by Edward Ball
Denise Collins said that her mother used to talk about the Ball family, and that her great-grandmother, Katie Heyward, was in slavery on a Ball plantation.
All stayed quiet. It was as though we wanted to hold on to the moment, the recognition. Soon there was an exhalation of sighs, followed by a ripple of murmurs. I turned to look at Denise Collins and was greeted with her profile, because she continued to avoid my gaze.
When Denise Collins finally looked at me, I saw her as though through a frame and she glowed with an intense clarity. We stared at each other for an instant, mutterings and gestures around us.
We got up and went into the hall. It was cream-colored, featureless, and had an unpleasant echo, Denise Collins held out her hand, which trembled visibly. She looked at me with a light in her eyes, bewildered, her expression equal parts anguish and hope. I would like to have opened my arms to her. I would like to have spoken kind words, but I could not bring myself to say them.
As we stood in the dim hall, I realized that I had no credibility with this outwardly gentle stranger. In her eyes, I might be no different from the person who had forced her mother’s grandmother, Katie Heyward, into the fields. The evidence of my name was against me. I stammered a few words, but as I stood with Denise Collins, I knew that if I was to reach out to her family, and share something with them, I would have to earn the privilege of their company.
A few days later the sun took only a small corner of the naked blue sky. It was an uncomfortably clear light. New York, on a fine day, can seem grotesque. On that blue afternoon, I visited Denise Collins and her family.
We met at Denise’s apartment in Harlem. The building was a four-story brownstone in a row of identical houses put up in the late 1800s. Each building measured exactly twenty-five feet in width. When they were built, the brownstones housed single families, but they had long ago been broken into apartments, one or two per floor.
Denise Collins, quiet and watchful, met me at the door and led me inside. She was out of her business suit, and in pants and a shirt. I gave her flowers.
We entered her apartment at the top of a flight of stairs. The door opened into a living room with windows onto the backyard of the building. There was a small kitchen in the midle of the apartment, and two bedrooms down a short hallway in the front, facing the street. We sat in the living room, which was lightless, a typical New York apartment on a blazing day. There were two low sofas, a coffee table, plants by the window, and a fireplace. Two large boxes sat against the wall, one containing a new television, the other a new microwave oven.
Denise Collins looked in the direction of the appliances, said that she worked hard for a living, then she smiled for the first time.
I looked in the kitchen and saw a sign that she might smile again, because Denise had cooked a large dinner for my visit. The dishes were distributed in piles on the countertops—ham, macaroni, greens, potato salad, and a pie.
Denise Collins said that she had two grown daughters. As she arranged our table setting, Denise’s movements were small and precise, her voice quiet. She either carried a load of worry or was unsure how to talk to me. Three children, ages four to eight, appeared from a bedroom. They were her grandchildren, Denise said. They were in for the afternoon while their mother, Denise’s daughter, did errands. The children introduced themselves, disappeared, and soon I heard television in the next room.
The doorbell rang and Denise’s cousins came into the apartment. They were siblings in their thirties and forties whom I will call Daniel and Carl Jenkins, using two more substitute names. Carl Jenkins, a stout man in a gray workshirt, had sensitive lines on his face and careful speech. Daniel Jenkins, a bit younger, had a sinewy frame and a bright, friendly manner. The brothers shared the same mahogany skin.
After introductions, we traded briefs on our lives. The cousins were raised in Queens, across the East River from Manhattan, and lived in New York suburbs. Denise was the only one who preferred Harlem. All three had jobs with the city or state, and all fit into the hardworking middle class. Denise worked for the New York Department of Transportation, in a computer training division. Daniel investigated insurance fraud in government medical programs. Carl worked for an agency that housed homeless people. Of all of us, Carl saw the most extreme New York. He spent his nights patrolling one of the largest homeless shelters in the country, at Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan’s East Side, where nearly a thousand men came to the door every sundown.
