Word: redfords
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...