Slaves in the Family

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.

One day you’ll want to know about all this, Dad said, waving his hand vaguely, his lips pursed. Your ancestors. The tone of the old joke was replaced by some nervousness.

I know my father was proud of his heritage but at the same time, I suspect, had questions about it. The story of his slave-owning family, part of the weave of his childhood, was a mystery he could only partly decipher. With the gift of the book, Dad seemed to be saying that the plantations were a piece of unfinished business. In that moment, the story of the Ball clan was locked in the depths of my mind, to be pried loose one day.

When I was a child, Dad used to tell stories about our ancestors, the rice planters. I got a personal glimpse of the American Revolution, because the Balls had played a role in it—some of us fought for the British, some for independence. The Civil War seemed more real since Dad’s grandfather and three great-uncles fought for the Confederacy. From time to time in his stories, Dad mentioned the people our family used to own. They were usually just the slaves, sometimes the Ball slaves, a puff of black smoke on the wrinkled horizon of the past. Dad evidently didn’t know much about them, and I imagine he didn’t want to know.

Did I ever tell you about Wambaw Elias Ball? he might say. His plantation was on Wambaw Creek. He had about a hundred and fifty slaves, and he was a mean fella.

My father had a voice honed by cigarettes, an antique Charleston accent, and I liked to hear him use the old names.

Wambaw Elias was a Tory, Dad began. I mean, he picked the wrong side in the Revolution. When the Revolutionary War reached the South, Wambaw Elias, instead of joining the American rebels, went to the British commander in Charleston, Lord Cornwallis, who gave him a company of men and the rank of colonel. Wambaw Elias fought the patriots and burned their houses until such time as the British lost and his victims called for revenge. The Americans went for Wambaw Elias’s human property, dragging off some fifty slaves from Wambaw plantation, while other black workers managed to escape into the woods. Wambaw Elias knew he had no future in the United States and decided to cash in his assets. Eventually he captured the slaves who had run away, sold them, then took his family to England, where he lived for another thirty-eight years, regretting to the last that he had been forced to give up the life of a slave owner.

In the Ball family, the tale of Wambaw Elias and his slaves passed as a children’s story.

In my childhood, our family lived in various small towns and cities in the South. Dad was an Episcopal priest, so the houses we lived in belonged to the church, and my parents owned a single car. Throughout my spartan, God-fearing upbringing, I sensed we were different from other people. It wasn’t merely that Dad was a clergyman, though certainly that set us apart; but our people had once controlled a slave dynasty.

The first piece of paper I remember my father presenting to me regarding the family was an obituary from the Charleston News and Courier. A long strip of yellowed newsprint, the clipping carried the headline Isaac Ball, 88, Confederate, Dies. Isaac Ball was Dad’s grandfather. He was born in 1844 on Limerick plantation, one of the many Ball tracts, and died in 1933 in Charleston. Dad used to call him Isaac the Confederate to distinguish him from the seven other Isaacs in the family tree, and because on April 28, 1862, one week after his eighteenth birthday, Isaac joined the South Carolina Militia, First Regiment, Artillery, and went to fight in the War Between the States. (The War Between the States is what the Civil War has been called in the South.) When Isaac was born, Limerick plantation, thirty miles north of Charleston, was the largest of the Ball plantations, measuring 4,564 acres. In the years before Isaac’s birth, some three hundred people lived in slavery there. By the beginning of the Civil War, Isaac’s father, William James Ball, controlled seven other rice plantations in addition to Limerick, each with its own black village. His Ball cousins and in-laws owned more land and people.

I have several photographs of Isaac, my great-grandfather. He was tall, lean, carefully dressed, and had thin brown hair that he lost as he aged. Isaac wore a mustache and a tuft of hair below his lower lip throughout life; the hair is dark in photographs from the Civil War era and white in later pictures. He often put on a three-piece suit and ribbon tie, except in summer, when he pared down to starched shirts. Among Isaac’s pleasures was playing the violin. He was known to play Bach and, I believe, now and then a Virginia reel. In his later years, Isaac wrote poetry, though he never published it, perhaps because in his society the desire to publish was thought to be vain, a bid for attention. I have a few of his manuscripts. The verses consist of love lyrics to his wife, meditations on old things—one about a country church, another about rusting Confederate guns—and elegies about the Civil War, whose outcome caused him much sadness.

