Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The disaster of being captured and dragged across the Atlantic had not broken Fatima’s will to live. In 1725, four years after her purchase, Fatima had a baby girl, Pino. During the 1700s, slave women at Comingtee gave birth to their first children at the average age of nineteen. Fatima was therefore perhaps fifteen when she was bought. A few years after Pino, Fatima had a son, Giley. Only once in a while did Elias and the other Balls write down the names of the fathers of slave children. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the father of Fatima’s two may have been a field worker named Sam.

  What can be said about Fatima’s life? All the memorial to her that is possible can be put in the form of a slender biography:

  Fatima: Born about 1706 in West Africa. Enslaved 1721. Traveled by ship to Charleston, in the English colony of South Carolina. Bought by Elias Ball, plantation owner. Taken to Comingtee, the Ball place on the Cooper River. Worked in the fields there. Took a mate, perhaps named Sam. Gave birth to a daughter, Pino, in 1725; and on April 23, 1742, a son named Giley, who died as a child. Watched her firstborn grow up to be a slave. Died on the plantation. Was laid in a cemetery far from home.

  In December 1722, for the first time, Elias noted that he had sold someone. He did not name the woman or man, but the buyer was a neighbor called William Rhett. In 1717, Rhett had built a house in Charleston five minutes by foot from Elias’s own townhouse. The two may have made a handshake deal while standing in the street. Elias thought nothing of the transaction. On a page where he wrote down Rhett’s debts to him, he scrawled that Rhett had delivered a quantity of rice worth £80 “Due In part for a Negro.”

  The person sold to William Rhett was one of many people handed from owner to owner in friendly bargains. Planters along the Cooper River bought and sold workers among themselves and bartered for them as they did for animals. Sometimes plantation owners sold people they felt they could not control, and sometimes they sold people who didn’t work as hard as demanded. From time to time, masters sold people merely because they didn’t like them.

  This sort of traffic, so casual as to be off the tax books, irritated the colonial authorities. In an attempt to collect revenue from it, in 1723 the colonial legislature passed a bill setting up an outdoor market to be held a mile from Comingtee, in a little village near the dock of the Strawberry Ferry. At the market, one Saturday each month, buyers and sellers were required to collect taxes on “every horse, mare, gelding, calf, or slave” sold. I imagine Elias bought and sold people here on an occasional weekend walk.

  One more first bears retelling, the first recorded episode of people who tried to flee. On September 4, 1731, Elias wrote the following: “Memorandum … Taken with the runaway Negroes a shirt & shift and a jacket and britches.” On this occasion it was not quite harvest season, but crops stood high in the fields and preparations for bringing them in had begun. Facing an autumn of round-the-clock work, at least two people had made a break. To judge from the clothing they took, which likely belonged to their owner, the runaways were men. In general, field hands dressed in rough-cut trousers and pull-on shirts. By stealing Elias’s clothes, a runaway might be able to convince a marshal that he was a trusted servant who had merely been sent on an errand. Without knowing their names, it is difficult to say more about the runaways. They were probably not the first to have gotten free, if only for a short while, and they would not be the last.

  The story of Elias’s runaways may have ended with a memorable scene. The South Carolina law concerning the treatment of runaway slaves dated from 1690. It had been revised in 1712 and in future years would periodically come up for rewriting by the legislature. In Elias’s day, according to the statute, the punishment for a first attempt to flee slavery was whipping. For the second offense, the runaway was to be branded on the right cheek with the letter R. For a third offense, one ear was cut off. A fourth offense brought the removal of the other ear for women, and another brand; for men, the law called for castration.

  With his second wife, Mary, Elias started another family. Despite his peasant background and the distance of South Carolina from England, Elias worked hard to surround his children with elite forms of European culture. The Ball youths went to school in a nearby village where the teachers were Huguenots, French Protestants whose worldliness surpassed that of the English immigrants. To give his home an air of gentility, Elias hired a music teacher to come to the plantation and give lessons. In the 1730s young Sarah Ball took instruction on what the family called “the viol.” This was the viola da gamba, a popular six-stringed instrument that anticipated the cello. A few years earlier Johann Sebastian Bach had composed “Three Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Clavier,” better known as the Gamba Sonatas, and an up-to-date music instructor may have known the work. After Sarah had been playing for a while, Elias himself got interested and made a note of “cash paid for My Learning Musick—£10.”