There was little small talk. Carl led the conversation by naming the places in Africa from which people had been extracted. He pointed out that some slave ships on the way to South Carolina stopped in the Caribbean to sell people to the sugar plantations of the islands. Daniel wondered aloud whether the cotton slavery of Alabama and Mississippi had been worse than the rice slavery of South Carolina and Georgia. It probably had been more gruesome, I replied. The cotton planters went into business by buying people from the older slave states of Virginia and the Carolinas, then marching them in long coffles toward the Mississippi River and to virgin land.
Denise Collins sat quietly, listening to us measure the merits and demerits of different slaveries. Then she looked at me and emerged from her silence. Black history had been stolen, she said. Black culture had been robbed.
Denise Collins appeared to me to be a woman of beautiful sadness. Her eyes were windows of sorrow. When she spoke, I finally understood the nature of her quiet manner.
“They tried to steal it,” I said, “but they didn’t succeed. Listen to American music. Blues, jazz, and what they turned into. The only art forms the United States has given the world are black.”
Denise answered that no, black history had been taken and destroyed, and that as a result black people were lost.
In a moment, Denise brought out a little booklet that resembled a corporate report. It ran to thirty pages, bore a date from the previous summer, and showed a title on the cover: “Heyward Family Reunion.” A drawing of a tree appeared in the booklet, with the names of people, Denise’s relatives, written in the branches. I opened to the first page and read paragraph one of the Heyward family story: “Our history began many years ago in a rural community near Moncks Corner, South Carolina. A slave named Binah, living on a Ball plantation, gave birth to a daughter, Katie, who was known lovingly as ‘Bright Ma.’ ”
Denise said that after freedom Katie had become Katie Heyward, her mother’s grandmother.
Daniel put in that the family was actually from a village called Cordesville, and that most of their dead were buried in a cemetery next to a Cordesville church. I knew the church, and the graveyard, because the village of Cordesville was a settlement near the oldest Ball plantation, Comingtee.
“A lot of people moved off the plantations to build a village,” I said. “There was a sawmill where the young men worked.” Denise replied that her mother had told her about the mill.
The sound of the television burst from the front of the apartment. Denise’s grandchildren wandered into the living room, trailing shouts. She quieted them, and sent them back.
Denise pointed out that the family did not know which plantation Katie came from, and Daniel and Carl nodded in agreement. The Heyward family history consisted of oral tradition. It was credible—I had little reason to doubt it—but there was no paper trail. Where did our stories cross?
From my bag I brought out a pile of photocopies, plantation records, and distributed them around the room. The records included a roster of slaves on Comingtee plantation and a two-hundred-page ledger documenting several other pieces of land. Each of us took a stack of records and began poring over it, looking for Katie and her mother, Binah.
The room fell silent as we scanned the names. Half an hour later, we had nothing—several women called Binah and one or two named Katie, but no link between them.
Then, from her own materials, Denise pulled out a copy of a page from the federal census of 1900, taken in the district that contained the village of Cordesville, S
outh Carolina. (She had done her own rummaging in archives.) The census showed Katie Heyward and her son, Denise’s grandfather. I took down the information. It was a lead I hoped might take me back to the plantation the Heywards called home.
Denise then gave me the name of an elderly cousin, her grandfather’s niece, Katie Roper. Katie Roper was in her eighties, she said, and lived in South Carolina. She had been named after Katie Heyward, or Bright Ma. When she was a child, Denise added, Katie Roper knew Bright Ma. Maybe from somewhere in her memory, the old lady could tell a story about Bright Ma that would provide the missing link.
I returned to South Carolina, went to the archives, and dug through the Ball family papers. Soon I found the ancestors of Denise Collins. They appeared on birth lists of slaves and in correspondence between the Balls, some of which mentioned slaves in the lineage of Bright Ma. The family’s link to the Balls spanned three generations and three different plantations.
