Slaves in the Family Read online

  SLAVES IN THE FAMILY

  Edward Ball

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK

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  PREFACE

  When I was a child, my father used to talk about the plantations that “we,” the Ball family of South Carolina, once owned. I grew up in New Orleans and, for a few years, in Charleston, South Carolina. The Ball plantations had lined the Cooper River, north of the city of Charleston.

  “Did I tell you about Elias Ball—‘Red Cap’?”

  “Yes you did, Dad.”

  “We call him ‘Red Cap’ because of that red hat he wears in his portrait. Elias Ball was about twenty-two when he came from England in the year 1698 to take possession of his inheritance, half of a rice plantation called Comingtee, and maybe twenty-five slaves, Africans and Indians.”

  “That’s what you said, Dad.”

  The Ball rice farms had lasted two hundred years, and my father and his many cousins knew a considerable amount about our individual ancestors, the people in the masters’ houses. We knew their love lives and their personalities, their illnesses and their travels, and the names of the ones who had fought in the Civil War. But my father never said much about the enslaved people who worked on the Ball plantations. Our family held slaves for six consecutive generations. My father didn’t know much about the slaves, and I don’t think he wanted to know.

  Years later, having moved and lived away from the South, I decided to try to tell the story of our family as slaveholders, and the result is this book, Slaves in the Family.

  The South Carolina Balls had been plain people—no artists among them, no writers, scientists, or politicians (save one)—but they had been grand in one pursuit, the business of their many rice plantations. The Balls kept exceptional records, which survived (unlike those of many slaveholders) and which ended up in four archives. When I first looked at the so-called Ball Family Papers, I was stunned at their scale—some ten thousand pages of letters, account books, birth and death records of enslaved people, receipts, maps, diaries, and even medical notes about slaves.

  With the mass of material, I knew I could tell a story about the Ball family, but Southern memory was pretty well choked with tales of the planter class, the people in the big houses. However, because the records about the people we had enslaved were also rich, I thought it might be possible to tell their story, too, side by side with ours. It was at this point that I had the defining idea. With some work, I might be able to identify and locate African Americans whose ancestors our family had once enslaved, and, with their agreement, tell their family histories from slavery down to the present.

  Why did I choose to make public the story of my family’s exploitive dealings with black people? There might be twenty reasons, but here are three. My father died when I was a boy, and I wanted to spend time with him, indirectly, by working through his family’s story, which of course was also my own. Also, I had never written a book, and the idea of doing so filled me with desire. The third reason grew slowly, but it became a central one. The more I learned about what the Balls had done as slaveholders, the more I wanted to tell the family story openly and without disguise.

  I felt that by writing about us—the Balls were one of America’s oldest and largest slaveholding clans—I might begin to approach the thing that therapists call “coming to terms.” My own reckoning, as a latter-day descendant of a slave dynasty, would be a selfish one. But if I could carry it off, the story might also enable other people, white and black, to approach a more livable memory of slavery.

  Many stories about the pre–Civil War South have come down through filtered light, veiled in a romantic glow. The plantations, islands of gentle refinement, were like a necklace of country clubs strewn across the land, or so at least many have imagined. In reality, the cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco plantations were in many ways like prison camps, with their owners in the role of commandants. I wanted to speak about the Ball plantation dynasty in a way different from old patterns of memory. I did not want to write a gentle family memoir padded with self-admiring tales.

  As a way of talking plain, I hoped to meet several black families with whom I had the vexed connection of sharing the same plantation backstory. I suspected there might be a large group of African Americans whose roots went back to the Ball lands. I wanted to break bread with some whose people, long ago, my own family had put through a kind of hell on earth. From these encounters, made possible by a close reading of the written record and, to a lesser extent, by both white and black oral traditions, I hoped to write a collective family history.

  I admit that it was a heavy assignment. But fortunately, I had all the records I needed, and eventually all the family lore I could cope with. And I had time, thanks to my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which offered an advance so I could quit my day work as a freelance critic.

  My father’s people, the Ball family of South Carolina, belonged to America’s first elite, the planter class, a group long defunct in economic fact but not necessarily in its idea of itself. In some places in the South, the descendants of slaveholders comprise a distinct society with its own folkways, memories, and pride. Families such as mine know who they are, in part because if your people once owned vast tracts of land, gorged themselves on exquisite things, and were followed through life by clouds of workers and servants, many of whom called you “master,” the memory of these experiences is not allowed to fade. Instead, it is preserved and honored. Such a memory might give you, generations later, in the present, a feeling of belonging and a sense of tradition—but also a sense of what it means to be entitled, an invisible psychological support and a feeling that one might deserve whatever is on offer from the world.

