Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Almost as an afterthought, Affra concluded:

  I Give unto ye sd John Harleston & Elias Ball all my Negroes & Indian Servts Cattle Furniture, goods, Debts & chattels to be equally divided between them. … Signed Sealed & Published—Affra Coming

  With Affra’s death, the title of master settled on the young Elias Ball.

  When Elias Ball sailed into the harbor at Charleston, in 1698, he was just twenty-two. He had traveled thirty-five hundred miles from England, a journey of perhaps six weeks, to claim his inheritance. As his ship edged into port, it would have been obliged to move slowly, because sandbars and oyster shoals lined the channel. From the deck, Elias would have seen a lush coastline, with reedy marshes edging the waterfront and green grass rising waist-high out of soft gray mud. Beyond the marshes stood the firm soil, and on it a curtain of trees and thicket so dense that light could hardly open it. One species of tree in particular would have been foreign to Elias’s eyes, the palmetto, which grows only in semitropical latitudes. The palmetto has a tan trunk, naked of branches until the top, where long leaves emerge in the shape of open fans.

  The harbor at Charleston was shaped by the confluence of the Ashley and the Cooper rivers. Flowing south, the streams formed a peninsula and met at a place called Oyster Point, a jutting piece of land colored white with shells. The Kiawah had long opened shellfish here, and there were still discarded mounds of shells. Around the eastern edge of the point ran the Cooper, around the west, the Ashley.

  Charleston stood on the east side of the peninsula, a line of buildings about a half mile from start to finish, facing the Cooper River. The mud of the marshes kept ships from docking, except at a single pier built out from the town. A dirt road ran along the shore, but only four or five streets cut inland. Even to an English peasant, it would have seemed barely coherent enough to call a village, much less “Charlestown,” namesake of King Charles II. The buildings were simple clapboard things with pitched roofs, though a few brick structures aimed for a more permanent standard of architecture. There were probably some houses in a state of ruin, and others charred black. That February an earthquake had struck, and the same month, a fire had burned a third of the town, including most of its best buildings. An aura of precariousness must have permeated everything.

  Elias had probably never met an African, and certainly not a Native American. I suspect what he saw when he stepped onto the dock filled him with wonder and fear. Nearly every other person would have been black. The population of the colony, including the inland farms, numbered about 3,800 free whites and 3,000 slaves, most of them black. In 1698, South Carolina was already the slave center of North America, and its high proportion of captive workers was greater than that of any other colony on the mainland. It wasn’t the blackness of the dock workers alone that would have caught the immigrant’s attention. In the late 1600s, some slaves in Charleston had two letters—DY—burned into their flesh. The inscription was the mark of King James II, known before his accession to the throne as the Duke of York. As a principal in the Royal African Company, the Duke controlled most of the traffic of Africans sold into South Carolina, and every person was branded with his title.

  Coming’s T was nearly twenty years old. By this time the name had been worn down through repetition to the poetic “Comingstee.” Within a generation it would smooth out to become simply “Comingtee.”

  Though Comingtee stood north of Charleston, no carriage roads reached Elias’s new home, and by English standards the land outside town was virtually empty. Only a few dozen Natives lived in the vicinity of Comingtee, and within a radius of ten miles there lived no more than 250 slaves, free colonists, and indentured servants. Even in this general emptiness, Comingtee was considered one of the busiest estates. An Englishman writing about the colonies around this time observed that the “most noted plantations” along the Cooper River were Comingtee and a place called Silk Hope, owned by an older man, Nathaniel Johnson, who would later be governor of South Carolina.

  Although there is nothing to prove it, Affra Coming was probably still alive to greet her nephew. But she died within a few months, leaving him alone with the new Ball slaves. In all likelihood, Elias moved into the house under the oaks, where Affra and John had once lived.

