Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The room was full of people eating lunch. All of us who were seated had skin more or less the color of old paper. A salad came and was placed in front of me by a black hand.

  I asked Dorothy whether she knew anything about the names people took.

  “That’s interesting,” she replied, unblinking. “Often, Negroes, their biological father would give their name to his child. But they lived like animals, you know. Very seldom did a man and woman live together, even as common-law husband and wife. They were actually like tomcats. And so the names become confused. They changed names in a very confusing way.”

  “Why did they change their names so much?”

  “Why do Negroes do anything?” Dorothy asked. “That’s a different culture, and you’re doing very well if you can learn what their culture is. You can’t explain it all.”

  “I don’t think black folks have a hard time understanding white people,” I said.

  “I don’t think they do, so much,” said Dorothy. “Somehow or other they are privy to almost all that white people do. White people have no secrets from Negro servants. Negroes have a lot of secrets from us. One reason the names get so confused is really—more consideration is given to breeding farm animals than to Negroes. They live and cohabit with anybody that suits them.”

  “Are you talking about two hundred years ago?” I asked.

  “I’m talking about any time, right on down now to today,” Dorothy answered.

  “On the subject of tomcats,” I said, “how common was it for slave owners to go to bed with their slaves?”

  “Well, there were mulattoes, and quadroons. You don’t use those words anymore, because most people don’t know what they mean,” Dorothy said. “In places like New Orleans, there used to be arrangements for young men to find a companion, a mulatto or quadroon woman. That was the French invention. The English would not do that. Whatever the English did, they would not organize it. Undoubtedly the miscegenation happened sometimes. It happened less in South Carolina than it did in Virginia. In Virginia, the Negroes are well adulterated.”

  “Thomas Jefferson was said by some to have had a long relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman to whom he had title on his plantation, Monticello,” I said.

  “Yes, that was because Jefferson’s wife made him promise not to marry again,” said Dorothy, rolling with the subject. “I don’t know why she did, because she was a widow when she married him. She tied him up with a promise not to marry again after she died, which she did. And he took this concubine as a result. That was a fact.”

  “Did the Ball slaves sleep with their masters?” I asked.

  “I never heard anything of that. And I don’t think anybody else has even thought about it. There was a close intimacy in the households between whites and blacks, but very little cohabitation.”

  I did not believe I would hear many reports from the white side about whether Ball men slept with their slaves, so I let the subject drop.

  “The fight against segregation in schools, I don’t know if it was right or not,” Dorothy continued. “I think the white children have to remain separate socially from Negroes. Otherwise you end up in marriages, sooner or later. Theoretically they should not be separated, but practically sometimes it worked better.”

  “What is wrong with intermarriage?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that I can even answer that. To me it is so repugnant—so awful—that I just can’t accept it. Perhaps my views are Anglo-Saxon, I don’t know. The French have always ignored the color line, always intermarried.”

  Dorothy went on, “Do you know the term ‘brass ankle’? It’s not a word you mention in polite society. Just like the word ‘nigger’—nobody uses that anymore. I haven’t heard that word in fifty years. A brass ankle was a mixed-blood person—Indian, Negro, and white. Three different people. They lived in the country, and had ankles that shined because of the mixture.”

  “I think we have two opposing myths,” I said. “One is the myth of the gentle master. The other is the story of the rivers of blood that flowed from slavery. Where is the truth?”

  “I don’t know that you will ever find out,” said Dorothy. “I think slavery was morally wrong. It always has been. It was wrong in Bible times, but it existed. The people who profited most from them were the slave traders. They persecuted them, and profited by them, and took no responsibility for them. They didn’t care how many dead bodies they threw overboard on the voyage here. Slavery was accepted all over the world, from Bible times on. In the Bible, they speak of slavery as an ordinary thing. Wasn’t it Benjamin who was sold into slavery in Egypt, and rescued by his brother Joseph? Throughout the Old Testament itx was accepted, and nobody thought of it as being wrong or troublesome. People in the United States were probably the first group to consider the morality of slavery.”

  In Dorothy’s view, the Americans had much to be proud of. The first stirrings of the antislavery movement occurred about the time of the American Revolution. A little earlier in England, however, a few writers and barristers raised a protest against the slave trade that was run out of the cities of Liverpool and Bristol.

  “Slavery ended because there was a change in the religious idea, all over the world,” continued Dorothy. “You simply cannot convince a Yankee that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. It was fought over states’ rights. See, the Russians had slaves up until the time of the Great War, in 1914. But all over the world there was a change of attitude—just as there has been a change of attitude toward women and children. When I was a child, women and children were like chattels. Up until the time I was a child, a woman owned no property. She couldn’t control herself.”

  The idea that all women were once like the black population on the plantations fit nicely into Dorothy’s conversation, like a minor chord inserted briefly into a major-key concerto.

  The dining room was beginning to empty out. Waitresses cleared the tables, and elderly people moved slowly out of the room.

