Skeletons in the Family Closet
By Drew Gilpin Faust
Published: March 1, 1998
SLAVES IN THE FAMILY
By Edward Ball.
Illustrated. 504 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
Slavery did not end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 or even with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Through its powerful legacy it has persisted into our own time, moving an American President on the eve of the 21st century to consider an official Government apology as a means of at last laying its ghosts to rest. In ''Slaves in the Family,'' Edward Ball, a descendant of South Carolinians who owned thousands of slaves over a period of more than 150 years, makes a personal effort to come to terms with his history. ''To contemplate slavery,'' he observes, ''was a bit like doing psychoanalysis on myself.''
But Ball insists that it was not guilt that motivated his search into the past. ''A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced,'' he writes. ''Rather than responsible, I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it.'' ''Slaves in the Family'' is thus an account and an accounting, a chronicle of Ball owners and Ball slaves that is designed to break the silences surrounding the author's troubling heritage.
Ball pursues his goal in travels across the United States and even to Africa, both through documentary research in more than 10,000 manuscript pages of Ball family papers and through oral tradition, stories passed down across the generations to his white relatives and to what he estimates to be the approximately 75,000 living descendants of Ball slaves. Using each type of source to check and amplify the other, Ball revises accepted family wisdom: when his white relatives assure him that his ancestors were the kindest of masters, he points to manuscript evidence of whippings, sales, even amputations of the limbs of rebellious slaves.
But perhaps more important, Ball uses documentary evidence to trace and enrich the stories he hears from descendants of Ball slaves. At a meeting of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in New York City, he encounters a great-granddaughter of Katie Heyward, a Ball slave born in 1840 and known as ''Bright Ma.'' Ball is able to identify Bright Ma's West African tribal origins as Mende and to uncover a haunting tale of how her aging grandparents were once flogged because an overseer employed by his ancestors suspected them of stealing and eating a plantation sheep.
The ties Ball traces between his forebears and their slaves are never more distressing than in their representations of the intimacy of so much of slavery's cruelty, never more moving than when some glimmer of humanity emerges amid the system's brutality. Thus Ball especially struggles to understand the evidence he finds of interracial sexual liaisons. In the 1730's, for example, the founder of the Ball dynasty, Elias, brought a ''Molattoe Wench'' named Dolly to work in his house after the death of his wife. Dolly's subsequent child, described as ''yellow,'' was, unlike all other Ball slaves of that era, given an English name, Edward, and later freed. Dolly, too, was allotted special treatment under the terms of Elias's will, convincing the author that she had served as Elias's mistress or concubine. Was this intimacy another form of violence perpetrated by his ancestors, Ball wonders. ''Was it rape? Or could they have cared for each other?''
Elias proves to have been hardly unique. Several ancestors who ''never married'' actually lived, Ball discovers, in long-term unions with slave women. The third Elias rewarded a slave named Nancy with freedom and the substantial annual income of $100 upon his death in 1810. Another ancestor built his black common-law wife a house in Charleston, where she raised their eight children. The white family tree lists him as a bachelor.
Ball tells stories remarkable in their circumstantiality. He finds a slave who ran away during the upheavals of the Revolutionary War, fled to Nova Scotia, then ultimately returned to the land of his father, Sierra Leone, where he composed an eloquent antislavery autobiography published in England in 1798. Ball's most extraordinary achievement is perhaps his reconstruction of seven generations of the family of Priscilla, a 10-year-old girl purchased from African traders in Sierra Leone in 1756. Together with Priscilla's 20th-century descendant Thomas Martin, a retired assistant school principal in his 60's, Ball returns to Limerick, the South Carolina plantation where Martin's grandfather, Priscilla's great-great-grandson, had been a slave. Both Ball and Martin recognize the anger and resentment their pilgrimage into the past arouses among friends and relatives. But Ball shares Martin's sense that Limerick is somehow ''hallowed ground'' and that their presence there together can serve as at least a gesture of reconciliation.
Ball's excursion into that burdensome Southern past situates him in a tradition of Southern historians and writers who have grappled with the meanings of race and the heritage of slavery's inhumanity. His search cannot but invoke the quest of Faulkner's Quentin Compson in that greatest of all Southern novels, ''Absalom! Absalom!'' Quentin, too, struggled with histories of cruelty and exploitation, and he, too, endeavored to confront the intermingled black and white legacies. Yet, sadly -- if hardly surprisingly -- Edward Ball is no William Faulkner. For all the richness of his research and for all the inherent drama of the stories he tells, his prose is too often wooden, inadequate to the emotional and moral ironies of his material. His efforts to set a scene when he portrays encounters with descendants of Ball slaves seem almost to revert to formula. He routinely describes their skin color -- ''tawny brown,'' ''blond wood,'' ''cardboard,'' ''eggplant,'' ''mahoga-
ny'' -- remarks on their giggling, chuckling, cackling or laughing, and notes details of their houses or furniture -- ''vinyl,'' ''with plastic covers'' -- that seem to embody judgments of taste and feelings of social distance that tell us more about Ball and less about his subjects than he perhaps intended. He misjudges as well in his decision ''at times . . . to convey white or black dialect, but not fastidiously.'' It is in fact overwhelmingly to black speakers, not white, that Ball gives such language, and the ''dialect'' he renders is little more than an omission of final ''g's'' and a transformation of ''them'' into '' 'em.'' Dialect that is not ''fastidiously'' rendered inevitably and dangerously approaches caricature.
Despite these shortcomings, there is much to admire in Ball's very willingness to challenge the generations of silence in his white family and to search out black kin whose reactions he had every reason to fear. And there is much to learn as well from a book that reminds us that slavery possesses not just a national and cultural significance but, for many Americans, a very direct and personal immediacy, even in the late 20th century. In naming the names -- Bright Ma, Paris, Priscilla, Angola Amy, Binak, Tenah, Daniel and dozens more -- Ball contributes to at least partly reclaiming the humanity slavery worked to obliterate. He reminds us that slavery was not just about economics or politics or even abstract questions of morality, but most essentially about the millions of human beings imprisoned within its chains.
Ball ends his book by returning to American slavery's beginnings on the coast of West Africa, to Bunce Island, where Priscilla was held before being shipped to South Carolina in 1756. ''I came from a family of slave buyers,'' he writes. ''In Congo, Ghana, Senegal and Sierra Leone lived the heirs of slave sellers. I went to West Africa to try to find some of them.'' In an audience with a Maforki chief, descendant of a ruling family that played a significant role in the 18th-century slave trade, Ball confronts slavery's roots. Persuading the Africans to join with him in a ceremony of commemoration and forgiveness, he closes his narrative with a powerful affirmation of his belief that the history of slavery is a shared legacy. Blacks and whites, Africans and Americans, are forever linked by the burdens of this past; together they must challenge history's destructive silences.