Dad grew up in the house where Isaac spent his last twenty years, and he had strong memories of the old man. Toward the end of his life, Isaac was nearly blind from glaucoma. As Isaac was losing his sight, Dad said, he used to shave with his eyes closed, explaining that he was rehearsing the necessity of having to shave blind. In his seventies and eighties, with pinhole vision, Isaac continued to get around town and took regular walks with a cane. Near the house where he lived, at the tip of a peninsula that forms the oldest part of Charleston, there is a delicate little park called White Point Gardens. The park contains a grove of oaks with overhanging moss and an octagonal bandstand, and is framed on two sides by the waters of Charleston harbor. Isaac would feel his way to the park and find the eastern edge of the green, where a tall seawall, known as the High Battery, stands against the tides. From this place it is possible to see, far out in the water, Fort Sumter, the old defense bulwark built on an island at the entrance to the harbor. On the morning of April 12, 1861, rebel batteries around Charleston opened fire on Federal troops stationed at the fort, loudly opening the Civil War. Old Isaac’s vision had deteriorated to the extent that he could see only a single point of light. Standing on the High Battery, he would raise his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, and, aiming the stick at Fort Sumter, pretend to fire shots at the Yankees, vindicating the lost war of his youth, which robbed him of his patrimony.

My mother, Janet Rowley, born in New Orleans, also had a plantation heritage. Across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, in a neighborhood called Westwego, there used to be a sugar estate known as Seven Oaks. The sugar fields, workers, and mansion at Seven Oaks (built in 1840) were the property of one of my mother’s maternal ancestors, Michael Zehringer. Zehringer’s grandfather had come to Louisiana in 1720 from Franconia, a section of Bavaria; later the family changed the spelling of its name to Zeringue, the better to glide through the French-speaking caste of Louisiana slave owners. A granddaughter of the master of Seven Oaks, Marie Constance Zeringue, married a man named Yves Caesar LeCorgne. Marie and Yves had a great-granddaughter, Edna LeCorgne, my mother’s mother, whom I loved.

A yellowing photograph of the Seven Oaks mansion used to hang in the hall of our house. The picture showed a whale of a building in Greek Revival style; six two-story columns lined each of the four facades, making twenty-four Doric columns all the way around. By the time of the photograph, the plantation had long passed out of the family and stood abandoned and decrepit.

In the family of my mother’s father, the Rowleys, were more slave owners. (Rowley is my middle name.) In 1834, Charles N. Rowley, my mother’s great-grandfather, married a Louisiana heiress, Jane Kemp Girault, who gave him control of her 2,200-acre cotton plantation, Marengo, and seventy-six slaves. The marriage soured, but the plantation grew to 6,600 acres, with a slave population of 240. Charles Rowley later went into the military, became a commissioned officer, and when the Civil War began rose to the rank of brigadier general, commanding the Sixth Brigade of the Louisiana Militia. Charles could not bear the defeat of the Confederacy; after the war, he fled the country for Brazil, leaving behind his wife and six children to join a faction of exiled Confederates. Brazil was a sugar-producing nation where slavery would not be abolished until 1888. Maybe Charles believed that if he had remained in the United States he would have been persecuted for his role in the war, or perhaps he simply could not let go of the lifestyle of slave master. In South America, Charles Rowley evidently once again acquired human property before he died in July 1869, at age sixty-three, in the province of Rio de Janeiro.

Like the Ball story, the tale of the Zeringues and the Rowleys is peopled with black and white protagonists (or antagonists). Although someday I may look into my Louisiana family, this story follows my father’s clan, and the lives of the thousands they enslaved.

