Edward Ball - Slaves in the Family

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK

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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 BallRed 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.

Thats 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 didnt know much about the slaves, and I dont 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 peopleno 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 scalesome 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 familys 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 familys 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 usthe Balls were one of Americas oldest and largest slaveholding clansI 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 preCivil 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 fathers people, the Ball family of South Carolina, belonged to Americas 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 traditionbut 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 plantationsComingtee, 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