Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The day of the estate sale, Tenah, Adonis, and Binah stepped up on the auction block. Standing below them in the pit full of bidders was John Jr.’s widow, his second wife, Ann Ball.

  A painting of Ann Ball from about 1825 shows a composed woman with a determined gleam in her eyes. Although her husband’s will called for the estate to be dispersed, Ann had another plan. Her male kin among the Balls advised her against it, but Ann wanted to buy back as much of the estate as possible and run the plantation business herself. For this reason, when Tenah and Adonis looked down from the auctioneer’s platform, they may actually have been pleased to see Mistress Ball, because the widow might buy them back and bring them “home,” a more preferable alternative than being snatched away to pick cotton in Alabama or Mississippi. On a list of people purchased by Ann Ball that day, the first names that appear are “Adonis, Tenah, [and] Binah.” The family was bought with two other people for $1,525. Before the day was done, Ann bought 210 children, men, women, who were about to be separated, blood from blood, and shipped out.

  Ann Ball managed the plantation for several years. Adonis finally died; then Ann Ball herself died in June 1840. That year Tenah’s daughter Binah gave birth to the child named Katie, who would come to be known as Bright Ma.

  With the death of Mistress Ball, random happenings in the big house once again posed a threat to the colored people. The children of Ann Ball included a daughter, Ann, and a son, Keating. Keating, twenty-two, had studied medicine, but with his mother’s death the dutiful heir abandoned a doctor’s career. He inherited Comingtee—with Tenah, Binah, and Katie—and moved into the old house. Keating’s sister Ann married a physician, Dr. Elias Horry Deas. It was the usual generational shift, only before long there came an evident quarrel between the heirs.

  There is evidence that Keating Ball saw his sister and her husband, known as Horry, socially because he kept a diary in which he noted their dinners together and reciprocal house visits. Horry Deas practiced medicine in Charleston but apparently liked the world of rice planters from which his wife came, and angled to join the slave-owning class. During the dinners with Keating, the three may have talked about the rice business. It also seems possible that they argued about who should get the Comingtee slaves, because suddenly Keating’s daybook shows that he stopped having dinner with his sister and brother-in-law.

  On March 20, 1841, Horry and Ann Deas filed suit against Keating, as well as a Ball cousin and the executor of the disputed estate, seeking redistribution of the Ball inheritance. Most of the property in question consisted of people on Comingtee. The result of the lawsuit was a writ of partition issued by the court, which divided the slaves of the deceased Ann Ball. Ownership of Tenah, her daughter Binah, and the infant Katie fell to Horry and Ann Deas.

  After the lawsuit, Horry’s new possessions stayed at Comingtee while he continued to practice medicine. Perhaps Keating shared with Horry some of the profits made by the people who now belonged to the doctor. Nine years passed, during which Keating made amends with Ann. Horry Deas finally grew tired of medicine and bought a plantation on the Cooper River, called Buck Hall, intending to staff it with Comingtee workers. The day arrived when Horry came to collect the people his wife had won in court.

  At the end of the growing season, in the winter of 1850, Keating summoned his workers onto the lawn of Comingtee to announce the news that their village would be split in two. He noted the event with a terse entry in his diary: “24 January 1850 … This day completes my 32nd year. Today gave notice to the Negroes as to who belonged to Dr. Deas … A general gloom seemed to pervade the negroes at the idea of parting with each other.”

  Lined up that day to hear their owner’s little speech were Tenah, Binah, and Katie. Tenah was about seventy, Binah thirty-five, her daughter Katie ten. The paperwork does not show whether Binah’s husband was included in the deal. It is likely that he was not and that Binah was forced to abandon the father of her daughter at Comingtee.

  Having been moved once from Limerick plantation, in 1810, Tenah’s family was now moved from Comingtee to Buck Hall, the last station of their journey.

