- [Announcer] Funding provided by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Amistad Center for Art & Culture.

(gentle music) - You were lost to me, but now you are found just now in the scheme of time.

I have not always known you, but still love abounds.

Family love's like that.

It seeks to surround.

I never felt your pain, but I remember it.

You never knew freedom.

You never knew a whole life.

You had six short years to watch your only child grow.

He'd live in freedom to father generations, but you could not know.

I was home from door knocking one day and sitting on the back porch, and my husband came out with this odd look on his face, and he said, "There's a man on the phone that knows a bit too much about you, and I want you to talk to him."

And so I was like, "What?"

So I took the phone and it turned out to be a middle school teacher from Guilford who was so excited.

And, you know, he was as excited as I was and he was giving me all of this information about people that I had not had no knowledge of, of my history in Guilford.

And it turned out that this was Dennis Culliton, who at the time was an Adams Middle School teacher.

And he had been researching this for some time.

So I was like the living end to some years of research that he had been doing.

He had originally learned of, I believe it was either Montros or Pompey in a document he read about old Guilford.

There was some reference.

I believe it was Harriet Beecher Stowe's father's biography, where he referenced a fiddler or, you know, an enslaved person.

And Dennis hadn't been aware that there was slavery right here in Guilford.

And so he began researching that and he worked his way as researchers do through all of the documentation, until he finally came up with the obituary of a Tuskegee Airmen who was in this line, who died in 2002, that turned out to be my father Lieutenant Colonel Bert Wilson.

He found his obituary and he was excited enough about that, but he hadn't expected to find a living heir, a living relative.

Montros and Phillis were two enslaved teenagers who were brought to Guilford by David Naughty in 1727.

They came through Boston.

They were imported, which I thought was an odd word, but it turned out that that simply meant he avoided paying taxes because they came in through Boston and he was bringing them to Guilford.

He purchased two teenagers who didn't know each other.

In fact, Montros we think had come more recently from Africa than Phillis.

We believe that Phillis, who already had a Christian name, was in the Caribbean before coming to Boston, both brought to Mr. Naughty who picked them up and took them back to Guilford.

He and his wife Ruth lived not too far from here, a block or so from here, I think, where the bank is now in a house.

They brought these two teenagers back.

Three years later, they were married and began to have children all living in that house.

When the children reached the age of 20, they were generally indentured out to neighbors.

- Well, it's one thing, it's not abstract.

These are our ancestors, but the fact that they were property, the fact that they lacked agency, the fact that they were traded.

- Yeah, like furniture.

- And loaned out.

And loaned out like furniture or cars.

But in a place in America, in Connecticut, where in the North where very few people associate.

You know, when you say the word slavery, you automatically think the South.

- The South.

Right.

- You don't necessarily think of, you know, New York and Wall Street, which I think at the time was one of the, I think Wall Street was actually the biggest slave market.

- It was.

It was.

- You know.

And so when it comes to Connecticut, were you at all surprised about?

- Oh, very much so.

I mean, I did not grow up.

In fact, one of the most impressive things for me is the fact that I could grow up here in an educated community and all of the, you know, the schools that you would expect that you learn whatever you needed to learn, and I learned nothing of myself.

I learned nothing about, you know, enslavement in the Northeast.

I certainly had, I had no idea that I had 11 generations of, or 10 generations of ancestors going back to 1727.

I guess it wouldn't be 10, but you lose track (laughs) with these generation levels.

But that Phillis and Montros came here in 1727, long before we had, you know, a constitution or effectively, you know, there was an America.

And given the lack of information that I had during my schooling, how could I be here and not know this?

I mean, I knew something of relatives in Guilford, but not anything as concretely as I do now.

And until Dennis Culliton happened into my life.

Naughty died only about 10 years after bringing this couple or what wasn't a couple but the two teenagers to his home.

He left a will when he died.

And in that will, he freed Montros and Phillis and their children and all those afterwards.

That was the intent.

They were to be freed, however, after Mrs. Naughty died, and she lived for 30 more years.

So they were promised freedom, but they didn't all obtain it.

Hyland House is where my Aunt Candace lived for about 20 years.

