Dorothy Spruill Redford

2001 Season

Dorothy Spruill Redford was born in Columbia, North Carolina. After attending college in New York she returned to North Carolina to manage the Somerset Place State Historic Site. It was on this antebellum plantation that four generations of her ancestors lived as slaves. She discusses her book, Somerset Homecoming, on a special episode of North Carolina Bookwatch.

Bibliography

Looks Just Like Me

Somerset Homecoming

Somerset Slave Community: An Antebellum Genealogical Study

Excerpt

SOMERSET HOMECOMINGS
Beginnings

Daddy was at work the windy February morning I came to ask about Columbia.

He was seventy then and holding down three jobs. The granary was closed. Waldo had shut it down back in 1962, after he became the city's Commissioner of Revenue. But Waldo didn't leave Daddy jobless. He took him along, made him a janitor, and that's where my father worked for the next thirteen years--keeping the Commissioner of Revenue offices clean.

They retired Daddy at sixty-five, but he wasn't the retiring kind. He'd been doing a man's work since he was twelve, and he wasn't about to sit down until he had to. So he got on as a runner at a local bank, was hired to clean a judge's office, and clerked at a neighborhood hardware store. That was enough to keep his days filled.