  “Where do you think the former slaves went?” I asked.

  “Well, it was a terrible and irresponsible thing to free slaves without providing for them,” said Dorothy. “When freedom came, the white people realized that it was not an open door to success and happiness and safety. White people knew that there was going to be pandemonium, and it was. The Negroes were taken advantage of by unscrupulous strangers, and they were taken advantage of by each other. They were terribly dishonest and cruel to each other. To this day they are not accustomed to taking care of themselves.

  “After the Civil War, I think many of them stayed, or kept up with the Ball family,” she went on. “Then many of them began heading north along the East Coast. They would drop off at Washington, or Philadelphia. Some of them got as far as New York.”

  Perhaps in Dorothy’s youth, the children of the Ball slaves remained in touch with the Balls, but no longer. I had asked around the family, and no such people could be found. There were no “faithful mammies” whose families went back to the days before freedom and who continued to work for the Balls.

  I mentioned that I was looking for some of the families of the descendants.

  “I think that’s great,” Dorothy replied. “They may say they were not well treated. All I know is that they were well treated. You may get the word that they were not. I would be surprised, because I don’t think it’s been characteristic of the whole Ball clan to act with anything less than kindness to other people.”

  Despite her familiarity with the old days, Dorothy had no special clues to where the families of the former slaves might be found.

  I thanked her for lunch. Later, as we said good-bye, her eyes got a thoughtful look. She paused to give me one final opinion.

  “It’s strange,” Dorothy mused. “In the old days, there was no feeling of restraint or embarrassment when Negroes and whites were together. Now if you attend a Negro wedding or funeral, even if you are invited, you feel a little uneasy. You don’t know whether people are really
welcoming you or not.”

  In hopes of sharing the task of finding the descendants of the slaves, I talked with other older relatives. Ten or fifteen kin had reached their late seventies or eighties. They were the keepers of family lore, and the Ball name was one of their prized possessions.

  Among the cadre of elders was a cousin whom I will call Fitzpatrick Ball. Fitz, in his late seventies, had been first cousin to my father. Fitz’s father and my father’s father were brothers. To me, Fitz was a first cousin once removed.

  Cousin Fitz was trim, vigorous, and charming, and wore his advancing age lightly. He had a ruddy face and a good shock of white hair. Unlike the majority of the family, Fitz had a portion of Scotch-Irish ancestry, which, some said, played a role in his personality. Many of the Balls had a phlegmatic temperament, but Cousin Fitz was alert and quick of speech. He had a jocular style of conversation, and knew the family lore intimately.

  During the Second World War, Cousin Fitz had been in the service, as had my father. Fitz was fond of telling me a story about Dad from the war. In the middle of the war, Fitz and Dad found themselves together on furlough in San Francisco, far from the palmetto trees and old streets of their upbringing in Charleston. Dad, who was a bit older, had been in California for a while and had the use of a car, a good luxury for a soldier. He also possessed a booklet full of fuel ration coupons, a precious necessity. San Francisco was overrun with enlisted men, said Fitz. It was also packed with barrooms, and women who made their living from the soldiers. The details were always blurred, but Fitz wanted me to know that night after long night, Dad and he caroused the port town. After the war Cousin Fitz attended medical school and became a physician in Charleston, with a long career.

  One day I called Fitz to ask for a particular piece of help. I was not prepared for his reaction.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with this!” he yelled into the phone. “That was a brutal period, the time of slavery, yes,” he said, breathing hard. “But there’s nothing that anybody—not you or me or anyone else—can do about it!”

  “If the past was, as you say, brutal, isn’t it better to talk about it than to remain silent?” I answered.

  “What you are doing can only cause trouble!” he came back. “This will court anger, and it will divide people!”

  I had always admired Cousin Fitz. He was a doctor with a record of helping people, and I had no desire to contradict him.

  “I think the way you are going about this thing is provocative,” he continued. “It will produce dissension, or worse. You know, in my lifetime, there have been race riots!”

  For Cousin Fitz, the trouble was not the legacy of the plantation. He thought the subject of slavery no longer had any importance, and it was even out of our power to make sense of it. The problem we had to worry about, Fitz believed, was the pathology of other people on the subject of race.

  I said mildly, “There are people in the family who support what I’m doing, younger people.”

  “Just what I thought!” Cousin Fitz exploded. “That it would be the younger generations who think this thing is positive. That’s just what I was afraid of!”

  Somewhere along the way, Fritz had heard that I was interested in the subject of white-black sex. This was the last thing he could tolerate, and suddenly it leaped to his mind.

  “This business,” he said, sputtering, “this suggestion of some sort of copulation between the slave owners and the slaves—that’s provocative! You’ll lose control of it!”

  Fitz exhausted himself, and fell silent. I made no effort to speak, because I felt he would hear no defense.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Earlier, I had spoken with younger relatives and tested their feelings. One cousin in her thirties, who lived in Buffalo, New York, offered strong encouragement. Another cousin, a realtor in Charleston with whom I had spent time when we were growing up, also urged me to continue. A third cousin had gone to work as a schoolteacher in an all-black school. She took me aside and told me not to stop for any reason.

