This Family Bought The Land Their Ancestors Picked Cotton On And Hosted An Unforgettable Holiday Gathering

Dorothy Giles and her nine siblings grew up on a sharecropping property in South Carolina, in a hut across the road from a “beautiful white house with the wraparound porch.” Decades later, she and her siblings purchased that home, which they’d daydreamed about. Dorothy’s son, Decker Ngongang, documented the occasion when the entire family finally convened there, this past Christmas, on Twitter.

Dorothy’s ancestors had picked cotton there too: After the Civil War ended slavery, former plantation owners employed the (generally exploitative) system of sharecropping, or renting out small plots of land to black families in exchange for part of the crop they harvested, to keep cotton agriculture afloat.

The Giles kids must have made quite an impression on the homeowner because when it was time to sell, she thought of them. According to BuzzFeed, the owner told the family she wanted them to have the house and its surrounding three acres because she remembered the bond they’d shared as children.

“We reminisce about playing under the porch,” Dorothy, a retired high-school science teacher from Charlotte, North Carolina, told BuzzFeed. “We were playmates as children, and we played with white children who lived within close proximity to us.”

The siblings combined their money and bought the property, and now they have an ideal place for entertaining and hosting relatives who are visiting from out of town. Last month was “the first Giles family holiday in the old/new house,” Decker captioned one tweet.

Although there were, according to Decker, some issues with “30 people trying to use country wi-fi” (ha!), the group appears to have filled their time together with fun, food, laughter, and cheering on the Cleveland Cavaliers in their Christmas Day game against the Golden State Warriors.