Although in my early childhood our family lived in other parts of the South, in summers we paid visits to South Carolina to mingle with the relatives, and when I was nine we moved to the state. Soon Dad took my brother, Theodore Jr., and me to see the old rice plantation district the Balls once knew as their neighborhood. The three of us drove north out of Charleston on a two-lane blacktop toward the upper streams of the Cooper River, where rice grew for more than two hundred years. Thick grass swallowed the edge of the asphalt, cicadas screeched in the branches, and a skyline of pine trees scored the horizon. I remember the suffocating heat that seemed to radiate up from the ground rather than descend from the sun and the air that felt like a wet cloth on the lungs. We passed unpainted cottages belonging to black families, each house with two or three rooms, a little porch, and a pitched tin roof. On one porch sat a thin old man wearing a blue workshirt.

There’s George, said Dad, pulling the four-door to a stop.

Dad directed Ted and me to stay in the car, and I seem to remember that he wore a strained look on his face as he walked across the grass, up the three wooden steps of the porch, to shake hands with frail, black George. I thought I saw him gesturing, pointing over George’s head to some mile-away place. In a moment, George and my father disappeared into the cottage. Until that day, on every occasion when my parents bumped into friends, they had introduced us, but this time Dad had left off his manners. For half an hour my brother and I sat simmering on the hot vinyl seats of the car, swatting mosquitoes. Eventually Dad emerged from the house and made his good-byes. After this encounter, the rest of the day’s tour, to an old church and down some dirt lanes, felt strange. On the way back to Charleston, Dad stayed quiet about George. We retraced our route past the empty tracts where the Balls used to rule and the flora grew in reverse, thinning and clearing. I never found out anything more about George (not even his last name), or about the mysterious thing that changed the expression on Dad’s face.

I went to college and settled in New York, where I began writing for newspapers and magazines. Years passed, and occasionally I visited Charleston. From time to time, the Ball book came down off the shelf, and when it did the plantations shadowed my dreams. The Balls lived side by side with black families for six generations, but the story, as I knew it, was divided in two. On one side stood the ancestors, vivid, serene, proud; on the other their slaves, anonymous, taboo, half human. I knew a lot about the Balls, but I never knew much about the slaves, even though on the plantations black people far outnumbered white. What were their names? How did they live? Who were their loved ones? When did they leave the plantations, and where had their descendants gone? Could their families be found? But once the book went back in the bookcase, the dreams faded.

In the mail one year came an invitation to a Ball family reunion in South Carolina. The purpose of the event, as announced by its septuagenarian organizers, was to convey the plantation story to the younger generations. Everyone, however far away, was invited home to commune with the ancestors and bathe themselves in lore. Although the Ball lands had been sold when the rice business dwindled after the end of slavery, and the fortune was long gone, documents, pictures, and above all stories remained. My memories of childhood were beginning to be released, and the invitation threw open a door in my mind. I brought out a photograph of Isaac the Confederate, Dad’s grandfather, and the faceless crowd of slaves gathered once again before my eyes.

Despite my having left the South, the plantation past was etched in my unconscious. The prospect of the family reunion pushed me, finally, to come to terms with it. To contemplate slavery—which for most Americans is a mysterious, distant event—was a bit like doing psychoanalysis on myself. Did the plantations form part of my identity? By outward measure, no. The wealth created by the slave system was destroyed, and the latter-day Balls had no inheritance from it. Some of the family had manners, others none; some had money and status, some neither. But inwardly the plantations lived on. In childhood, I remember feeling an intangible sense of worth that might be linked to the old days. Part of the feeling came from the normal encouragements of parents who wanted their children to rise. An equal part came from an awareness that long ago our family had lived like lords, and that the world could still be divided into the pedigreed and the rootless.

The invitation to the family reunion sat on my desk, beckoning. No one among the Balls talked about how slavery had helped us, but whether we acknowledged it or not, the powers of our ancestors were still in hand. Although our social franchise had shrunk, it had nevertheless survived. If we did not inherit money, or land, we received a great fund of cultural capital, including prestige, a chance at education, self-esteem, a sense of place, mobility, even (in some cases) a flair for giving orders. And it was not only us, the families of former slave owners, who carried the baggage of the plantations. By skewing things so violently in the past, we had made sure that our cultural riches would benefit all white Americans.