  The music lessons made a strange scene at the Ball house. Every week or two, a studious teacher rode along a muddy road up to Comingtee, sheet music and instruments sticking out of a saddlebag. Perhaps several Africans, returning from the fields, greeted the white visitor. Then, with the sounds of crickets in the grass and alligators thrashing in the ditches, the Ball family gathered in the living room to learn the fine points of a fugue. Two of the children, Sarah and her half-brother John Coming, also took dance lessons, training that prepared them for social events in Charleston. At quadrilles performed in the townhouses of the landed class, the children of the plantation owners were expected to meet appropriate mates.

  Smoothing his image, at some point Elias trained himself to develop a taste for wine. According to his records, for many years Elias bought gallons of rum, which he gave to friends, used to pay bills, and no doubt drank himself. But there was a new drink, Madeira, making its way around well-off households. Madeira came from the island of the same name off the northwest coast of Africa. The imported drink was the colony’s first real taste of wine, and accounts show the sudden appearance of it on Comingtee. With a glass of the reddish brown liquor in hand, Elias made a polished old soldier.

  At the end of the 1720s, Elias reported to the government that his property consisted of 4,328 acres and forty-three slaves. The hand that picked up the viol and poured a glass of wine was less comfortable carrying a bludgeon to patrol his vast estates, and Elias started to bring in white assistants to help supervise. The first he hired was a man named Andrew Songster, who, he noted, “came to my house to live.” Songster was paid in goods, mostly rum, in addition to cash. When Songster left, he was replaced by another man, John Netman. By hiring plantation helpers, Elias separated himself from daily farm business and freed his time for more leisure.

  By the early 1730s, Elias and Mary Ball had four children living with them in the old wooden cottage that had served as the master’s house for half a century. Elias decided to build larger quarters, and sometime before 1736 the Ball family moved into a new, two-story brick house. The building was probably put up by slaves under the direction of white foremen. Its brown bricks, each shaped and baked, would also have been made by black hands. The house was a simple symmetrical building, with two rooms on the first floor and two on the second, plus a garret. The front door stood in the middle of the west facade, with no columns and no pediment, three steps up from the soggy ground. It had no porch and no architectural ornament. The new house may have been spartan, but it was big, brick, and dry. It would survive for more than two hundred years before it fell to ruin in the 1960s.

  With the construction of the house, Comingtee took its final form. The master’s dwelling, or “big house,” faced west, toward the Cooper River, whose waters could be seen five hundred yards away. The slave village, or plantation street, lay behind and east of the big house. In later years it consisted of a group of wooden cabins in a row and nearby workshops for the carpenters, blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and other craftspeople. There was a barnyard with stables, a poultry house, a brick oven, a smokehouse, and the
hutches of a beekeeper.

  Off in the woods, between the big house and the dock, lay a well-tended clearing, about an acre in size, secluded among some white oak trees and ringed by a little eddy that drained into the river. Here was the graveyard where the slaves were buried.

  There is a story, which has the smell of legend but which I nevertheless like, concerning the beginning of rice cultivation on the plantations. In the late 1600s, it goes, a ship sailing from Madagascar, the island off the southeast coast of Africa, happened into Charleston. Somewhere beneath the boards of his deck the ship’s captain carried half a bushel of rice. On a whim, several plantation owners decided to try the new crop. Truth or fable, early plantings of rice in South Carolina began about 1695. Five years later the colony shipped thirty tons a year to the Caribbean islands, and three hundred tons to England. By 1708, rice had become South Carolina’s largest export.