  The records of Buck Hall, a 635-acre plantation, have not survived, but the slave population probably numbered about seventy-five. It appears that Tenah died soon after the family’s move. In time, Binah found a second husband, named John. Katie grew up and took a husband named Zachariah. At Buck Hall, Binah and Katie, who came from a family once in the artisan class of the plantation, lost their status. They were apparently put to work as field hands, who waded in the mud of the rice fields in gangs. With their new positions came a new master, Horry Deas. There is evidence that Dr. Deas, a first-time slave owner, was detested by the field hands. Some years later his own daughter would write of her father, timidly, “He could not get along with” the black people.

  Ann Ball Deas, now the mistress of Buck Hall, died in 1859 at age forty-four, leaving Horry Deas a widower. In December of the following year, a meeting of would-be revolutionaries in Charleston drafted a document known as the “Ordinance of Secession,” which announced the withdrawal of South Carolina from the United States. The rebels got what they wanted, a Confederate States of America, but the Southern nation lasted just four years. An end to the trek, of sorts, finally came for the family.

  In January 1865, Federal troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman swept through Georgia and paused in Savannah, where they contemplated whether or not to destroy Charleston, ninety miles away. Horry Deas, the widower, trembled alone at the Buck Hall mansion, his daughter having fled for the town of Greenville to escape the almost-certain attack. The village of black workers bided their time. The Federal forces headed for the capital at Columbia instead, leaving Charleston to surrender to the siege fleet that rode in the harbor. A few days later, Yankees meandering inland from Charleston arrived on the lawn at Buck Hall. When they came, Binah and John, standing with Katie and Zachariah, were able to see firsthand the destruction of the old world.

  In the first week of March a raiding party of Federal soldiers came to Buck Hall and headed for the slave street. They appear to have landed from a gunboat, the Potomaska, captained by a Navy man called F. M. Montell. According to a letter written by Horry Deas, the Yankees recruited newly freed slaves to their side and soon, with the column of freedpeople, made their way to the big house. The detested doctor waited there, powerless to stop them. The raiders stripped the house of furniture, curtains, and silver, carried some of the loot to the cabins, and loaded other pieces onto a boat sent in the direction of Charleston. When the house was bare, the former slaves burned it to the ground. Next the raiders torched the barns, stables, and other work buildings. (They left their own houses, the old slave cabins, standing.) The freedpeople’s rage finally expired on the little grain that had kept them captive, as they burned what remained of the rice crop from the previous year.

  “[N]ot a solitary chair, table, or pillow left,” wrote Horry Deas to his daughter. “I have saved a few blankets [and] a mattress. … The servts about the house have taken themselves off and are wandering about the city.”

  And with that, Binah and Katie expressed their appreciation for the care so long extended to their family by the Balls.

  The blue of the sky in South Carolina seemed paler than that of New York. In the strong Southern light, the sky washed its pigments until they faded like old cotton. Under that distant and gentle sky, I paid a visit to the granddaughter of Katie, or Bright Ma, one of the last slaves at Buck Hall.

  Denise Collins’s cousin Katie Roper lived near Charleston in a simple brick house, with two of her children and two of her grandchildren. “We’re very proud of her,” Denise Collins had said, in Harlem, as she wrote down Mrs. Roper’s address on a piece of paper.

  I had driven into a modest subdivision, built in the 1960s, with streets lined by identical brick houses. Each one-story rectangle occupied about a third of an acre in the shadow of tall pines. Katie Roper greeted me in he
r living room. She wore a dark pleated skirt, cut to the knee, and a cotton shirt. A thin woman, she stood five and a half feet tall and had strength in her grip, but I saw that her eyes seemed clouded. As we shook hands, Mrs. Roper was aware that I was peering into her eyes. She explained that she suffered from glaucoma and cataracts, and that she was blind in her right eye, with little sight in her left.

  “But it don’t bother me none,” she said with a subtle smile, releasing my hand.

  Katie Roper had an oval face and rich lips, which came to a slight, pleasing smile. The line of her chin sloped delicately, and I could see that in her youth she had been a beautiful woman. She wore a gray wig, short and straight, combed up and back in the style of a good matron. Katie Roper brought her chin down and looked up at me demurely from under her eyebrows. The smile came again, decorous and subtle, and she used her face sweetly, luring my attention.

  Mrs. Roper knew who I was, because she knew the names of the slave owners. Aside from the Balls, there were the Cordes family, the Harlestons, the Irvings, the Lucases, the Stoneys, and on and on.

