This is my first post to BitterSweet: Linked Through Slavery, and I wanted to briefly introduce myself. My name is Felicia Furman. I’m a white, middle-aged media maker from a privileged family. My ancestors owned a plantation called Woodlands and still owns most of this land today. I am linked to many descendants of enslaved people on my mother’s side of the family through my slave owning ancestor William Gilmore Simms. He was a popular 19th century Southern literary figure who owned about 60 people at Woodlands Plantation near Bamberg, South Carolina. Several families stayed on the place after the Civil War including the Rumphs, Laboards and Rowes among others. For more information about these families, go to Shared History. I am also descended from enslavers on my father’s side but I won’t go into that saga today. This post is about Llewellyn whose family was in South Carolina before the Revolutionary War.
Category: Linked Descendants
Cousins
I started digging deep into my paternal family history in 2008 in hopes of finding information about my great, great grandmother, Tempy Burton who had been a slave. The search took me from Maryland to Mississippi and introduced me to cousins I didn’t know I had. But I never expected to encounter descendants of the family who had once owned Tempy. I wrote about our work together to reclaim our common history and our complex connection in a recent issue of MORE magazine.
Bittersweet Memories
When I was a small child, there was an old woman I remember seeing when we visited my grandfather’s house on the Southside of Chicago. She was extremely quiet, very tall (although slumped with age), with light brown skin and braided hair. My mother told me she was more than 100 years old.
It was not until I was a grown woman that I realized who “that woman” was… Rhody Leslie, my father’s grandmother. She migrated to Chicago in 1939 to live with her sons, Tommie Joe and Robert (my grandfather), after her husband of 67 years died in Alabama. When she passed away in 1954, at age 104, I was three years old. Too young to ever have a conversation with her, I do not even remember attending her funeral. And, until I became an adult, I had no idea that Rhody had been enslaved – along with her husband and mother. Those in my family who knew her well say I remind them of her. A regal six feet tall, she smoked a pipe, swallowed an aspirin and downed a shot of whiskey each and every day.
Being Linked Through Slavery Means …
Being a “linked descendant” puts racism and white privilege in a harsh light for me. It makes speaking out honestly about the legacy of slavery a personal and family imperative.
I always knew that my mother’s ancestral roots went back to at least one plantation-owning Virginia family, but not until well into adulthood did I realize that being directly descended from one plantation family actually means being descended from many such families, and related by marriage to as many as 50 others. Furthermore, this heritage for “first families of Virginia” turns out to endow me with an extended family of European American cousins, but an equally large or larger extended family of African American cousins. And the longer I studied my family tree, the more I realized how large, extended and “linked” it is.
Remembering their names
When I joined Coming To The Table over two years ago, I began a journey—a journey into the lives and times of my slave-holding ancestors and, most important for me, into the lives of the people they had enslaved. Taken together, we call ourselves linked descendants.
Along the way, I have participated in discussions with other descendants of enslaved and enslaver, and learned from what they have said to me. In March 2012, I had the opportunity to spend a night in slave quarters with Joseph McGill, founder of the Slave Dwelling Project (http://www.lowcountryafricana.com/2012/04/10/descendants-of-slaveholders-descendants-of-slaves-share-overnight-stay-at-bush-holley-house-greenwich-ct/ ), and other Coming To The Table members, in Connecticut, the last place any of us might associate with slavery.
Our Stories
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