  It must have been a chaotic, brutal time. One of the main battles, though certainly not the bloodiest, was the struggle merely to communicate. Of the Africans on Comingtee, some had lived in America for several years and spoke an English patois as well as their own language, such as Wolof or Fula. The Native slaves, too, spoke more than one language. Elias was the real stranger on the land, a prisoner of his West Country English.

  Although many of his peers were illiterate, Elias had received a rudimentary education; he could read and write, but he was no poet. His spelling was improvised, as was the custom of the day. In an account book that he would later keep, there is an entry that reads, “23 January—Day that I sent my fouor Cheldren to Mr. Faur.” His penmanship, which fills that old book, was scrawled to the point of hard-won. Somewhere along the way, however, he had learned double-entry bookkeeping. He was scrupulous with debts and had a grip on figures. To judge from the papers he left, one of his favorite things was to keep an eye on his property.

  I imagine that during long nights at the edge of the swamp, Elias Ball brooded about the wager he had made with his life. The twenty-two-year-old farm boy seized his future: he would be a little autocrat in a corner of an unknown world.

  3

  THE WELL OF TRADITION

  On a summer afternoon in Charleston, in the kind of heat that slows a person’s walk, I went to visit a distant cousin, Elias Ball Bull. Elias was in his sixties and, by my count, the sixteenth male in the family christened with the name Elias since Elias Ball, founder of the family in America, died in 1751. My cousin’s mother, Julia Ball, was a first cousin of my grandfather, Nathaniel Ball. She had married a scion of another old Carolina family, Francis Bull, giving her son his percussive two last names.

  Cousin Elias had worked as a historic-preservation planner for the government in Berkeley County, the district where the Ball plantations once stood. I wanted to go over the family story with him, in hopes of finding a clue to the mystery of the descendants of the Ball slaves.

  Elias lived alone in a two-story apartment house in the suburbs, in a compound of ten or twelve identical buildings put up in the 1970s. His situation reminded me that the offspring of the slave-owning families, fleeing the sinking ship of the rice plantations, did not necessarily land on high shores. He came to the door in a customary position, seated in a black aluminum wheelchair. Elias suffered a long-term disability and was able to walk with crutches, but around the house he preferred the chair. After decades of making accommodations in the walking world, Elias fused his incapacity with his identity. His upper body consisted of a pair of powerful arms on a great barrel chest, beneath which the dangling legs seemed too small. A paunch rode up over his belt to fill his shirt.

  Cousin Elias had lived alone most of his life. His apartment consisted of four small rooms with low ceilings, hollow walls, and plywood doors. In one or two corners stood a piece of old furniture handed down from an ancestor. The humble setting did not flatter the antiques. Still, Elias was a superior caretaker of information. Bookshelves lined the walls, filing cabinets jammed closets, and in his study papers spilled out of their drawers.

  For many years Elias had studied South Carolina history; he did not have a teaching career but published articles in small journals. When a railroad spur was planned to traverse Limerick plantation, an old Ball place, he got a commission from the government to write a historical survey. He was keenly interested in such subjects as the first (failed) attempt to colonize the Carolinas, made in the 1560s by France.

  In the family of his father, the Bulls, Cousin Elias claimed another old Carolina clan, though in the eyes of some history buffs a suspicious cloud hung over that group. In the late 1700s, when South Carolina was still a
British colony, one of Elias’s paternal ancestors, William Bull, rose to become governor, a position he held on and off for nine years. When the American Revolution stirred, Bull had the misfortune of being in office. He tried to fight the uprising but went down with the English and eventually moved back to London. Ever since, a traitorous mist had enveloped the Bull kinspeople left in America.

  Cousin Elias and I started by going over the contours of the Ball story, beginning in 1698 with Elias Ball’s arrival on Comingtee plantation.

  “We always called him Red Cap because of that little red cap he wore to hide his bald head,” said Elias. “The Balls are noted for being bald-headed.” He let out a guttural laugh, and his belly shook. The laugh, a deep, hoarse caw with rough edges around a baritone middle, filled the room.

