Film tells racial history

'Moving Midway' links black, white in plantation's story

RALEIGH -- It's a rare movie that can attract 500 people to a middle school auditorium on a chilly Tuesday night, but a 98-minute documentary packed them in like a first-run Hollywood blockbuster.

"Moving Midway" isn't in theaters yet, but two screenings in Southeast Raleigh last week helped build a citywide buzz about the story of a Wake County plantation -- mainly the black and white family members united by its history.

In 2004, film critic Godfrey Cheshire came home to Raleigh from New York and was startled to hear that his family would move Midway, the plantation house in Knightdale that his family had occupied since the 18th century.

Cheshire had spent weekends there as a boy, when the place was wild and undeveloped. But with construction crowding all around the Knightdale area, his cousin Charlie Hinton Silver told Cheshire that the antebellum house would be moved intact to a quiet rural spot nearby.

Cheshire, who writes for the Independent Weekly, among other papers, decided to film the exodus and use it as a conversation about the plantation's image in American life. He would skewer the romanticized fantasy shown in the book and movie versions of "Gone with the Wind," recall the racist cruelty depicted in the 1970s television show "Roots" and trace his own family as a backdrop.

In the process, Cheshire learned via Silver that a family patriarch had had a child by one of the slaves before the Civil War. As Cheshire's work continued, black descendants named Hinton began appearing.

Cheshire also came across Dr. Robert Hinton, born in Raleigh's Chavis Heights projects, now a history professor at New York University. Hinton's ties to Midway were just as strong, through not as nostalgic as Cheshire's.

Hinton's grandfather had been born a slave at Midway, and he and Cheshire guess they may be related.

In the film, Hinton joins Cheshire's family as they sadly watch 200-year-old trees fall, and they imagine the reaction of the ancestors' ghosts as the house is hauled away.

"I feel like it's important for me to be here to represent my family," Hinton said in the film. "I can't imagine the spirits of my ancestors will want to hang out in Target."

He and Cheshire made a compelling pair last week as they introduced the film at Ligon GT Magnet Middle School on Tuesday night, then again on Wednesday when they discussed "Moving Midway" with about 100 students.

The first screening came on the day Sen. Barack Obama made his speech about race relations, in which he described his own complex racial makeup.

"We see this film as the basis for a lot of conversations," Cheshire said. "Our mission is to pass down these stories."

Cheshire introduced himself as a native of West Raleigh and country club neighborhoods. Hinton, meanwhile, told both crowds that he attended Ligon when it was a segregated school for blacks and that he fled Raleigh as quickly as he could.

Even after leaving, he explained, he found it easier to talk to white Southerners than black Northerners. Left-leaning friends in New York get rankled, he said, when they hear that white Southerners aren't ignorant racists and that black Southerners aren't all victims waiting for their help.

Even his students, he said, are reluctant to dig into the nation's racial past.

Eventually, Cheshire said, he hopes his film will make it out of art house theaters and get a wide enough distribution to be an educational tool.

It's a film about many complicated topics -- race, family, the South -- but mostly, Cheshire said, it's about Raleigh.