  Within the Ball family, the plantation stories functioned like a giant self-portrait. I was making a new painting that might change the look of the past. I talked to close and distant cousins, old and young, at churches, dinners, and picnics. In general, the oldest generation worried that I wanted to alter the family story; it was plain in their eyes. People in middle age seemed ambivalent, at times curious and at other times apparently fearful. Many of the young adults offered support, secretly or out loud.

  There was also a difference of opinion between the sexes. The women in the family seemed considerably less nervous about my inquiry than the men. This included both women born with the Ball name and those who took it on with marriage.

  After I talked with Fitz, I contacted another older cousin, a retired gentleman with a melodious name. I will coarsen it a bit and call him Bennett. Cousin Bennett Ball was a businessman in his eighties, with horn-rimmed glasses and a gentle voice. He had attended Harvard Business School, but that was long ago, and he betrayed no evidence of having acquired Northern manners.

  “I just don’t want to get involved,” he said quietly. “I knew your father when we were growing up. I had such good family relations with him and your grandfather. I just want to keep it that way.”

  There was a strange tone in Bennett’s voice that I could not immediately name. His speech had the sound of resignation. Instead of expressing anger, Bennett reacted as though he had seen something large bearing down on him, inevitably, at a good speed. He only wanted to step aside.

  “You’re going about this thing differently from the way that I would,” he said, simply. “And it doesn’t mean I dislike you. It doesn’t mean I’m not happy to have you as my cousin. I just don’t understand why you’re doing it the way you’re doing it. I just don’t want to get involved. You’re a good cousin and I want it to stay that way.”

  I felt chagrined, as though I had mistakenly taken something from him. Bennett and I talked for a moment about Isaac Ball, my great-grandfather and Bennett’s grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War. We traded a few details about Isaac’s life. I laughed at a memory, Bennett laughed, and the pressure eased. Then his tone changed. Bennett was no longer laughing, and he was no longer resigned.

  “My father didn’t own slaves!” he snapped. “And my grandfather didn’t own slaves. To do this is to condemn your ancestors! You’re going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!”

  4

  BRIGHT MA

  It was September, and overcast in Harlem. The clouds had the tin coating the city of New York gives the sky, and the summer heat had not yet been cleared from the air, which seemed to lie stagnant in the alleys, between the buildings. An aroma of grit rose from the surface of Malcolm X Boulevard, and in the thin light and old heat, the street smelled sharply.

  On a visit to New York from my borrowed house in Charleston, I attended a meeting of a black genealogy group. The Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society was founded in the 1970s by people who sought to uncover as much as they could of their family history. The group in New York had dealings with similar associations elsewhere—Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and some smaller towns. A rendezvous took place every month at a public library in Harlem.

  I arrived on a Saturday morning at a squat brick building on a corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and found the meeting on the second floor. The room measured some twenty by thirty feet, and was low ceilinged, with fluorescent lights between suspended fiberglass panels. A brown table whose veneer felt like hard vinyl filled the center of the room. Lavender carpet covered the floor, and at one end of the space stood an old filing cabinet.

  Around the table sat twenty women and five men, ages thirty to sixty-five. From earlier visits, I recognized everyone in the room except one woman, who sat next to me. I had joined the group in hopes of finding clues that might lead me to the descendants of Ball slaves. Alt
hough most of us had both European and African ancestors, I was the only member of the organization who did not live under the sign “black.”

  Dance music drifted into the room from a radio on the street, and a gentleman in oxford shoes and khaki trousers stood up to close the window. The meeting began as it always did, with introductions, as each of us stated our name and the nature of our genealogical research. I reminded the gathering that I was attempting to locate families who had come from the Ball plantations in South Carolina, that I was a descendant of the owners of those plantations, and that I hoped to find out what became of a few of the families formerly enslaved by my ancestors. Polite nods bobbed throughout the room, acknowledgment of the familiar. The one dissent came from the woman I did not recognize, who began to shake her head from side to side.

  She sat on my left, at arm’s length. She wore a beige jacket and skirt, gold-rimmed glasses, and had close-cropped natural hair, with touches of gray. Her skin was brown, her facial features smooth, her expression calm; with some uncertainty, I put her age at about forty-five. Staring at the purple carpet, the woman listened and continued to shake her head, left to right. Finally she spoke.

  She said that she was on the way to see her grandchildren and had not intended to come to the genealogy meeting, but that some things were foreordained. She looked around the room, caught the gaze of others, but did not turn to me. The woman added that she was researching her family, who were from Moncks Corner, in Berkeley County, South Carolina. A gesture without a look came in my direction. She couldn’t believe the coincidence, she said, but had to believe it.

  In the end the woman preferred privacy, so I will call her Denise Collins—a name other than her own.