  Among his American descendants, Elias Ball is known affectionately as “Red Cap.” The nickname came from a piece of clothing that he donned when he had enough money to commission his portrait, in the 1740s, when he was nearly seventy. In the portrait, Elias is old and rich, his belly large from abundant dinners. He wears a white scarf, dark vest, and collarless jacket, and his face, heavy with jowls, carries an expression of supreme confidence. On his large head is his signature red velvet hat, evidently covering the baldness of his later years.

  “I’ve got some of the same genes myself,” said Elias, touching his brow. I liked his irreverence; he did not seem to venerate the old emblems of family pride.

  Elias Bull was not bald, however, but had thick, short hair, the hairline merely pulled back an inch from the brow. His hair was gray around the temples and still dark on top. The face beneath his broad forehead contained exaggerated features. Elias had large bushy eyebrows, and deep, sensitive, watery eyes that contained hidden reaches and thoughts. His heavy bags sagged down, drooping on their way to a pair of great jowls, the skin finally landing on the banks of a huge jaw. Elias’s jaw and mouth dominated his face. It was a wide, capacious mouth, with thin lips, and the mouth was made more grand by the voice that emerged from it.

  “You’ve heard the joke about the plantation folk?” Elias asked. “What do Charlestonians and the Chinese have in common?” His eyes glinted. “Both grow rice and worship their ancestors!”

  Elias had a deep and cavernous voice, with a floor of gravel. His accent had a strong upcountry pitch, because his father and grandfather had been cotton farmers in a town called Stateburg, far inland from the port city of Charleston. Upcountry, the plantation crop was cotton, while toward the coast, with its tidal rivers, the old staple had been rice. Among white people, the upcountry accent differed from the coastal and Charleston brogue. Inland, the vowels seemed to emerge from the nose. Downstate, they shifted to the front of the mouth. The locale of Elias’s childhood was imprinted in his voice. Yankees would call it a drawl, but in local terms it was simply more cotton than rice.

  Our talk of Red Cap turned to the Ball family coat of arms.

  “Red Cap was not entitled to that coat of arms,” said Elias, referring to a family emblem we both knew well. He grew serious. “The English code is that the coat holds to the oldest son.”

  I nodded at Elias, sharing this apparent secret. When I was a child, in addition to baseball gloves and favorite jackets, I held on to two copies of the family crest, printed on old paper in black, red, and gold. The Ball coat of arms consisted of a shield, like that used in medieval jousting, topped with an eyeless metal helmet. On the shield, suspended against a field of red, appeared three black balls, each with a tongue of flame on the top. The red field was cut in two by a gray chevron, an inverted V. Underneath came the inscription “Ball family of Devonshire.”

  The emblem had a mysterious aura. It seemed to represent some long-ago and unknowable deed, probably soaked in blood, that involved swords and the clank of armored boots on the floor of a castle. As a child, I was lifted by the knowledge that this deed had something to do with me. I took it for granted that the Ball coat of arms and its train of glory, or murder, or castle building, had somehow been carried over to America and conferred on our mayonnaise-eating family. Cousin Elias told me that this was not so.

  “The coat holds to the oldest son,” Elias repeated. We both knew that Red Cap, the Ball immigrant to America, was a last son. That meant that the use of the family arms by the American clan presented, at best, something of a fraud. Elias and I nodded our heads up and down gravely.

  “Here is the standard British heraldry.” Elias drew back in his wheelchair, brought his hand to his face, and pointed a finger at the air.

  “Let’s say there were four sons,” he began. “The first is entitled to the coat of arms—as is. Okay. The next son usually goes into the army or navy. Well, he gets a half-moon. All right. The next son is either military or clergy, and he receives a star. And the fourth son would get, for his coat of arms, a martlet. A martlet is a little bird, which, according to myth, has to be on the wing, because it has no feet. In other words, the fourth son inherited nothing.”

  In addition to the existence of the coat of arms, there was the matter of its imagery—black balls on a red field. The balls were an embarrassment, because they seemed to represent our peculiar name.

