Slaves in the Family Read online

  “We’re spending more time in the rice fields than our ancestors ever did!” one cousin joked.

  The decision came to abandon ship, and several speedboats pulled alongside to help. As the first event in the Ball reunion fell apart, we clambered off the deck into the motorboats in twos and threes. The rescue operation ferried us away from the rice fields, back to firm land.

  I moved from New York back to Charleston to carry out the search. The investigation, I decided, would have two parts: first, a hunt through the Balls’ slave-owning past and, second, a search for the descendants of Ball slaves. This double search—at a distance of many generations and through the mists of segregation and distrust—seemed daunting to say the least.

  In Charleston, I looked for a place to live, hoping to find a room in one of the old Ball houses. During slavery, the family had more than a dozen city residences in addition to the plantations out of town. In the early 1800s, the townhouse of Elias Ball, founder of the family, had been sold away and was later knocked down. In 1838, three houses burned in a fire. Most of the rest were wiped aside in waves of demolition that began in the 1900s. But a handful of the old Ball houses remained. There was a wooden one near the northwest corner of Ashley and Bull streets that belonged to a family member in the 1850s, as well as a three-story brick house on the northwest corner of East Bay Street and Stoll’s Alley, occupied in the 1830s by an heiress named Ann Ball.

  A cousin who worked in a bank offered to help me find a place to live. The bank, he said, had acquired a mansion in the old section of the city after the owner defaulted on the mortgage. It was run-down and neglected, but I could use the house until someone bought it. Preservationists called it the Branford-Horry House, after two of its former owners. It stood in a row of mansions on Meeting Street, the main avenue through the historic core of Charleston, on the northwest corner where Meeting intersects Tradd Street. Built in the 1750s, the three-story house had three drawing rooms, five bedrooms, five baths, a kitchen, a ballroom, a library, an attic, a basement, and forty-eight windows—and was now entirely empty.

  My new Charleston home had no resemblance to my former New York apartment. Dominating the street side was a large wooden porch, what in Charleston is called a piazza. It emerged from second-floor height and hung out over the sidewalk, where five columns stood against the curb to hold the thing in the air. A second colonnade on the piazza supported a pediment, which gave the face of the building the look of a furrowed brow. The house was roughly square, the brick walls two feet thick, covered with beige stucco that was cracked and chipping away. Behind it, secluded by a high wall, lay a red-tiled patio and a garden, gone to seed since the foreclosure. The front door opened into a wide central hallway, on either side of which were large folding doors that gave into drawing rooms. The rooms were moldering, the air thick and bacterial. Puffs of ancient dirt breathed from crevices between the floorboards, and everywhere was peeling paint and water-stained plaster. Down the main hall lay the best-kept room, the library. Its walls and mantelpiece, made from thick cypress, glowed like an old page. A staircase rose from the hall, with a loud squeak in the seventh step. The ballroom on the second floor was lined with more cypress, broken up here and there by fluted pilasters topped with Corinthian capitals. Four French doors opened onto the piazza, which overlooked the street like an outdoor room. Elsewhere were two bedrooms, another drawing room, bathrooms, and, on the top floor, three more bedrooms, baths, a laundry. Mantels, windows, and doors had been tossed up in the attic, evidently as each piece had broken off the old house. I moved in with a bed, bookshelf, and two tables, which became the only furniture in the building.

  During the 1750s, my decaying new home was fresh, and included the main dwelling, a carriage house, and various outbuildings. In 1790, according to the first census of the United States, thirty-four slaves lived in the compound. The workforce, whose names the census enumerator did not record, belonged to a family of eight whites in the mansion. It was the largest number of slaves living at any address in the city.

  Slave owners rarely became artists. Despite their leisure, they did not paint pictures or perform music apart from recitals at home. They wrote, but only for a few readers. Rather than make art, slave owners collected things. They assembled people, land, and facts about both.

  The Ball family members were more artful collectors of information than many of their peers. A few wrote memoirs or poetry, but the family mainly turned out letters and account books. The letters chronicled their lives, while the accounts detailed the rice business and the family’s human property. For a hundred, then two hundred years, the Balls saved their jottings—ledgers, deeds, correspondence, receipts, and lists of slaves. First there were stacks of papers, then boxes and finally trunks. Each generation assumed care of the hoard and in old age conveyed the documents to their children.

  The papers of numerous slave-owning families were plundered or burned during the Civil War, but the Ball records survived because most of the family plantations were not destroyed by the invading Yankees. At the start of the 1900s, the family began to deposit the lode in archives around the South, until nearly all of them came to rest in public hands. Historians call them the “Ball Family Papers,” more than ten thousand pages housed in four libraries. The earliest page is an inventory of property from the year 1631. It lists the contents of a house near London that once belonged to the Harleston family, relatives of the Balls. The last letters date from three hundred years later in America, after the rice fields were put to rest.

  For me to understand the plantation story and find the descendants of the slaves, the written record would have to provide the map. Oral tradition suffers from scarcity and omission. Among the Ball family members, who overflow with legend, memory became selective over time. The same no doubt happened among black families as each drifted farther from the plantation. Though the paper record had gaps, it answered the need for detail better than hearsay could.