  “I was always taught that my father was Cordes, and my grandmother was Ball,” said Katie Roper. She meant that her kin had come from a Cordes plantation on one side and a Ball place on the other.

  Katie Roper’s potent voice betrayed her decorous expression and small frame. Its vibrations pierced the room, humming like a transformer, and was echoed in her strong movements. Though she was thin, she moved quickly, striding around and tossing out her hands. While Mrs. Roper’s face resembled that of an elderly debutante, her strong body belonged to the women the debutantes called “help.”

  Katie Roper’s two daughters, Charlotte Dunn and Delores Singletary, both in their forties, showed immediate kindness. Effusive, with a voice like a horn, Charlotte had inherited some of her mother’s bluntness. Delores took her mother’s demure side, all subtlety and withdrawal in her face. Delores’s son Michael, a tall and handsome seventeen-year-old, stood by, gently quiet, a masculine example of the family’s reserve.

  Whereas Katie Roper had a birdlike frame, both of her daughters were solid women. I learned why when I looked into the kitchen. Spread out on the countertops were a pile of fried chicken, fried potatoes, vegetables, rice, dessert, and sweet drinks. As I eyed the food, a rustle of laughter ran around the room. Charlotte gave her sister an elbow in the ribs.

  Throwing down her forearms, Katie Roper took her place on the sofa. The laughter died down, and we opened the family story.

  After the Civil War, black people were able to use family names for the first time. At Buck Hall, Binah and John took Rivers as their surname. Katie and Zachariah became Mr. and Mrs. Heyward. It’s not clear when Katie Heyward earned her nickname, Bright Ma.

  “The furthest back I’ve been able to uncover,” I said, “your ancestors were living on a place called Limerick plantation, at the head of the eastern branch of the Cooper River, north of Charleston, soon after the American Revolution.” I took some papers from my bag and said, “This is a list of people living on Limerick. On it are Tenah and Adonis, the most distant forebears I could identify.”

  I looked up to solemn stares and flat, grim mouths.

  I described what I knew of the lives of Tenah and Adonis at Limerick. Then I went over the family’s move to Comingtee plantation after the death of their owner, Old Mas’ ‘Lias.

  “I can’t make excuses for it,” I said. “That’s what happened. The family was just given away.”

  I came to the name Binah. The family’s oral tradition, which I had first heard in New York, mentioned Binah. But the tradition had no word about her life, and did not say where she might have lived.

  “This page is a record of people born on Comingtee plantation,” I said, holding a photocopy. “Binah was born there on September 8, 1815.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Delores.

  There was an intake of breath in the room.

  “Oh, Lord,” echoed Charlotte. “We didn’t know what—we didn’t know where—or the age.” Charlotte’s hornlike voice pierced the air. “All we had was a name.”

  I told the tale of the family’s next and last move, to Buck Hall. I brought out a labor contract from 1866 that listed Binah, who used her new name, Binah Rivers. And it listed Binah’s daughter, Katie, with her new surname, Heyward. Binah and Katie were illiterate—it was against the law for slaves to read and write—so in place of signatures, the women each had marked the contract with an X.

  We passed the pages around, and Katie Roper spoke up for the first time.

  “Didn’t have the education to write,” she said. “It’s been back a long time.” Her voice was slow and deliberate. “Buck Hall,” she said. “My grandmother, Katie Heyward, used to talk about it.”

  All eyes turned to Mrs. Roper. Everyone in the room, except me, had heard her talk about the past. Mrs. Roper’s kin gave way once again so the stories could get air.

  “My grandmother was very small,” she began, “a cheerful little lady. She was very active. She moved!” Mrs. Roper fingered the air. “It was a good thing she liked to move, because if she didn’t, probably I’d never remembered her.”

  Mrs. Roper’s voice and body commanded the room. She shook her head, and I thought I could see the woman she was describing in front of me.

  “We called her Bright Ma,” Mrs. Roper said. “She was an ex-slave.”

  “Was she fair-complected?” Charlotte asked her mother, although she had heard about Bright Ma many times.

