MOVING MOVING AWAY AWAY FROM FROM THE THE LENTICULAR?: LENTICULAR?: 52
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
The Politics of Race, Gender, and Place in Godfrey Cheshire’s Moving Midway by Margaret T. McGehee
COURTESY OF GODFREY CHESHIRE; MOVING MIDWAY, LLC; AND FIRST RUN FEATURES
Click here to watch Charlie Silver explain the circumstances behind the decision to move Midway Plantation.
MARGARET T. MCGEHEE is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Oxford College of Emory University. Her scholarship has appeared in Studies in American Culture, Southern Spaces, and Cinema Journal. She received her PhD in American Studies from Emory University, MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, and BA in History from Davidson College in North Carolina.
The 2008 documentary Moving Midway chronicles the recent undertaking of a North Carolina–based family to relocate their antebellum plantation home, Midway, away from the hustle and bustle of traffic and commerce in Raleigh’s metro region.1 Frustrated and annoyed by the noise produced by the significant number of vehicles passing the house daily and alarmed by the rapid development of nearby property into shopping complexes, the Silver family seeks and ultimately finds a quieter spot for their homestead – a wooded area accessible primarily by back roads, though only a few miles from the house’s original location. The transport of the home and its accompanying buildings is a visually stunning and mesmerizing event, involving the time and energy of a significant number of laborers and, no doubt, a load of cash. But that’s only part of the story. While chronicling Midway’s move, the film’s writer, producer, and director, Godfrey Cheshire, first cousin to the home’s legal owner, Charlie Silver, begins to research his family’s slave-owning past, a project that leads him to Dr. Robert Hinton, professor of African American Studies at New York University and a descendent of slaves connected to Midway Plantation. Not uncommon in the mid-nineteenth century, the plantation’s patriarch, Charles Lewis Hinton (the great-great-great-grandfather of Charlie Silver and Godfrey Cheshire) had a sexual relationship with Selanie, the plantation’s African American cook, which produced the ancestral line claimed by ninety-seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln Hinton (grandson of Charles Lewis Hinton) and Abraham’s son, Al, both of whom viewers meet in the film. Cheshire admits that, while his family always knew of an African American line of Hintons descended from the family’s slaves, they were not aware until more recent years of the intermixing that apparently took place. The convergence of bloodlines does not really surprise the viewers, however, given the pervasiveness of interracial liaisons during slavery. (Cheshire brings in leading historians, including the late John Hope Franklin, to locate the Silvers’ narrative within the broader historical context of the antebellum and postbellum South.) What is
ABOVE LEFT The documentary poster
(and DVD cover) for Godfrey Cheshire’s Moving Midway (Find more information, including purchase information, on the documentary’s website.)
1
Godfrey Cheshire, dir., Moving Midway (First Run Features, 2008); film clips and stills are used with the permission of Godfrey Cheshire; Moving Midway, LLC; and First Run Features.