  When I decided to look closely at the Ball plantations, I knew only a handful of facts about them. I knew that our family had been planters who sold rice grown by enslaved workers, and I knew the names of some of the Ball plantations—Comingtee, Kensington, Hyde Park, and Limerick. I did not know, but was soon to learn, that the Balls had operated a dynasty of twenty-five different rice farms across a period of two centuries. I did not know, but in time discovered, that on these plantations we had enslaved close to four thousand people. When I first started reading, I expected that there might be a number of black people living today whose roots went back to the Ball lands. I did not know, although I was eventually able to determine, that the descendants of the “Ball slaves” numbered perhaps 100,000, people who lived all across the United States.

  A conspicuous piece of family business, however you look at it. And more, it was a shared history, black with white, rather than our sole family possession.

  In popular memory, a wall of silence has long surrounded the subject of slavery, a wall nowhere more soundproof than among the descendants of slaveholders. There are two pillars of tradition that have been the possession of most families who once enslaved people. They are, first, that our ancestors w
ere gentle masters. We did not beat our slaves—whereas the people next door were well-known for brutalizing their workers. The second common tradition is this: The men in our family did not sleep with their women slaves—however, everyone knew that on the plantation next door, those men had sex with enslaved women.

  When the emotional stakes are high, the taboo against remembering must be enforced. And before writing this book, I also observed the common silence around slavery. The root of my own anxiety lay, I think, in the shift between generations. While today it may be hard to fathom, it was once a mark of distinction in white society to have come from slaveholding roots. Since the civil rights movement, however, the social value of belonging to this defunct class of elite has gone into steep decline. I did not talk about slaves in my own family, because to do so was not a reliable way to make friends.

  People who hear about this book want to know two things: What did your family think about your investigation of the slave past? And how did black people react when they found themselves face-to-face with the family of their former enslaver?

  The short answer to the first question: They didn’t like it. To most people in my father’s family, by looking at our long connection to slavery, I made myself into a kind of radioactive relative. I became the contaminated cousin—or, if you like, the messenger of our shared uncleanliness. A handful of cousins within the 150 or so of our extended family understood what I was trying to do and offered encouragement, but they were outliers. Many disliked the idea that our ancestors, whom we were all taught to revere, might turn out to be human beings with desires, greed, and a liking for power. Some did not accept that our rare and proud story should be mixed in with the stories of black people, because to do so would dirty the silk. There was also a divide of opinion along gender lines. Women in the family tended to be more accepting. They understood that to talk about the slaves, especially the situation of enslaved women, was not an outrageous trespass. In general, the men, with their larger emotional stake in the family name, were more frightened and angry than the women. Many cousins feared what stories I might discover by looking at the record, and what I did discover—namely, that we did a lot of indefensible things. Another unpopular thought was the possibility that I might find, as I did find, black people to whom we were related by blood as a consequence of interracial sex on the Ball plantations. All these things were understandably frightening. They scared my relatives, and they scared me. Some cousins were concerned that if I was to write an uncensored history of our family’s slave plantations, we would be shamed and vilified in the press. More than a few worried that we might be sued for reparations. After all, the Balls had made people work without pay, and the descendants of “Ball slaves” might not all be in the best economic circumstances.

  In the end, terrible things did not occur. And since Slaves in the Family was published, many of the Balls have come to regard the book as something that makes us look interesting. Just as we previously had thought we were.

  How did black people feel? Among the African-American families I came to meet—and there were many more than those who appear in the book—the most common chain of reactions went like this. When I first turned up in the life of a family, either by phone or personal introduction or by writing a letter, people were stunned. The shock fading, they agreed to a visit. A day or a week later, some families were overcome with suspicion. What did the white man want, after all? In two weeks or a month, the mistrust was replaced by curiosity and a desire to take advantage of the strange event of our meeting to make sense of the painful history we shared. After that, we spent long hours and months together, sharing stories and emotions, some of the worst of each, and occasionally some of the best.

  There was often a mitigating part. Before I reached out to people whose ancestors the Balls had enslaved, I tried to compile a file of biographical facts about two or three individuals in that family, people who had worked on one of the plantations before the Civil War. These stories emerged from close reading of the Ball papers, and I would share them, tales and dates and names that filled gaps in the family histories of people I planned to meet. This research became a kind of token offering that helped spread an ounce of peace around our first meetings. And in this way, I would make a pilgrimage to the kitchen tables of a handful of families, and ultimately to those of dozens, each table surrounded by people who had no real reason to allow me to sit down in the first place.