  Elias had sold timber and beef in his first years, but now everything changed. Rice would become the manna of the Balls and the bane of thousands of blacks. The little cereal would bring the plantation owners a life of comfort for six generations.

  Rice was not a rich person’s food, but it had two attractions: it filled the belly and did not spoil. In Europe, the grain bought by poor people for the family table was also used to feed armies and gangs of workers. The cultivation of rice was, at least initially, something Elias and his peers knew nothing about. In parts of West Africa, however, rice was an old staple, grown along the Gambia River, for instance, and in Sierra Leone. It wasn’t long before planters recognized that some of the Africans they owned possessed a knowledge that could earn them profits. The strain of rice grown by the Carolina slaves, refined through years of experiment, became known as Carolina Gold.

  Before long, Carolina Gold was the engine of the regional economy, dominating every aspect of daily life, black and white. The first rice fields lay in the swamps interspersed with the forest, just off the riverbank. Here, men and women cleared acres among the tupelo gum trees and bald cypress trunks. In March the field hands planted the provision crops—com and sweet potatoes—in fields set aside to feed the plantation. Then they turned to rice. The slaves prepared the ground beginning about April 1. Because the wet soil swallowed both horses and plows, animal power could not be used, and the hand-held hoe became the rule. The hoe was a wooden stick the length of an arm, with an iron blade at one end. The work began with weeding, every inch of the field pulled cleaned by fingers or turned by the blade of the hoe. Next came the digging of long furrows, about eighteen inches apart, until the slaves had turned out several hundred empty, striped acres. In New England, a modest-sized field might be prepared by four horses and two drivers with plows. On Comingtee, with the handwork, the same field took twenty people.

  In the parts of Africa where rice predominated, women took the job of seeding the ground, and the same arrangement survived in America. In late April gangs of women walked through the fields, spreading, or “broadcasting,” the rice in the furrows.

  Rice is a thirsty plant that requires irrigation. To comply, Elias Ball commanded that a little stream which emerged in the middle of Comingtee be dammed. One year, teams of male slaves hauled enough earth into the path of the creek to create a water reserve, a lake six feet deep and several hundred yards across. The men next dug ditches from the edge of the reserve to the fields, until Comingtee resembled an arterial system. The rice fields were like living tissues, fed and drained by veins of water that led back to a great heart, the reserve, which swelled silently in the middle of the property.

  In late spring the workers brought the first flow of water from the reserve to the fields. To flood the young shoots of rice, slaves opened a wooden lock or dike; to drain, they cut the flow. In summer the afternoon arrived with a baking heat. The crop was doused and drained at periodic intervals, and teams of workers returned frequently to the fields to weed. The flooding meant that slaves spent much of the year up to their knees in mud.

  By early September, the mature rice plants unrolled toward the horizon at shoulder height. Harvest began when the workers cut the reedy crop with sickles, pieces of iron two feet long and shaped like half-moons. The stalks were then laid out to dry. After a day or two in the sun, the rice was bound into bundles and brought to the barnyard. Field hands carried great stacks on their heads to oxcarts or piled them on barges that wandered the inland creeks.

  The growing season made up the shorter part of the work cycle, the longer and more tedious phase coming next at the barnyard. First came threshing, or flailing. A flail was a piece of leather about three feet long, like a strop, attached to an equal length of wood. Field hands laid the rice on the ground and flailed or whipped it to separate the grain from the stalk. Next, the husks were removed. A rice grain has an outer husk and an inner cuticle, and both had to be sheared off. In the mid-1700s, workers used hand-operated mills, built from wood slabs two feet across. The slabs pressed and revolved against each other, and there were cuts or corrugations that ran from the middle to the edge, through which the rice grain moved as the pressure of the rotation pulled off the husk. The inside cuticle, harder to remove, had to be pounded away from the grain. Coming at the end of the season, in November and December, the pounding was the most onerous work of the year. The equipment consisted of a large hollowed-out mortar about waist-high, and a pestle a yard long. The workers put scoops of rice into the mortar and pounded with the pestle until the grain emerged naked from its shell. It was a jolting, sweaty, repetitive job. When the contents were clean, the mortar was emptied and another load dumped in. For two months, a constant sound of thrup, thrup, thrup came from the rice barns. A field hand might pound seven mortars, or about fifty pounds of rice, in one day. The pounding sometimes broke the rice, which made it unsalable. These half-grains, categorized as “Negro rice,” were collected from the ground around the barn to become part of the workers’ food. Plantation owners and their overseers kept a punishing eye on the barnyard to make sure people broke as little rice as possible.

