Margaret Seidler didn’t put much stock in the DNA test she took in 2012.
“Somebody pestered me to do it,” says the Charleston, South Carolina, native. “It was kind of a new thing to do. And to me, it was a big waste of money.”
As it turned out, that DNA test not only changed everything she’d believed was her past, it also changed the entire trajectory of her life.
“I’m not a Charleston aristocrat,” says the retired consultant, a white woman whose test confirmed a West African heritage of 0.1%. “I’m just from a working class family here. And I never thought that my genealogy or my history was interesting.”
“Interesting,” however, doesn’t even come close to describing what she eventually discovered.
Seidler learned that she wasn’t a fifth-generation Charlestonian, as she’d thought. “I found out that I’m an eighth-generation Charlestonian, with 100 years of slave traders in my family. Not just slaveholders — slave traders — 100 years of people here that I knew nothing about.”
On Saturday, Sept. 6, Seidler will recount her stunning discoveries in a “Cultural Conversation: A Bridge to Truth and Connection,” hosted by the African American Research Library and Cultural Center (AARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale. The event is the opening dialogue for the traveling exhibition, “To Be Sold: Enslaved Labor and Slave Trading in the Antebellum South,” featuring paintings by self-taught South Carolina artist John W. Jones. It will remain on display through Dec. 27.
Some of Jones’ portraits of slaves also appear in Seidler’s book on her mission to learn and process her family’s genealogical past, “‘Payne-ful’ Business: Charleston’s Journey to Truth” (Evening Post Books, 2024). It won this year’s Phillis Wheatley Book Award, which honors books about American slavery and African-American genealogy. The title refers to Seidler’s ancestor, William Payne.
“My fourth great-grandfather and his sons sold 9,268 human beings in the first three decades of the 19th century,” she says. “He was the most prolific domestic slave trader here in Charleston. And by ‘domestic,’ I mean these are not people captive from Africa. These are people that are living here, raising their families.”
A prominent descendant at the other end of Seidler’s “Cultural Conversation” is South Carolina Sen. Mia S. McLeod. Seidler discovered their connection in 2020 after hiring an African American genealogist, Robin R. Foster. Through the research, Seidler learned of Joseph Morris, who’d been enslaved by her ancestors and whose descendants owned a funeral home in the state.
“I’d decided to see if I could find descendants of people who were enslaved by my family, just so I could apologize to them,” Seidler says. “I just felt like I needed to apologize to someone.”
She found that someone in McLeod — whose great-great-grandfather happened to be Joseph Morris, and who the senator thought had been a free man. Seidler reached out and the two women connected.
“I shared with her what I had known so far,” Seidler recalls. “It was probably about a two-hour phone call. We laughed, we cried, we had silence.”
A friendship developed between the author and the senator, the first Black woman to run for governor of South Carolina.
“We’re on a mission to show people that even with this kind of history between us, it can be used for the greater good to bring people together and bridge a racial divide,” Seidler says.
“For many of us African Americans, we don’t know a lot about our ancestors and even less about the people who may have owned them or sold them,” says Tameka Hobbs, AARLCC’s regional manager for the past three years. “And it’s a conversation that people attempt to avoid, but it is a foundational part of American history. So I think it’s going to be incredibly interesting to hear these two women talk about their shared family history, and how they kind of reconcile all of that.”
The exhibition comes to AARLCC by way of Partners in Racial Justice, a community group that brought a similar exhibition by the same artist to the center in 2021. Jones’ exhibition, “Confederate Currency: The Color of Money,” took its inspiration from the portrayal of enslaved individuals on Confederate banknotes.
The Fort Lauderdale exhibition will be its first outside South Carolina, where four have been held over the past 18 months. Its 43 paintings, 36 of which appeared in Seidler’s book, portray skilled, enslaved people at work. As reference, Jones used newspaper ads that had offered for sale people enslaved by Seidler’s family.
“They are highly descriptive,” she says of the ads, which in both the book and the exhibition appear beside Jones’ conceptual portraits of the individuals up for sale. “It’ll say ‘a person who’s warranted and of good character in every way,’ who’s, say, in their 30s or 40s and of dark complexion or light complexion. And then it’ll say what their skillset is.
“When people think about slavery generally in the past, we think about people picking cotton or planting rice, right? And it’s so much more than that. Mr. Jones humanizes them and shows how important the work of the enslaved was in building this entire country. I mean, nobody has ever done anything like this before.”
AARLCC’s Hobbs echoes the sentiment: “To have the art vivify the lives and the skills of these individuals, it just took my breath away. You can’t help but contemplate what their lives might have been like and what type of wealth they may have been able to leave for their descendants if they had been able to actually keep the profits of the labor that was extracted from them. And so it does lead us to these types of conversations about the real contributions of enslaved Black people to this nation’s economy during that period. It’s something that we don’t talk enough about, but this exhibition brings that into clear focus.”
Seidler’s discovery of the truth about her ancestors surely came as a shock, but her profession had equipped her to not only deal with the revelations but to make them count for something. As a consultant specializing in leadership development and conflict resolution in organizations and communities, Seidler had been a catalyst for healing in her community long before she knew of her family’s history there.
She’d been working as a consultant for the city of Charleston and its police department when in 2015 a mass shooting killed nine people during a Bible study at the city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Race relations had become a tinderbox throughout the country, and Seidler was asked by the city to head up a yearlong process to bring citizens and police closer together.
Two years later, she learned the real story about her ancestors. “And so,” she says, “when people find out this kind of bad news, they can either choose to hide it or use it for something to make things better. And being that that was my professional background and what I’d done for a really long time, there was no way I was gonna hide it, right?”
Far from hiding it, Seidler says she’s spoken to more than 4,300 people about it through “Cultural Conversations” and other efforts.
“And not only have people not been ugly, I mean, people are crying,” she says. “We have not had a negative comment yet. Not one.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Cultural Conversation: A Bridge to Truth and Connection,” an opening dialogue for “To Be Sold” exhibition
WHEN: 3- 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 6
WHERE: African American Research Library and Cultural Center auditorium, 2650 W. Sistrunk Blvd., Fort Lauderdale
COST: Free
INFORMATION: broward.libnet.info
This story was produced by Broward Arts Journalism Alliance (BAJA), an independent journalism program of the Broward County Cultural Division. Visit ArtsCalendar.com for more stories about the arts in South Florida.