  Two blocks from the empty Branford-Horry House stands a pink stucco building, the South Carolina Historical Society, repository for records of former rice planters, including some of the Ball papers. Every morning, I walked to the cobblestone block of the library to read the family records, housed in climate-controlled rooms like specimens of an extinct bird.

  At the beginning were two questions: Who were the Ball family? And who were the Ball slaves?

  In the old days, a Ball household began simply enough, with a wedding. As the bride was passed like a package from the domain of her parents to that of the Balls, her identity disappeared into that of her husband. The new Mrs. Ball might own land or slaves (the two did not always come together), and a village of people could be her dowry. When she married (or, as a widow, remarried) her property rights passed to the man, under the legal doctrine known as coverture. The rule of coverture meant that in the eyes of the law a couple would appear as a single person, the husband, whose identity substituted for that of his wife. While keeping a hand on the transfer of property, traditional patriarchal marriage was also a way to manage sex, making sure neither the family name nor belongings would stray. The culture demanded sexual loyalty from wives more than from husbands. With all this, the Ball men owned most of the people, controlled most of the land, and left behind most of the records.

  The mistress of each plantation did not have full command over the slave farm but became a co-master with her husband, using power as she was able. Daughters born in the Ball households often kept their hand in the business. Some signed a prenuptial agreement that preserved their property rights when they left to marry, and they affected the families they joined. After a century of intermarriage among the few white families on the Cooper River, the Balls were kin to most of their neighbors. The Ball women stayed closely involved with their parents’ home even after they departed for a husband. Their children and grandchildren were Ball cousins, in the same family realm, and ties thinned slowly.

  A workable definition of the Ball family
for the purposes of my investigation soon appeared: they were men and women born with the name, women who took the name Ball with marriage, and one generation of the offspring of Ball daughters who had acquired another surname.

  The Ball slaves were easier to define. Simply, Ball slaves were people owned by members of the Ball family whose lives could be traced in the surviving files.

  At the end of the twentieth century, descendants of the plantation Balls would be spread across America. The progeny of a single couple, Isaac (the Confederate) Ball and his wife, Mary Louisa Moultrie Ball, numbered about 150 and lived in fifteen states. They were construction workers, realtors, schoolteachers, lawyers, secretaries, homemakers, professors, physicians, students, and librarians. There were also one chemist, a priest, a banker, and a fashion model.

  How many people might be descended from Ball slaves? When the Civil War ended in 1865, the family held many plantations, all of them on the Cooper River: The Blessing, Buck Hall, Cedar Hill, Cherry Hill, Comingtee, Dean Hall, Halidon Hill, Hyde Park, Limerick, Pawley, and Quenby. According to the records that survived (not all did), at least 842 people were freed from these tracts. Others were freed from three Ball places—Kensington, Pimlico, and St. James—that were sold out of the family some years before fighting with the North began. These may seem like big numbers, but they are a tiny current in the sea: nearly four million black Americans were affected by the Emancipation Proclamation.

  After freedom, the former Ball slaves made a distinct community. Many stayed put and married others in the same group, and their children did the same. Fifty years later, more married outside their old circle, half migrated to the North, and in other ways they came apart as a discrete society. Using an equation that made allowances for rates of marriage within the community, for average numbers of children, long-term migration out of the South, and the increase in life span, it was finally possible to calculate the progeny of freed Ball workers. By a conservative estimate, in the year 2000 there would be at least seventy-five thousand living descendants of former Ball slaves in the United States, and by a slightly generous guess, even more—nearly one hundred thousand.

  Old papers are beautiful things. Coarse, mottled parchment containing business records sometimes has the look of white skin. The pages are veiny, with age spots, the black ink coursing down them like hair. In some places, the ink is as dark as the day it was unbottled, and the paper as blotchy as an English cheek. I read through the Ball papers, beginning with the story of the first Elias Ball, who died in 1751, at seventy-five; his will filled four pages with script. The paper was pierced here and there by holes, signatures of bookworms. A rip had been mended on the second page, and there, in the splotch of a dried glue stain, a thumbprint appeared.

  The deeds were the most beguiling. They came with maps, or “plats,” that showed the layout of a plantation and the location of its buildings. One plat had a red border, faded like a child’s watercolor, while some pages had brown splatter marks, perhaps from ancient splashes of tea. Other papers had curled up from dryness or changes in chemistry. In the old days, each deed was folded into an envelope shape, tied shut with a strip of parchment, and sealed with red wax. The wax was crusty, with black streaks where the burning candle had dripped carbon into the seal.

  I read the papers slowly, lingering on the chatty letters, smiling at the quirks of the garrulous Balls, savoring their loopy signatures. Then I found the slave lists.

  There were bundles of them, in thick sheaves, each sheaf containing a stack. When a rice planter handed out shoes, he wrote down the names of who got them. To pay taxes, he made an inventory of his human property. If he bought fabric so people could make clothes, he noted how many yards were given to each person. When a woman gave birth, the date and name of the child appeared. And when Mr. Ball died, his executor appraised everyone before title passed to the heir. I began to count the names on some of the bigger lists, up to a few hundred, then lost track.