  Finally came the cleaning of the crop. Field hands used a basket called a fanner, woven from tall grass. Fanners were flat disks about two and a half feet in diameter, with a raised lip around the edge, made with a beautiful spiral weave that went from the center to the edges. Workers brought the basketmaking tradition from West Africa, along with the method of cleaning rice. A field hand in the barnyard put about a pound of rice with its chaff in the basket, then tossed it up and down in a breeze. The chaff flew away, leaving the heavier grain.

  In colonial days, an acre of rice produced between twenty and forty bushels, each bushel at sixty-five pounds. An individual was thought by his or her owner to be capable of handling about four acres. An average yield amounted to four and a half barrels of rice per worker, and with a barrel at five hundred pounds, a single person meant more than a ton of rice.

  In Elias’s time, the crop went from Charleston to England, where it was taxed and reshipped to continental Europe. Early buyers of Comingtee rice included Portugal, Spain, and Gibraltar, as well as England and Ireland, but the largest buyers were in the northern ports. In the 1730s, three-quarters of the rice exported from the hot Cooper River went to kitchens in Bremen, Denmark, Hamburg, Holland, and Sweden. Carolina Gold soon gained an international reputation, drawing higher prices than other rice and becoming the premium grade in Europe. Rice from South Carolina could be recognized at a glance as buyers looked into the two sacks displayed by any seller in London. In the first bag was the seed, with its gold-sheathed kernel, and in the second, the finished grain, which gleamed the whitest white.

  In the early 1730s, a young black woman named Dolly came to work in the Comingtee big house. Elias’s second wife had three children at the time, and Dolly probably helped with the young ones, cleaned house, and cooked. A little homage to Dolly appears in the published Ball memoir. “Perhaps the name that stands out above the others is ‘Dolly,’ ” wrote one of the Ball women at the beginning
of the twentieth century. “We know little about her, but enough to show that she was well thought of in the family. Perhaps she had ‘minded’ the children, and been a faithful nurse in illness. The ministrations of such humble friends of the family—they were surely no less—have soothed many a bed of suffering; and in death their hands have tenderly performed the last offices.”

  It seems strange that the name of a slave would evoke sentimental memories in the family of her owners some 150 years after her death. Just as strange is the aside “We know little about her,” which seems to contradict the familiarity of the memory.

  Dolly was born in 1712, though I cannot say where and I can only fix the year of her birth from a note about her death that states her age. Dolly was evidently more than a good housekeeper. In his will, dictated in 1750, Elias devoted considerable thought to Dolly, whom he called his “Molattoe Wench.” As used then, the word “mulatto” described children of black mothers and white fathers. (In Elias’s day, the children of one Native and one black parent were called “mustees” by whites.) Since the colonial legislature had already passed a law forbidding sex between white women and enslaved blacks, the white mother of a daughter of color would have been subject to prosecution. Therefore, in all likelihood, Dolly’s father was white, her mother black.

  It is undeniable that white men on the plantations forced and persuaded black women to have sex with them, and evidence of white-black sex appears in official records from the earliest days. In one case, from 1692, a woman named Jane LaSalle filed a petition with the Grand Council, the highest authority in Charleston. The petition involved her husband, who had left her for a black woman, probably one of the white couple’s slaves. The abandoned wife appealed for help, and the Grand Council ordered the husband to return to his spouse, or else pay her a sum of money. The public nature of the case and matter-of-fact way in which it was disposed give reason to believe that interracial sex was a common part of Elias’s world.