Introduction:
I met Margaret Seidler at USCB in January at the opening reception for her book, “Payne-Ful” Business Charleston’s Journey To Truth. Her narrative is combined with artwork based on the advertisements for the sale of enslaved people, painted by John W. Jones. After Margaret spoke, I went right up to her and said “I’m Mary Ellen Thompson, would you like me to review your book for Southern Literary Review?” She looked directly at me and replied, “I don’t know who you are or what that is,” and then she threw her arms around me and said, “AND, I love you!”
Margaret’s book was selected as a recipient of the 2025 Phillis Wheatley Book Award. “This award honors outstanding literary contributions that uplift, preserve, and illuminate the history and legacy of descendants of the Middle Passage. The book ‘exemplifies this mission through its excellence in research, storytelling, and cultural impact.’”
Interview:
Mary Ellen Thompson: Margaret, tell us how this story started.
Margaret Seidler: I believed that I was from working class people that had nothing to do with slavery, and I felt good about that. My grandmother left papers in the family Bible that said we had ancestors from New York. Raised in the South, which was still reeling from losing the Civil War, I wasn’t interested in having any relatives from up North.
Then I took a DNA test.
MET: Why did you decide to take that DNA test that started this behemoth ball rolling?
Margaret Seidler
MS: I took it in 2012 at the insistence of a colleague’s husband, who lives in Boulder. Said they were cutting edge so Bob and I should do it. It cost $250 per test back then, and it determined I am 99.7% European. I saw it as a big waste of money, and not a priority since my consulting practice had gone national. Fast forward, in 2018, a long-time friend calls with a disturbing DNA finding about her health marker. Same test; so I went back to look at health markers. That was OK. That’s how I saw the message from my new cousin who is Black, which was sitting there waiting for me for about eight months.
MET: How, when as a result of this, you learned the truth about your ancestors being slave traders in your own home town of Charleston, did you process that information initially?
MS: I started screaming and I couldn’t stop. I thought I was exempt because I wasn’t part of Charleston society, and then I found I was in it, too. My research into my family tree took me back to New York with John Gordon Torrans of County Derry, Ireland, who was a partner in a shipping firm that brought Ulster people to the Carolinas in the 1700’s. Eventually they also transported captive Africans to Charleston. Torran’s daughter married William Payne, who in 1803, started his own brokerage business, William Payne and Sons. That became the largest auction house in Charleston engaged in the sale of thousands of enslaved people.
MET: At what point in the process of your research, did you know to look for the advertisements for the slave auctions/sales?
MS: I went to the Charleston County Public Library and told the librarian what I was looking for and was advised that if Payne had been an auctioneer, that the ads would be online, so I found them. Initially I found 80 ads and thought I was finished with that when my friend, Dr. Nic Butler, who is an historian at the Charleston County Public Library, said to me that I “had to” complete the research for the entire time period! I found over 1100 ads in total.
Mary Ellen Thompson
MET: What was your visceral reaction when you read the first few ads and realized that they were selling real, live, human beings?
MS: You have to imagine that you’re sitting in your home office working on your laptop and looking at Payne ads. Sometimes it was like a fist came out of the computer screen and hit me in the stomach.
MET: Looking back, what do you remember about your experience, living in an exclusive neighborhood, with Black children living next door, even though the schools weren’t integrated until you were in high school?
MS: I grew up with a sense of security in The Country Club of Charleston, which I recently learned, is on the former grounds of the McLeod Plantation. As children, we would wander over there and I remember seeing the poor Black children, who lived in the row of the existing old slave cabins, playing in the dirt because they didn’t have any toys. They had to get their water from a cistern because they didn’t have running water or indoor plumbing. Schools were not integrated until the mid-60’s. Until then, the only Black people I knew were adults and they were all in service to my people in some way, the cleaning lady, laundress, people at the club – bartenders, caddies, etc. Once we were in school together, we got along really well, but we didn’t socialize.
MET: In the book you tell us that your mother “… was from a blue collar, working-class family, daughter of a brick mason.” When she married your father who was a successful businessman, you said she “married-up.” Your mother always wanted you and your sister to have the advantages she never had growing up. What do you think, if she had still been alive when you found all this out, she would have thought of coming from what was a very wealthy family?
MS: It would have made her really happy to know she came from somebody wealthy.
MET: What gave you the ability to face this problem head on and work towards a solution, rather than trying to shield yourself from it?
MS: I am a certified Master of Polarity Thinking, there are only about fifty of us in the country. Polarity thinking provides a way of viewing problems as “both/and” rather than “either/or.” From my training, I realized the power when a person can acknowledge the past. While you can’t change it, you can see what you can do today to change the future. My hope is for White people to open our eyes, develop in ourselves a new empathy, and a better understanding of the anger, or resentment that African Americans may harbor now. This is the core of the book on page 107.
MET: Margaret, your book has given me valuable insight, and I am so very grateful for that. Thank you for talking with me and I look forward to seeing how this journey progresses.
Leave a Reply