It was a shared though relentlessly unjust experience wrought up in an extended plantation household encompassing African Americans and free whites, all bound together by a network of reciprocal responsibilities (2). Through their day-to-day interactions for a period of perhaps 260 years, these families contributed equally in creating traditions and culture that they share today. As W.J. Cash asserted, “the relationship between the two groups [black and white Southerners] was, by the second generation at least, nothing less than organic. Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.”(3) The connection between the Woodlands families was close, complicated, perplexing, and often frustrating. But their encounters produced connections and even demanded relationships tied to a common history, the land, and to each other. Long after the legal ties of slavery were dissolved, those connections endure, rooted deeply enough —though profoundly flawed—to last for generations.

Their sustained encounters have produced parallel and overlapping stories, congruent and conflicting memories, dramatic and mundane traditions. And they come together now to face the truth of their age-old bond, and negotiate—as they did through the over 260 years they have been connected—a new relationship that will take them into the twenty-first century.

After the Civil War, several families of freedmen from Woodlands—the Rowes, Rumphs, and Laboards, among others—stayed on at the ruined plantation. Many of their descendants were born ‘on the place’ and continued to live and work there well into the second half of the twentieth century. The Simms family lived at Woodlands on and off but eventually scattered to other parts of the state. Yet they continued to maintain the property and the connection with descendants of the slaves. The social interactions, personal communication, and exchange of information between these black and white families persisted. And it continues into the present.

DOCUMENTARY SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

The development of the documentary script included nationally acclaimed scholars who helped direct the research and define the humanities themes of the project. They include:

Jualynne Elizabeth Dodson
Professor and Director of the African Atlantic Research Team, Department of African American & African Studies, Michigan State University.

Benjamin Bernard Dunlap
President of Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, where he served as the Chapman Professor of the Humanities.

Walter B. Edgar
Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina and the author of South Carolina, A History.

Karen Fields
An independent scholar, writer, and filmmaker and former director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. She is currently producing a documentary about the connection of Bordeaux and the US slave trade.

John C. Guilds
Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. He is the biographer of 19th century American novelist and critic William Gilmore Simms and author of Simms: A Literary Life, University of Arkansas Press, 1992.

Charles Joyner
Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University and author of the seminal book Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, and Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture.

Frank Martin
Curator of Exhibitions and Collections for the I.P. Stanback Museum at South Carolina State University where he also teaches art history.

The significance of the project to humanities scholarship is in the opportunity to “ask large questions in small places.”(4) The sustained encounters of the Woodlands families allow exploration of the behaviors constructed by US families tied together by time, space, and hierarchical social systems. The film examines how and why black and white families of unequal status consciously or unconsciously create relationships, specifically those created in a racially charged US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through the eyes and experiences of the Woodlands families, we can examine the traditional chain of transmission that re-enforces the habits of racial etiquette through several generations. We can experience the families’ process of remembering and forgetting, how they continue to invent their history—a memory of a life together—and, how they conspire with each other to create ways to live with and, perhaps sometimes even celebrate, the actions and conduct of their ancestors.

This documentary is an accounting of how we begin to remember what we have often chosen to forget in the long evolution of becoming Americans. Audiences can identify with the Woodlands families and their struggle with the ethical dilemmas they have faced as well as the choices and compromises they have had to make over the many generations of their association. Starting from an acceptance of the disorderly and ever-changing views of race in this country, we invite our viewers to examine the foundation of the “good will” that has survived among some black and white families—whether shared genuinely or for economic, social, or psychological pretexts no longer effective or needed today.

The documentary touches on larger questions as well. How can black and white Americans ever genuinely trust each other when our country built its social and economic structure on slavery?

Benjamin Dunlap challenges us with further questions and a possible outcome: “can [the Woodlands families] deal with those very subtle shadings of delusion, dissembling, resentment, and affection that underlay black-white relations in the South? Will they dig down to the bedrock reality, through all the facile sentimentalities and self-deceptions of the white point of view—as well as the often corrosive cynicism, deception, and self-contempt of the black experience—to something that satisfies both of them as true…to something Oliver Wendell Holmes called the simplicity on the other side of complexity—that is, some sort of acceptance despite all the entanglements of love and betrayal?”

Nevertheless, the unique circumstance of an on-going, centuries-old entwined relationship reflects those questions back onto the actual gritty, lived existence of those two family groups. The power of the documentary rests on that fact and in our invitation to the audience “to join in this experience of recollection, redefinition, and reconstruction.”