryland senate, Clarence W. Blount, 65; a chef from New London, Conn., Archie Dunbar, 24; an elder of the Gospel Temple Church of Christ in Manhattan, Joseph Baum, 65; one of Redford's high school classmates, Herman Bonner, 45, of Portsmouth, Va., an aircraft-maintenance manager who did not know he was kin to Redford until she began her research; and the owner of a trophy-making firm in Hillside, N.J., William Dennis Boughton, 52. Says Boughton: "I'll be going to see the joy of others."

There will be no slave quarters to see; the last were torn down in the 1930s. But the pale yellow plantation house still stands, with its green shutters, 14 rooms and veranda and upstairs gallery extending the width of the 53-ft. front. Elsie Reeves Baum, 71, of Creswell, expects the day to swing from sad to happy as she and others walk among the ghosts of their forebears and the splendid cypress trees they planted. Says she: "They sang the same spirituals we sing. 'Steal Away to Jesus!' And 'All o' God's Chillun Got Shoes' . . . For us to walk on the soil where they walked -- there is going to be some crying and everything."

A few men and women whose parents were slaves will be there, among them retired Farmer-Logger Ludie Bennett, 83, of Creswell. He is one of ten children fathered by Darius Bennett, who was born into slavery in 1854 and who lived until 1948. Says Bennett of the homecoming: "It's a great thing. People should know their people." What stories had Bennett's father told of life as a slave child? "About what you imagine," says Bennett. "All they did was what the finger pointed at, what they were told to do." Says Redford, in an aside: "When you talk with Ludie, you really understand how close we still are to the time of slavery."

Dorothy Redford will bring along her immediate family, a total of 17, including Daughter Deborah, 23, six brothers and sisters, their children, and her parents, Grady and Louise Littlejohn Spruill. Although she was born when the family lived in Columbia, only eight miles from Somerset Place, Redford had no idea that the family line led to the plantation. She was able to make the connection when she discovered a bill of sale in the Chowan County courthouse showing that her earliest known antecedent, Elsy Littlejohn, born in 1796, and eight children were sold by the Littlejohn plantation in Edenton to Josiah Collins, owner of Somerset. In the North Carolina state archives, she found a private collection of some 2,000 pages of letters, slave inventories, bills and memorandums from the Somerset plantation. How did the breakthroughs feel? Says Redford: "With the past opening up, you feel more complete, you feel whole."

Redford hopes the homecoming crowd enjoys some such feeling. They will, she thinks, if they set aside their rage at the hideous fact of slavery and let new knowledge make them feel more complete. This, she says, is what she means when she speaks of the homecoming as a "healing."