Moving Midway

Plot Summary

New York film critic-turned-filmmaker Godrey Chesire returns home to North Carolina and finds that his cousin Charlie Silver proposes to uproot and relocate the family ancestral home - Midway Plantation - to escape urban sprawl. Chesire also comes across history professor Robert Hinton, who reveals that his grandfather was born a slave at Midway. As Chesire and Hinton explore the plantation mythology embodied in our cultural history - from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Gone With the Wind" to "Roots" - Charlie meanwhile follows through on the Herculean feat of hoisting Midway several miles across a forbidding landscape. But this event's drama leads to an even more startling surprise: the discovery of 100 African-American cousins that Chesire and Silver never suspected, potent proof of America's long buried but increasingly important status as a mixed-race society.