1986 THROWBACK: "NORTH CAROLINA SLAVE REUNION"

On the same cypress-shaded plantation where his ancestors arrived in chains 200 summers ago, 80-year-old John Thomas Baum cleared his throat under his white straw hat today and recited the slavery story he had heard as a child.

''He had to run from his master every time he went out,'' Mr. Baum said of his grandfather's efforts to court the girl he married.

''His master had a big dog that he'd go out and sic on him,'' the retired farmer suddenly added, straining to remember through the mists of the past.

Mr. Baum, who was born here in Creswell, revived such memories at the elegant site where they began -Somerset Place, once North Carolina's second-largest plantation, now a state park, and today the scene of an extraordinary ''family reunion'' of hundreds of descendants of 21 slave families who worked the vast rice and corn estate from 1786 through the Emancipation.

Among them today were Clarence Blount, the Democratic leader of the Maryland Senate, and William E. Honeyblue, the Mayor pro tem of Williamston, N.C. There were lawyers and doctors, soldiers and teachers. There were farmers, like Mr. Baum.

Also at Somerset Place today were Josiah Collins 6th, a descendant of the plantation's founder; Alex Haley, the ''Roots'' author whose slave history inspired the effort that led to today's gathering, and Gov. James G. Martin, who said in a speech that the event focused attention on the descendants themselves, not the slavery and segregation they had suffered.

In 1986, many of those descendants still bear the names their ancestors took from their first owners: Littlejohn, Baum, Collins, Blount, Cabarrus, Palin, Phelps, Reavis. So, first and foremost, today's remarkable gathering provided a rare opportunity to track down relatives and roots.

And it happened just steps away from the cream-colored 1830 Greek Revival plantation house that Somerset slaves once served.

Here, under sunny skies, a crowd of 2,000, three-quarters of them descendants of Somerset slaves, picnicked on lawns canopied by swamp chestnut trees, hummed along with Negro spirituals, and observed the re-enactment of a slave wedding.

Yet, despite the joyous mood and the lack of actual reminders of slavery at Somerset, where only a wooden marker indicates the site of the slave quarters, descendants inevitably reflected on their grim common heritage.

Struck down by malaria in the marshes, victims of back-breaking labor in the untamed fields, Somerset slaves ''belonged'' to the new estate like so much human chattel. 'A Shared Recognition'

Modern-day descendants, however, second-, third- and fourth-generation free black Americans arriving by busload today from Florida and Maryland, flying in from as far away as California, were clearly here by choice.

They belonged to Somerset only in terms of the heart, said the homecoming organizer, Dorothy Spruill Redford, in welcoming remarks.

''From this day forward, there will always be a shared recognition,'' she told the crowd. ''They'll think of the Josiah Collins family, but they'll think of my family too.'' Somerset plantation, she said, ''is a living monument to ordinary folks - to our toil, our lives, our lineage.''

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