The subject of the plantations stirred conflicting emotions. I felt proud (how rare the stories!) and sentimental (how touching the cast of family characters!). At the same time, the slave business was a crime that had not fully been acknowledged. It would be a mistake to say that I felt guilt for the past. A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced. Rather than responsible, I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it. I also felt shame about the broken society that had washed up when the tide of slavery receded.

I decided I would make an effort, however inadequate and personal, to face the plantations, to reckon with them rather than ignore their realities or make excuses for them. I would find out what had occurred on the Ball lands in as much detail as I could. America was beginning to work through the tragic parts of its history, and the Ball name, once admired in a small corner of the country, seemed likely to become a casualty of that process, painted with infamy. Paradoxically, by describing as honestly as possible what the family had done, I might clear some space around our name, and around us.

When finally I chose to look into the slave past, I felt a remarkable calm, and the rest of the path seemed clear. To complete the legacy, I would try to find descendants of the slaves. The plantation heritage was not ours, like a piece of family property, and not theirs, belonging to black families, but a shared history. The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave owners are forever linked. We have been in each other’s lives. We have been in each other’s dreams. We have been in each other’s beds. As I prepared to go back to South Carolina, I thought we should meet, share our recollections, feelings, and dreams, and make the story whole.

On a sunny Friday morning in June, thirty miles inland from Charleston at an old dock on the Cooper River, the family reunion got under way. Some 150 relatives from around the state and scattered parts of the country climbed aboard a chartered boat for a tour of the river where the Ball plantations once stood and where their remnants still moldered on the banks. Many wore shorts and T-shirts in the Carolina heat, though a few women turned out in heels and jewelry. The youngest was less than a year, the eldest eighty-eight. Reeds brushed against the hull of the double-deck boat and greetings and laughter echoed over the water as each Ball walked the gangplank and made a little jump onto the deck. My brother, Ted, and his wife, Pam Taylor, came from Louisiana.

The engine turned over and we took our seats. In a moment the skipper rounded a bend in the river and we came in sight of the oldest Ball place, Comingtee plantation. It was here that the founder of the family, the first Elias Ball, came from England to live in the year 1698. (The name Elias Ball would be used for many future sons, including Wambaw Elias, the Tory who moved back to England two generations later.) The ruined brick hulk of the rice mill at Comingtee stood within plain sight. Sticking out of the mud near the riverbank were pieces of rotting wood shaped like the headboards of beds—the sluices that once controlled the flow of water onto the rice fields.

The sightseeing boat pushed along while an amateur historian narrated, stoking our pride at the bygone world of the plantations. The size of the Ball lands once ranged from small three-hundred-acre tracts, worked by thirty or forty field hands, to giant estates of three or four thousand acres, with hundreds of slaves. Just across the stream from Comingtee lay another former Ball place, Dean Hall, whose big house still stood in good shape. Some of the South’s plantations were now used as second homes by wealthy families, but many had been swept away. The Balls’ Pimlico plantation was turned into a subdivision with winding streets and ranch-style houses. A few miles up the river lay two old Ball tracts, Kensington and Hyde Park, whose buildings were mostly gone. Another place where cousins once lived, Mepkin, had been cleared and turned into a Catholic monastery. A forestry company had bought much of the family land and planted pine trees. We peered out over the water and murmured at our broken heritage.

In the slave days the rice fields lay at the edge of the river. Each plot was surrounded by a rice bank, an earthen levee several feet high and perhaps two hundred yards long on four sides of the field. The remnants of rice banks, eroded by the current, lay submerged in the water, presenting obstacles for boats, and a hull with a draft of more than a couple of feet could easily run aground. As the double-decker headed for another bend, it lurched and teetered on one of the rice banks. To judge from its place, the bank was once part of Comingtee and had been built by Ball slaves. The pilot tried to dislodge his vessel, stuck in the muck where the slaves had worked, but the helpless engine made hoarse guttural sounds. Half an hour passed, then an hour.

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