Shared History

Could a group of African American families and my white family, who are connected by a relationship forged through slavery that spans over 260 years, come together to explore the realities of our past? After all these years, could we finally speak honestly with each other about our long-term, continuous connection?

These were the questions I began to consider over ten years ago—activated by a friendship and discussions with Professor Jualynne Dodson of the University of Colorado’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Answering these questions would require confronting my own family’s particular participation in this country’s greatest tragedy—the enslavement of other human beings—at Woodlands, a plantation my family still owns. I am descended from William Gilmore Simms, the 19th century American writer who acquired Woodlands through marriage into a landowning family near Charleston, South Carolina.

At the beginning of the Civil War, there were seventy members of enslaved families living at Woodlands. Many left after the War, but some stayed on and became tenants, sharecroppers, and the managers of the plantation property. As children, my cousins and I would visit what my grandmother called “the remnants of the old place—what Sherman left behind” that included an old house, graveyards, swamps and empty fields. She was an historian and author and had told us that our ancestors had been “good masters,” a story that helped me assuage, for awhile, the discomfort I felt as a child about my family’s slave-owning past.

I knew I could not explore these questions without help. I would need to find collaborators, in a sense, accomplices, who were descended from one or more of the enslaved families of Woodlands. I first met Rhonda Kearse. Her grandmother, who I had known as a child, introduced us at a “homecoming” event I held at Woodlands in 1996. Rhonda, who has lived all her life in New Jersey, is a descendant of Jim Rumph, who was born in Africa in 1810 and died in 1922 at Woodlands at the age of 112. His family remained closely connected to my family after the Civil War. Rhonda agreed to help create a reason for our families to come together. On November 24, 2001, we held the “Woodlands Families 50th Anniversary Gathering” to commemorate a similar event held in 1951 on the plantation grounds. It was there that we met Charles Orr, who had found us at www.sharedhistory.org. Charles is the great grandson of Isaac Nimmons, the slave coachman of Woodlands, who left after the Civil War. The three of us agreed to work together to break the silence mandated by the old etiquettes created by our ancestors and start a different kind of dialogue—one that used our historical relationship as a base from which we could discover and reconsider the realities that might genuinely connect our common backgrounds.

Shared History is our story and the story of our country’s continuing struggle to address the realities of our past.