IAALLAMA-L Archives

From: Roxanne L Barth <>
Subject: One genealogist's story
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 15:19:16 -0600

From time to time, stories come along that really must be shared. This one
tells us how one person coped with his family history.

Facing a history of slave owning

By MARGO HAMMOND Book Editor

St. Petersburg Times, published March 8, 1998 ----------

Edward Ball has never owned slaves. His father never owned slaves. His
father's father never owned slaves. But six generations of the Ball family
did. Beginning with an Englishman named Elias Ball in 1698, they lived on
their South Carolina rice plantations side by side with Africans and
descendants of Africans for more than 150 years, profiting from slave labor.

Edward Ball doesn't feel guilty about that. "A person cannot be culpable
for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have
influenced," he writes in Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
$30), the recently published account of his personal quest to find out the
truth about life on the slave plantations owned by his ancestors. But he
does feel accountable.

That is an important distinction. And one that unfortunately is not made
enough of in this country's discussions on race. In Slaves in the Family,
Ball is not just another Southern white liberal expunging his guilt. He is
a responsible person willing to hold himself accountable for his ancestors'
-- and this nation's -- actions. The slave business, which helped build
this country, was "a crime which still needs to be fully acknowledged,'"
Ball says.

As a child, Edward Ball is proudly presented with a written history of the
Ball family, but there is a strange void at the center of it, he finds.
"The Balls lived side by side with black families for six generations, but
the story, as I knew it, was divided in two," he writes. "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?"

To answer these questions, Ball pores over family documents, hunts through
archives and gathers oral histories from both the black and white
descendants of those who lived on Ball plantations. As he digs deeper, the
myths of the Ball family's past begin to drop away. Contrary to the oft
repeated refrain by his relatives that the Ball slave owners were kind
toward the people they enslaved, for example, Ball finds evidence of
beatings and mutilations. Slave families were broken up and sold. Beginning
with Elias Ball himself, Ball ancestors slept with their female slaves and
fathered children they never acknowledged. For more than 150 years, Ball
concludes, two societies, one black and one white, lived intertwined yet
totally unequally.

If Ball chose only to tell that story, Slaves in the Family would have beem
a worthwhile read. But he goes one step further. Tracking down hundreds of
descendants of "Ball slaves" across the country to hear their side of the
story, he sits down in their kitchens and living rooms, offers them his
hand, and apologizes for his ancestors' actions. More important, he shares
with them the findings of his research. In other words, he gives them back
something that his ancestors had stolen from them years before: their
history.

Now Slaves in the Family is not only a worthwhile addition to the history
of slavery. It is a blueprint for racial reconciliation.

Most of the black descendants Ball contact have no idea their ancestors
once lived on Ball plantations. Unlike Ball, whose family tree is fully
fleshed out, most of them have no knowledge of their roots. "In childhood,
I remember feeling an intangible sense of worth that might be linked to the
old days," says Ball. "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 pedigreed, of course, have papers. They know their lineage and their
history -- even if at times it is a sanitized and romanticized version, as
Ball's was. The descendants of slaves, on the other hand, have no written
history of who they are. In most cases their very names have been lost. For
six generations, births, deaths, marriages (when they were allowed at all)
and other proofs of existence for black slaves were recorded by their white
owners. These records, if they have been kept at all, are still for the
most part held in private hands.

So when Ball is able to present an entire genealogy to two black families,
tracing their origins back to a single African ancestor, it is no small
gift. Not surprisingly, Ball's description of one of those family's
reaction to his discoveries is one of the book's most moving passages.

It is an afternoon in March. Ball arrives at the Martin household and finds
Thomas P. Martin, his sister Rosina and several other family members
gathered in the living room, "among the family diplomas and tropical
fish,"' waiting to hear about his latest findings.

In the Ball papers, he tells them, there is the record of a girl named
Priscilla -- there is no evidence of her African name -- who was brought on
a ship called the Hare from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756 when she was
10 years old. She was sold on June 30 to a man called Elias Ball II, who
brought her to Comingtee plantation, where she established a family that
continued to live in slavery to the Balls for 110 years. The descendants of
Priscilla can be identified from the slave lists, Ball explains. Thomas P.
Martin, the retired assistant principal who is seated on the couch, is the
seventh-generation descendant of Priscilla.

At first, the room is silent. "The Martins knew how rare it was for
Americans to be able to identify African forebears," explains Ball. Thomas'
sister Rosina is the first to speak. "Why would they sell children?" she
asks. A short discussion follows. Young people would live longer, she is
told. There is more silence. "We have a Priscilla living now," someone
finally says, and the family begins to check Ball's list for other names of
their ancestors in slavery that live on in current family members. Then it
hits them:

"Thinking about Priscilla, the Martin family began to smile at one another
in a bewildered way," writes Ball. "Suddenly there was a wave of laughter
around the room, and everyone was talking at once. It was the first time I
had heard Thomas Martin laugh since we met."

Later Ball travels to Sierra Leone to see the crumbling prison from which
Priscilla caught the last glimpses of her homeland. While in Africa, Ball
confronts the black ruling family in Port Loko whose forebears were
involved and got rich off the slave trade. Many of the fellow Africans they
sold into slavery ended up on Ball plantations. Ball asks them to accompany
him to the dock on the creek where hundreds of people were sent off into
slavery and, on behalf of their families, take part in a ceremony of
commemoration. Remarkably, they promptly agree.

Not everyone whose past is entangled with slavery, however, is ready to
face the past so courageously. Not everyone wants to be held accountable
for past sins. Ball finds resistance especially among the older Balls. "To
do this is to condemn your ancestors!" one of his elderly cousins tells
him. "You're going to dig up my grandfather and hang him."

But Ball hangs no one in Slaves in the Family. He merely strives to uncover
the truth. To dig up the past is not a hostile act, but actually a
liberating one. By providing human faces to both his own ancestors and to
the slaves that they owned, by acknowledging the "whole" history of slavery
rather than perpetuating its usual fictionalized version, Ball has restored
to all of us our common history.

"The plantation heritage was not "ours'" like a piece of family property,
and not "theirs,'" belonging to black families, but a shared history," says
Ball. "The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave owners are forever
linked."

At the end of his book, in the lists of sources Ball consulted for this
mammoth undertaking, he makes a poignant plea to the families of former
slave owners as well as other collectors who continue to keep records from
the plantation period, to donate such material to archives, historical
societies, museums and universities, to put it in the public domain. "Such
private letters," he writes, "contain the family histories of millions."

For decades slave traders -- white Europeans and their black Africans
collaborators -- profited from slavery. So have their descendants. Even
those of us whose ancestors never owned slaves are accountable for the
continued negative legacy that slavery has imposed on black Americans. Ball
has had the guts to take a first small step, to make a gesture and to hold
out his hand. Slaves in the Family doesn't change history. It simply
acknowledges it.

"Someone's got to break the ice," Leon Smalls, a descendant of black slaves
and also, as Ball discovered, a distant relative to that first Elias Ball,
tells the author. "I gotta give you credit, you were man enough to do it."

--- </tpc/TC.Copyright.html>©Copyright 1998 St. Petersburg Times.

All rights reserved.

This thread:

• One genealogist's story by Roxanne L Barth <>