Film critic and North Carolina native Godfrey Cheshire’s cousin Charlie (aka Pooh) decides to transport the family’s historic Midway Plantation. The monumental decision sparks an engaging reflection on the intricate and vexed relationships to land, home, and heritage. The plantation as icon, myth, and symbol of both Southern gentility and national shame is also a place of beloved family tradition that Cheshire’s mother used to call, “down home.” Not all members of the family necessarily agree with Pooh’s fateful decision and most of them—both alive and dead—have something to say about it. Cheshire’s interest in Midway’s retreat from Raleigh’s urban sprawl becomes sheer fascination with the family story, which winds its way back to British settlers and on through this nation’s most defining period in the antebellum South. By complete chance, Cheshire discovers that only a few degrees of separation link African American NYU historian Robert Hinton to Midway and the Cheshire family. The unearthed family connections and uprooted Plantation buildings acutely expose the foundations of an exemplary Southern story with particularly local resonance.  SW