Story of N.C. plantation house is moving, in many different ways

Imagine this as a sequel to Gone with the Wind: It's 150 years later, and Atlanta sprawl is lapping at Tara's fields. Scarlett O'Hara's great-great-grandchildren decide to move the Big House, columns and all, to a more peaceful spot. You can almost guarantee that a few skeletons would get jostled out of the closets.

So it happens with Godfrey Cheshire, a film critic and a descendant of North Carolina plantation owners who now lives in New York.

It's after Christmas 2002 when Charlie Silver tells Cheshire, his cousin, that he is going to move the ancestral home, Midway. Built in 1848, the plantation's grand, gracious Greek Revival house has become surrounded by suburban Raleigh's strip malls and traffic. Silver feels that selling some of his land and moving the old house is the only way to save it.

Cheshire originally planned to record the experience himself with a digital camera as a document for his family. Back in New York, his friends told him that the story was good enough for a "real" film. With a crew and seven cameras, including one in a helicopter, Cheshire documented the house's August 2005 moving day to a site three miles away.

The resulting documentary, Moving Midway, will be shown tonight at the Salem College Fine Arts Center.

Real life is messier than Hollywood. And Midway's move was just the beginning of the story. That's when fate stepped in, with eerie, impeccable timing. Cheshire was in New York, wrestling with how to portray the elephant in the plantation house -- slavery. One day, he was reading The New York Times Book Review when he noticed a letter to the editor signed by Robert Hinton, a professor at New York University. In the letter, Hinton wrote that he grew up in Raleigh. "I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness, there may be a connection,'" Cheshire said.

So he called Hinton. Hinton told him that he thought his grandfather, Dempsey, had been born a slave at Midway, and Cheshire offered him a chance to work on the film.

Hinton is a professor in New York University's Africana Studies program. He teaches and studies black history.

He was born in Raleigh and hasknown much of his life that his relatives likely included slaves on a Hinton plantation. "I assumed from my name that we must have been owned by a Hinton family but I didn't know much more than that," he said in a phone interview last week. "When you live in the South, you take this for granted. You know that this other person exists. Whether you meet them or not is another question."

Hinton became the film's historian and associate producer, and that took him to Midway, including a first visit before the movie.

"I was feeling emotions that I didn't have words for," he said. "There was a layer of anger because I was essentially returning to the scene of the crime, but more importantly, I was reconnecting with my ancestors and family.

"One of the questions I asked myself is why wasn't I angrier. For one thing, all the people responsible for slavery are dead … and there's no sense in being angry at the people alive now."

Hinton said he is happy that the house is getting saved -- the land is another story. "I have the pleasure of knowing what used to be Midway Plantation will soon be covered with concrete and asphalt," Hinton says drily in the film.

"Surely you can't like that?" Cheshire answers.

"Yes, because nothing significant will ever grow there again."

"Well why is that good?"

"That's good, because my folks did the growing."

Meeting Hinton wasn't the only surprise waiting for Cheshire. While making the film, he met a branch of his family he had never known about -- black ancestors of a son one of his forefathers had with a slave, a plantation cook.

Moving Midway has received glowing reviews from Cheshire's film-critic colleagues, but watching it as a North Carolinian simply just tugs on your heart, not in a sappy way, but in a way that is as bittersweet as the South's past.

"People in North Carolina I think feel very connected to (the film) on a lot of different levels, and they're interested in what it means for the history of the area. And in terms of what their communities are like now. It raises questions about sweeping away … heritage, and the other level is the fact that a lot of communities are still divided along racial lines."

Cheshire has created an onscreen collision of the mythic antebellum era (that includes Gone with the Wind -- the Tara in the movie was a painting, not a real house) and the increasingly black-topped new South with cookie-cutter houses, Home Depots and Targets; racial and cultural divisions from then and now; disparity and differences; and untidy but riveting family histories that make one big Southern crazy quilt.

If you go

Robert Hinton and Godfrey Cheshire will be at today's screening of Moving Midway at 7:30 p.m. at the Salem College Fine Arts Center. They will answer questions after the film.

The screening is open to the public and is part of Preservation North Carolina's annual conference taking place in Winston-Salem this week. Tickets are $10 and will be available at the door. The price includes a prefilm dessert reception that begins at 6:45 p.m.

For more information about the film, go to www.movingmidway.com.