  From time to time, however, research file or none, some people turned away. They became angry or afraid, either refusing to talk to me or breaking off the conversation after a few weeks.

  To turn into a go-between—white family on the right, black on the left—was painstaking, cathartic, and draining. As I went along and grew more immersed in the slave story, a question started to hang overhead, namely, how to answer the past. And whether to make amends. The Ball family damaged the lives of many, many people, with injuries that began three hundred years ago and might be said to continue down to the present. Of course, thousands of families, and not just us, once owned slaves, whom they dominated with greater or lesser violence and more or less grief. And there is also this: the thousands of slaveholders like the Balls helped to establish a robust culture of white supremacy that has guided America through its long life and that shows only small signs of weakening, despite the country’s having elected a black president.

  Living generations have come around to the consensus that slavery was a crime against humanity, and so it was. The families of former slaveholders are not responsible for the past in the way a criminal is culpable for a crime. We cannot have influenced the dead, our ancestors, who enslaved black adults and children. However, the descendants of slaveholders are accountable for exploitive acts done in our name, for the reason that we have inherited advantages from them. We can acknowledge and speak about the difficult acts in which our families took part, rather than hide or distort them—we can retell those stories and try to make sense of them. Added to this, I think that white people as a wide group are also accountable for the slave past, for the reason that all whites extensively benefit from the legacy of slavery.

  One sometimes hears declarations like this: Our family were immigrants, and we came to America after the Civil War. We had nothing to do with slavery, which had already been abolished. We were poor, and we worked and climbed up into the middle class. So don’t talk to me about slaves, because we’re not liable for all that.

  To which there is an answer, something like this: Your people might have been Irish potato farmers—or Italian peasants, Russian Jews, German craftsmen, or others escaping poverty and persecution in Europe. Yes, they struggled, and their suffering should be honored. But when they arrived in America—in 1870 or 1890, in 1910 or 1940—your family set foot on the top tier of a two-tier caste society, and they got work or land, housing and education, all things that, thanks to slavery, were withheld from black people by custom and by law. And these gifts helped poor white immigrants who came from Europe after the Civil War to take benefit from the legacy of slavery, and to move up into the propertied class.

  While writing Slaves in the Family, I came to the conclusion that it would be appropriate to offer an apology, perhaps merely to one African American family whom we had enslaved. An apology would be a gesture—inadequate, maybe even self-serving—but it might have symbolic strength beyond the personal event. In the end, I apologized to two families whom I had come to know closely for what my family had done to their people, a long time gone.

  The idea that one might answer in the present for a crime against humanity in the past carries little weight with most people. Many of us regard U.S. history as a triumphant pageant crowded with heroes. But slavery was the rock on which the founding fathers built the nation. American history is a tragic history as well as a heroic one.

  The first edition of this book contained an epilogue, an account of a visit I made to Sierra Leone, in West Africa, to try to grasp the workings of the slave trade th
ere. I have removed this section in an effort to keep the focus on the United States.

  Edward Ball

  New Haven, Connecticut

  January 2014

  1

  PLANTATION MEMORIES

  My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves.

  “There are five things we don’t talk about in the Ball family,” he would say. “Religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes.”

  “What does that leave to talk about?” my mother asked once.

  “That’s another of the family secrets,” Dad said, smiling.

  My father, Theodore Porter Ball, came from the venerable city of Charleston, South Carolina, the son of an old plantation clan. The Ball family’s plantations were among the oldest and longest standing in the American South, and there were more than twenty of them along the Cooper River, north of Charleston. Between 1698 and 1865, the 167 years the family was in the slave business, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery to the Balls or bought by them. The crop they raised was rice, whose color and standard gave it the name Carolina Gold. After the Civil War, some of the Ball places stayed in business as sharecrop farms with paid black labor until about 1900, when the rice market finally failed in the face of competition from Louisiana and Asia.

  When I was twelve, Dad died and was buried near Charleston. Sometime during his last year, he brought together my brother, Theodore Jr., and me to give each of us a copy of the published history of the family. The book had a wordy title, Recollections of the Ball Family of South Carolina and the Comingtee Plantation. A distant cousin, long dead, had written the manuscript, and the book was printed in 1909 on rag paper, with a tan binding and green cloth boards. On the spine the words BALL FAMILY were embossed. The pages smelled like wet leaves.