The Heyward family story began on Limerick plantation. In March 1764 Elias Ball Jr., son of Red Cap, bought a tract known as Limerick, named after the hometown in Ireland of the land’s first white tenant. The plantation had been operating since 1710. At 4,564 acres, it would become the largest piece of land in the Ball realm and, eventually, home to the greatest number of slaves on any of the family places. Limerick stood at the headwaters of the eastern branch of the Cooper River, about a day’s trip by flatboat from the port at Charleston. After the Revolutionary War, Limerick came into the hands of Elias Ball III. A grandson of Red Cap, Elias III was born in 1752 and died in 1810. In his last years, Elias III fought swelling in his legs from gout. Elias III acquired a nickname that distinguished him in the family story I had heard from my father: Old Mas’ ‘Lias (Old Master Elias). The Balls borrowed this way of talking about a distinguished ancestor from the local black dialect, Gullah. Old Mas’ ‘Lias never married, trudged slowly with his swollen legs, and owned large numbers of people. So he was, in fact, an old master.
Sometime after the Revolution, a slave named Tenah appears in the Limerick records. In some cases it is possible to identify the ethnicity of African captives from the single name that survives on lists of slaves. “Tenah” (if pronounced Teh-nay) would be the English spelling for a girl’s name common among the Mende in West Africa. The Mende lived in a region that would later encompass the nations of Guinea and Sierra Leone. The Revolutionary War disrupted things on Limerick, not least the paperwork, so I cannot say whether Tenah, or her parents, might have been the first to come from Africa. But it is quite possible that Tenah’s culture of origin was among this clan; circumstantial evidence supports this conjecture. South Carolina slave owners bought many people enslaved in the region of Sierra Leone because of the captives’ familiarity with rice and irrigation. More convincingly, Elias Ball III had an uncle, Henry Laurens, in the slave-trading business in Charleston. Laurens often received ships from a depot in the Sierra Leone River known as Bunce Island, where captives were held before being deported. In Charleston, Laurens did business with the Ball family, his in-laws, and Elias III would have bought people from his uncle’s firm.
Based on the year Tenah began to have children at Limerick, I put the year of her birth at about 1780. Tenah had a brother at Limerick, a bit older, named Plenty, and their children evidently grew up side by side. An ordinary path would have taken them to work in the rice fields by age twelve or thirteen. To judge from their later lives, however, Tenah and Plenty seem to have come from a family of craftspeople. Blacksmiths, carpenters, seamstresses, and other trained workers lived somewhat apart from the majority of the field hands, who worked in gangs in the muddy rice plots.
By the first years of the 1800s, Tenah was in her early twenties and living with another Limerick slave, Adonis. Tenah and Adonis had one child, Scipio, their first of a long marriage; thirty years later, the couple still appeared on plantation lists together. Next door in the slave village lived Tenah’s brother, Plenty. By this time, 1805, Plenty was a carpenter, a job that gave him high status among both blacks and whites.
Tenah’s and Plenty’s families were vigorous and valuable—at least, Old Mas’ ‘Lias saw them that way. In 1810, a month before he died, Elias III settled the division of his property. The owner of Limerick deeded his plantation and almost all of his human property to his nephew, a twenty-five-year-old bachelor, Isaac Ball. Elias III then singled out the families of Tenah and Plenty for a particular fate: they would go to Isaac’s brother, John Ball Jr.
John Ball Jr. already owned Comingtee plantation. Perhaps the gift of a pair of slave families was simply a toss of the dying man’s spoils, so that Isaac’s brother would not feel left out. But whatever the reason, Elias III inserted the following little paragraph in his will, which altered the lives of nine people:
I … give to my said nephew John Ball, the younger, for ever, my pew in the middle aisle of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, and two families of Negroes, to whit, Plenty (a carpenter), his wife Chloe & their three children, Nancy, Little Plenty & Cato, and Adonis & his wife Tenah with their two children, Scipio & August, & all the future issue & increase of the females.
Because Comingtee was a few miles downstream from Limerick, Tenah, Adonis, Plenty, Chloe, and their children packed, said good-bye to their village, and moved. At that time, Comingtee was home to more than one hundred black people, a family of overseers, and the family of John Ball Jr. At twenty-eight, John Jr. lived in the mansion with his three children, all under age six, and his twenty-six-year-old wife, Elizabeth, pregnant with another child.