  “Those cannonballs are not because of the name,” said Elias, straightening the crooked past. “No, the Ball family coat of arms has three flambeaux. They are like cannonballs, only they have a tongue of fire coming out of them. What those things were, you use a catapult to throw them into the enemy’s sails in order to set them on fire. The flambeaux represented military attack, from seafaring people, which is what you would expect from the Balls of Devonshire, on the English Channel. And the gray chevron in the middle, the chevron means hospitality.”

  Our conversation moved back to the plantation story. Red Cap died in 1751, leaving behind many descendants and more than a hundred slaves. By that time the importation of Africans into South Carolina had begun to peak. Charleston was the most populous city in the British colonies south of Philadelphia, with a large black majority.

  “Charleston was the South,” said Elias. “There wasn’t any other South. It dominated Georgia. North Carolina was nothing—never was anything. Virginia had no real towns, just little villages. The South was here, Charleston.”

  As we talked, I felt that Elias shared my interest in the lives of the slaves. He knew the family story had little to do with the coat of arms—that the Ball rice farms were no resorts but large and efficient work camps.

  “Life on the plantations,” I said, bringing the subject into the room.

  “All right,” said Elias.

  “About how many slaves worked on each place?”

  “That question cannot be answered,” said Elias. “It depends on the size of your rice fields. A large part of them didn’t work. They were too old and were supported, or they were too young and didn’t work. So really you are only using about a third of the labor force. If you have one hundred slaves, only thirty of them worked. The others were supported, and those people were never sold. The plantation owners had to support them. If they didn’t, they were through. The burden was accepted as part of life.”

  I admired Elias, because he spoke easily of the old days, but I wondered about his figures. One-third of the slave population at work seemed low. Older people were not sold, perhaps—they had no economic value; no one would buy them—but children usually carried water or food by the time they could run, and were sent to the fields by age twelve.

  “Rice planting, they say, was easier for ’em than cotton,” Elias continued. “Because the slaves had their task—generally one or two acres to be tilled in a day. After they were through with that, then they could take their gun out and go hunting. A lot of them had guns. People say, ‘Oh, slaves with guns, how terrible!’ They get all wound up over this business. But on the plantation, a lot of the slaves had guns.”

  This was the first I heard of guns in the hands of slaves. Were the plantations a more trusting place than some legends would have
them?

  “There were no slave uprisings!” Elias barked. “When the Civil War broke out, the white men went off to fight. There were no uprisings then! Life went on!”

  Elias laughed his baritone laugh and waved his hand, dismissing the idea that there was discontent among the slaves. He exaggerated, yet he raised a real question. How did slavery continue for so long, nearly 250 years in English-speaking America? Why were there so few slave revolts? His implication was clear: the Ball slaves resigned themselves to their predicament.

  “I knew a black woman who got a pension because her father fought beside his master in the Civil War,” said Elias, wrapping up his case.

  Of all the Ball family, Elias seemed to be the most curious, and passionate, about life before the Civil War. His grandfather had fought for the Confederacy, and I had the feeling that Elias had one foot planted in those days, even though they had ended long before his birth.

  “How did the Balls treat their slaves?” I asked.

  “Apparently very well,” came the answer. “They were quite fond of them. There is the story that after the Balls left Comingtee plantation, some of them went back up to visit. The slaves turned out—I mean the former slaves—and said, ‘Oh, the maussas is back!’ They greeted the Balls with open arms! They gave them eggs and I don’t know what all. It was very affectionate.”

  The “maussas” were the master and his family.

  “The boredom was the biggest thing that hit them,” said Elias, meaning the Ball family. “People don’t realize, with the plantations, that they are so far apart, if somebody came to visit, they had to stay for at least two weeks. How lonely it was! They might not see another white person for six months. And nobody they could associate with, nobody. You did not associate with your overseer, and definitely not with your slaves.”