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Mrs. Roper. “We just called her Bright Ma as a nickname. Sometimes she would take me for walks. One day, she said she was going fishing. I asked my mother can I go. So I went with her, cane fishin’ pole on her shoulder. When we got down there, Bright Ma showed me on the riverbank, by the water. She said, ‘I want to show you what happened to me when I was a girl.’ And she said, ‘You know, the maussa then wanted to whip me.’ ”

  Mrs. Roper studied me with her unblinking eyes.

  “So she wanted to show me how she ducked this whippin’,” she went on. “And to save the whipping of her ‘hind, she walked this riverbank. ‘Boss man there walking down the riverbank,’ she said. They thought they had penned her up. One man went this way, one went the other way.”

  Katie Heyward was born in 1840 on Comingtee, and moved to Buck Hall in 1850. The event she had described to her granddaughter might have taken place in the 1850s. It had been seventy years since the fishing trip with Bright Ma, but Katie Roper was still excited by the memory. Her voice got louder.

  “Well, she tied her dress around her waist, and put the line pole down and bucket with the bait. I said, ‘Bright Ma, where you going?’ She just mashed the weeds down, and she pitched overboard! She ducked in the water, and swam. I got excited, and started crying. And I screamed murder! I said, ‘Oh Lord, the ‘gators going to eat her!’ That’s what was in my mind. She swam around and came back ashore. I said, ‘Bright Ma, why you do that?’ She said, ‘Don’t cry, I’m all right.’ ”

  I knew the riverbank. It was muddy and lined with marsh grass, with a clear landing where boats went in. If Katie Roper was ten at the time, her grandmother would have been eighty when she dived into the river.

  “We went back home, then she said, ‘I showed Gal how I had to save a whippin’.’ My nickname they used to call me at that time was ‘Gal.’ I said, ‘Bright Ma, you wasn’t afraid of the water?’ She said, ‘No, because I was going to get a hard drive.’ ”

  “Who was going to beat her?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say,” answered Mrs. Roper. “She might have said more, but she went in the water, and that take everything I remembered away.”

  Mrs. Roper’s story slowed.

  “After that, I got sick,” she said. “I had hot fever. But I was too scared to tell my mother how I got it. I said, ‘Bright Ma, you mean they would whip you?’ It made me feel very bad, that she had to run to keep somebody off. And from that day to this, I d
on’t like water. It turned me off, seeing her in the water. My daddy was a fisherman, but after that, he never got me in his boat to go fishing.”

  Katie Roper’s story of how she came to fear water stayed with me, a memory broadcast through the decades. For the Heyward clan, the story of Bright Ma worked like the oral tradition in the Ball family, in which the dead fed the dreams of the living. Later, when I met more of the Heywards, it seemed that everyone knew about Bright Ma. She was their indissoluble bond.

  I asked whether the other old people from Mrs. Roper’s youth talked about what happened to them.

  “No,” replied Mrs. Roper. “The older parents come up under such strain, with slavery, until they didn’t tell the children things they should have told them. They didn’t talk about it. I don’t think they wanted the children to really know.”

  Mrs. Roper was describing the silence of survivors, after whose lives the memories of slavery were few.

  “If I know something happened to me that was very bad, I wouldn’t tell my grandchildren, because it doesn’t make them feel good,” she went on. “So I feel sure that they didn’t tell their children.”

  Former slaves often did not tell the worst of it to young people, who never felt the lash, which means that an end to the lore began soon after freedom.

  “But see, my grandmother was something,” Mrs. Roper said, staying with her memory. “Bright Ma got up in the morning early, and walked in the trees. She was like a prophesier. She would sing, and testify, and there wasn’t nobody around.”

  I pictured a small, strong old woman, who marched though the pinewood near the riverbank, preaching to the trees.

  “The children laughed at her,” Mrs. Roper kept up. “I’ve seen it. But some of the things she said was true. One thing she said, she told me there would come a time when sons wouldn’t know their fathers, and fathers wouldn’t know their sons. That’s here today! She said a time would come when daughters wouldn’t know their mothers, and mothers wouldn’t know their daughters!