Tenah’s husband, Adonis, became an animal minder in the barnyard at Comingtee, where his specialty seems to have been pigeons. From time to time, Adonis would be asked to send some of his birds to Charleston, where they would be cooked and eaten in the Ball townhouse when John Jr. was in town.
On September 8, 1815, Tenah and Adonis had another child, Binah. The common practice of parents in slavery, when they were able to control the names of their children, was to call newborns after one of the grandparents. In this case, “Binah” may well have been the name of Tenah’s African mother. Like the name Tenah, Binah (if pronounced Beh-nay) can be read as the English rendering of a girl’s name commonly used among people from the inland of Guinea and Sierra Leone.
On Comingtee in the 1820s, Tenah and Adonis were relatively privileged people on the dirt slave street. Not many had the choice to use West African names, or to keep animals rather than work in the fields. Fortunate though they were, Tenah and Adonis sometimes felt the whip. On one occasion, in October 1827, Thomas Finklea, the overseer at Comingtee, noticed that two sheep were missing from the plantation herd. Making a search of the slave settlement, Finklea found suet in the house of a field hand named Daniel, and the bones of a sheep in the garden behind the cabin belonging to Tenah and Adonis.
“i think old Adonis assisted in the butcherry,” Finklea wrote to John Ball Jr. in one of the weekly reports he sent when the master was away in Charleston. “i have had all flogd that live in that house whitch is Adonis Tenah & Linda & have had Daniel in limbo since munday morning & have him flogd morning & night to make him tell hue assisted in the butchery it apears that he will not tell.”
Tenah and Adonis were whipped for (allegedly) taking a bit of meat to add to their gruel of corn and greens. Daniel was beaten twice a day for a good stretch, but held his silence.
Another description from the period and place may help to convey what happened to Denise Collins’s ancestors. In the early 1800s in Charleston, a white woman, Angelina Grimké, who was raised in a slave-owning family that kept a large upcountry plantation, decided that she could no longer put up with the violence that her family relied on for their comfort, and therefore left South Carolina permanently for the North. Grimké published essays about her youth, and in one, she described the wounds left by a flogging: “[T]he treatment of plantation slaves cannot be fully known, except by the poor sufferers themselves. … One poor girl … showed me the d
eep gashes on her back—I might have laid my whole finger in them—large pieces of flesh had actually been cut out by the torturing lash.”
There is a bitter joke, from some anonymous survivor of slavery, that makes light of the cruel absurdity of the slave’s situation. One day, a slave stole a ham from the plantation storehouse and put it on his family’s dinner table. Soon the slave was called to account for his master’s stock of cured hams. When confronted with the evidence—a ham bone found in the trash pile—the slave made a great show of denying that he had stolen anything. The logic the thief offered could not be argued with. “We belong to the master,” he said, “and the ham belongs to the master. I was just rearranging the property.”
By 1830, two decades after they arrived at Comingtee, Tenah’s children were grown, and had moved out of her cabin. Plenty was a widower, having lost his wife, Chloe. Chloe’s daughter Nancy had grown up and gone to work at another plantation, leaving her father with one grown son, Cato, at home. In a few years, the old carpenter himself, Plenty, disappears from the plantation books. He may have been either sold or swept away in one of the periodic epidemics that decimated the slave street.
Tenah’s family had their share of sickness and work injuries. Adonis hurt his arm in the mid-1820s, and the injury lingered for some time, while in letters from the overseer Tenah is sometimes described as falling ill. On one occasion, in August 1833, Tenah was recuperating from some illness at the plantation infirmary, or “sick house.” That same week, workmen were replacing the porch of the sick house, which had rotted. A black carpenter named Bristol sawed and hammered for days outside Tenah’s room. The noise probably did little to help her bed rest, and the return to work was only slightly less attractive than the pounding of tools in her ears.
John Ball Jr. died in June 1834. I cannot say what affection, if any, Tenah’s family felt for him. It is almost certain they feared his death, because the demise of a slave owner meant that his human property might be sold. When John Jr.’s will was read, the terms came down that the executors should sell much of the estate if they deemed it “necessary or advisable,” and shortly most of his belongings, including his people, were auctioned.
