Somerset Homecoming by Dorothy Spruill Redford

Author:Dorothy Spruill Redford [Redford, Dorothy Spruill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807848432
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Voices from the Past

They are dead now, all of them. The Collinses, the Pettigrews, and their slaves. Nineteenth-century ghosts. But even now, they are still apart, white and black, as separated in death as they were when they were living.

The whites left snapshots of their lives behind. In letters and ledger books they told me who they were and how they lived. I knew what the Collinses ate, how they dressed, where they slept, how they spoke. They spoke on paper, and their voices can still be heard a century after their bodies were put in the ground. There is little that is magical about lives like that, little to imagine, little room for mystery when the mundane is so specifically preserved.

The black people whose names I held in my hand left nothing. What they wrote, neither they nor their owners kept. And when they spoke, really spoke, it was only to one another. The voices their owners heard were not the voices they shared among themselves. When they died, their real voices went with them. And the echoes that were left became mystery, then more. The mystery became magic. It’s that way with the dead—the less we know about the lives they led, the more we make them myths when they are gone. We fill the void with our own imagining, with our own hopes.

That is what I had done as I worked my way to Somerset. Because of the very fact that all I had were lists of slave names and dates culled from courthouse records and company account books, I wrapped each of those names in an aura of wonder, of richness. Once I arrived at the place where they lived, I realized there was the chance I would be robbing that richness by digging into the reality of their pasts. In a way I was intruding, peeling away their mystery by reaching for the concrete, the three-dimensional. In a way it seemed right to leave my ancestors among the mists of myth, to keep them apart from the Collinses—to allow them in death to be more than the people who owned them in life.

But that would be to deny their own very real lives, to put my dreams above theirs. I was here now, at Somerset. I had the names. I had the place. I had to go on, to piece together their existence—as individuals; as a group.

There were no straightforward, firsthand accounts of slave life at Somerset. Only references among the Collinses’ and Pettigrews’ correspondence. Costs of slaves in old ledger books. Entries of money paid for slave shoes and buttons.

Tiny slivers of reality, mere shavings of the past, disjunctive fragments of time.

Mention of a persistent runaway in an overseer’s letter. Plantation inventories listing slaves by cabin, telling me who lived with whom, giving me a sense of families, but only a sense. An archaeologist’s reconstruction describing where those cabins stood, how they were built, even their color—white.

I walked into a church where my ancestors had sung both before and after they were told they were free.

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