Hollywood, MD – When considering Maryland history, there are no darker chapters, nor deeper held scars, than the bondage of African-Americans. It took a bloody Civil War to end the inhumane system, but the scars lingered.
Yet at Historic Sotterley Plantation, where for 200 years the upper echelon of society depended on slave labor for its bounty, healing has begun. And what is most remarkable: It took two of their own, one from the mansion on the hill, the other whose ancestors labored and lived in the little ramshackle cabin at the forest’s edge, to not only begin the healing process, but to save the historic site as well.
Agnes Kane Callum, whose memory was honored with the slave cabin exhibit being named in her honor Friday, April 21 at Sotterley, discovered when she began searching her own family history, that the story of her enslaved ancestors was tied inexplicably to that of Historic Sotterley. It was she and former St. Mary’s County Circuit Court Judge and former delegate John Hanson Briscoe, whose family at one time owned Sotterley and had enslaved Kane Callum’s forbears, whose hard work and dedication not only began to tell the plantation’s untold story, but in doing so preserved Sotterley when it was in danger of being lost altogether.
Sotterley Board of Directors Vice President Janice L. Briscoe noted that through the duo’s research, they found that “Agnes’ ancestors did not own the shirts on their backs.”
“Hope does not disappoint,” Dr. Francine Dove Hawkins, evangelist of St. Peter Claver Church, St. Inigoes, told the assembly. “This is Sotterley, where our past has the opportunity to meet the present, where suffering has the opportunity to meet healing, where despair has the opportunity to meet hope.”
She praised the work of Kane Callum.
“Her story now becomes our story,” she said.
“Twenty years ago, this site almost didn’t exist,” Historic Sotterley Executive Director Nancy Easterling admitted. “Because of Judge Briscoe and Agnes Kane Callum, because of the geneology and oral history, we are now able to more fully interpret all sides of our story.”
“She [Callum] told the story nobody wanted to hear,” Sotterley Education Director Jeanne Pirtle added.
Callum’s sister Edna Martina Kane Aiden, said her sibling was adamant about learning.
“I am proud of my sister,” she said. “She was smart. And she gave us the devil of we didn’t learn. My sister was my second mother,” she said.
“Over 150 years ago, my great-grandfather was born here, a slave,” said Callum’s sister Martina Callum.
“We’re walking on holy ground here,” said her brother, Martin. “One day I stopped by to see my sister {Agnes], just stopped by to say hello, and she had a piece of white paper that started on one side of the wall and it went all the way down the wall. She had put up a family tree. I was blown out of the water.
“She drilled that stuff into us,” he added.
Dr. Tuajuanda Jordan, president, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, said that when she thought of the “big house,” meaning Sotterley Plantation, she thought of it as a “den of oppression.
“They made their living on the backs on my people,” she said. “Their children were nursed and their elderly cared for by the hands of my people, who were treated less than human.
“I draw strength when I think about the cabin,” Jordan said. “We cannot let their sacrifices have been in vain. Our job is not just to survive, but to live. In this way we can make our ancestors proud.”
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com