  These documents chronicled only some of the dealings between black and white Americans over the span of centuries. The larger dynamic might be captured in an image borrowed from tales of maritime disasters. Occasionally after a shipwreck, two people among the dead wash ashore, locked in an embrace. At the inquest, coroners puzzle over the drowned bodies that clutched each other to the end. Finally, the investigators conclude that the drowning pair must have died simultaneously, because each was unable to release the grip of the other.

  Shut in the vaults of the historical society’s pink stucco building, I read as much as I could absorb. One family at a time, the stories surfaced, and in glimpses and parts I began to piece together what happened.

  2

  MASTERS FROM ENGLAND

  Elias Ball, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, was born in 1676 in a tiny hamlet in western England called Stokeinteignhead. His life shows how one family entered the slave business in the birth hours of America. It is a tale composed equally of chance, choice, and blood.

  The village of Stokeinteignhead stands in southern Devonshire, about two miles from the English Channel. Although I cannot fix his birthdate, Elias was baptized there on October 13, in the Anglican church. An older spelling, Stoke-in-Teignhead, helps to describe the place: the stoke, or settlement, on Teignhead, a rise of some hills along the River Teign, whose mouth opens into the Channel.

  When I was a teenager, I traveled to Stokeinteignhead to stay for a week in the old man’s hometown. I hitchhiked west from London to the hills of Devon, where the buildings grew few and the pasture large. Elias’s village seemed not to have changed much since his childhood—a few stone houses with thatched roofs, most built in the 1600s, on a twisting road between fenced fields. About twenty miles away stood a narrow thatched farmhouse with an ancient stone gate. The stone, which looked like a Druid megalith, had a name chiseled into it: Balls. The farmhouse of the Balls. It wasn’t Elias’s home (too distant from his village), but likely it had been the house of a cousin. I’ve seen photographs of the interior of this Ball house, probably very like the one where Elias would have lived. It had low beamed ceilings and a great fireplace for cooking.

  The green and brown fields of Teignhead made a lovely place to begin, but life in rural Devon in the 1600s must have been severe. Most people were peasants without land, under the heel of noblemen. Some men worked as mates on ships out of nearby towns such as Torquay, three miles south of Teignhead on the Channel coast at Tor Bay. The more fortunate were yeoman farmers who owned a few acres, which gave them a degree of freedom from the big landlords.

  Elias’s immediate kin were poor tradespeople and peasants. His parents, William and Mary Ball, evidently worked as tenant farmers, since William Ball’s will shows that he owned no acreage and left few belongings to his children. Elias’s older brother, William Jr., pulled himself up a step when, as a young man, he got an apprenticeship to become a tailor. Some of Elias’s kin in surrounding villages were better off. One of his uncles, Charles Ball, left money to his children, as well as to what his will called “the poor of the Parish.” The Devon Balls parceled out what bits they could to their sons and parceled out their daughters to Devon farmers.

  Various other Ball families lived in England. In one branch—related or not, I don’t know—there was once a man whose lasting fame probably reached the ears of young Elias: John Ball, the “mad priest of Kent.” In the 1360s, John Ball, a clergyman in the city of York, defied the Church and went south to take up the cause of the peasants in Kent. Ball preached the goal of a classless society and communal property, and denounced the lords, for which reckless talk he was excommunicated and imprisoned, around 1366. As quoted in a biography drafted by his accusers, John Ball attacked the elite, saying, “Matters goeth not well to pass in England nor shall do till everything be common and that there be no villeins [serfs] nor gentelmen but that we may be all united together and that the lords be no greater masters than we.” Released from jail, he again drew a following, preaching t
hat all people were created equal and calling for the murder of the lords, the lawyers, and the justices, in order to level the class system. In 1381, John Ball emerged at the head of a mass peasant movement that raised a following of two hundred thousand, and marched on London. He was captured in Coventry in July of that year. Imprisoned again, this time he was delivered to harsh justice. At St. Albans, outside of London, in the presence of King Richard II, the “mad” Ball was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the four pieces of his corpse were later sent to four different cities in England.

  Although no evidence links John Ball to Elias’s family, he could have been ancient kin. In any case, his crusade against caste is relevant. When Elias was a child, his own family may have had the feeling of lost promise and things stolen. In the mid-1600s, some of the Devon Balls had been well-off people of high esteem, but something happened before Elias was born: the family got on the wrong side of history and squandered its privilege.

  There is an old genealogy, made by one of the American Balls, which states that Elias’s grandfather was a man called Robert Ball, a vicar in the Church of England. Robert Ball was born in 1600 not far from Stokeinteignhead and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He married a wealthy woman named Mary Huchenson, from Exeter, the governing seat of Devon, and acquired some land. At twenty-four, the rich graduate received his parish assignment at a congregation in the port of Torquay, St. Mary’s Church. In Robert Ball’s England, a clergyman’s godliness was not ruled out by his money.