She was indentured to the Parmelee family.

Candace as a 20 or 22-year-old was sort of running the house because the Parmelees were very old at that point.

And she lived here for nearly 20 years.

And the fact that there's mention of her now, but for so many years, no one knew.

That wasn't a part of the Hyland House story, but it really is a huge part of it.

Candace was both enslaved and indentured because by the Mr. Naughty's will, she would've been freed, but Mrs. Naughty decided to continue the indenture.

And for 12 pounds a year, each of the children was rented out in effect.

So she was rented, if you will, to the Parmelees.

They were able to pass her on to their children.

And so she was here for 20 years.

She is a part of this house.

And when I walk around here, I feel her, I connect to her.

In Ashford, Connecticut, which is where I grew up, was an all white town except for us.

The only real connection I had was skin color to something beyond, you know, what I knew - Africa.

I remember studying every year.

It seemed like the Civil War would come up and there would be pictures of little pickaninnies outside of a little house.

And that was me.

That was the representation of me to my classmates.

I was the living slave.

And so that, you know, that discomfort, that feeling of, you know, representing something that I didn't feel that I was representative of me.

But that's what was seen.

I was always, you know, kind of disturbed by the fact that my connection to slavery and that's all I was, like, the only contribution somehow I made to this country was free labor.

I did not have a context for understanding the richness of my history or the fact that I had relatives that fought in the Revolutionary War, not to mention the Civil War and every other, just about every other war we've had.

But I didn't have that context.

What suffered was my self-esteem.

What suffered was my ability to understand who I was as an American and to claim that.

I mean, I did it in ways, but how much stronger would I have been had I known this as a child, had I not had to hide my face and in shame during stories of the Civil War as though my life began there when in fact it was, you know, so many generations before.

Everything in school had always taught me that somehow I was like here, by default, I mean, somehow Black people were Americans, but, you know, we were brought here and left here.

And, you know, there was that sort of a feeling.

I never had the sense that not only were we here before there was an America, but that many of us fought for American's freedom before we, you know, had our own.

But that sense of, you know, the sense of patriotism that I now understand goes back way far, you know, to the very beginning.

- Well, I mean, but it's interesting 'cause as I'm hearing you talk about what it was like for you growing up.

You know, me being born in New Haven, but growing up in Storrs and Ashford, you know, with the name Cheo Hodari, because it being important for yourself and my father for me to have, you know, a connection to African heritage.

The irony is you grow up the same way, 'cause when everyone else is named Dave or Phil, and your name is Cheo Hodari, you just want to be like everybody else.

And you want to, you don't necessarily want to hide, but you just, you don't necessarily understand or want to necessarily own, you know, what it means.

- Your difference.

- But I mean, I think I came to that pretty quickly.

I mean, it was never a sense of confusion about who it is I was or what it meant, but it was more just having understanding.

But my pride in my family came from my grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Bertam W. Wilson or Granddaddy as I called him.

For me, knowing that that history and that pride, it goes so much further than just World War II or anything else.

Particularly as an African American, you read about history, you read about American history, and you don't necessarily feel as connected because there's always gonna be this asterisk.

There's always gonna be this notion that, because you were owned, because you were imported, that your roots aren't really planted in this soil here, and that you're not really from any of this.

And so when you're able to look back at your lineage and understand that, you think differently about patriotism and what it means to actually be a part of the fabric of this country.

Now that we understand who it is we are, and what do we do with this, and what's the importance of knowing who you are, it shouldn't be just shame and anger.

It also should be a sense of ownership that this is my country as well.

- And triumph.

Because to think of where, you know, people have come, where we are compared to where we were forced to begin.

There's a lot of triumph in that story.

And when you don't tell the story of enslavement, you miss that triumph, you miss that growth.

And I certainly don't mean to take the line that somehow there was some value in slavery.

That's not what I'm saying.

- None.

- But what I am saying is that you have a different sense of yourself when you understand how far back your history goes.

You have a different sense of ownership of this country.

You have a different sense of responsibility for this country and for telling the story and for helping people understand that this America belongs to all of us.

(gentle music)