Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Because the earliest Ball plantation records date from 1720, and Dolly was born in 1712, it is difficult to say who her parents were. I don’t believe her father was Elias Ball. I suspect, from much circumstantial evidence, he bought her as a child and later grew fond of her. During her youth Dolly seems to have gotten unusual attention. At age sixteen, according to plantation accounts, Dolly fell ill and Elias quickly summoned a doctor to the plantation to treat her. The following year, he again called a doctor for Dolly and paid a high fee for the cure. It almost never occurred, on the remote plantations, that a slave was singled out for individual medical care. Physicians were scarce, and doctors had to be enticed with large sums of money to make trips to the country, since they could easily find patients in Charleston. But thanks to Elias, Dolly received house calls, the only black person on Comingtee to warrant such attention.

  The pattern of care continued throughout Dolly’s young life. On one occasion Elias had special shoes made for her. Beginning in the colonial days, plantation owners hired shoemakers to sew one kind of footwear for themselves and their families and another kind, called Negro shoes, for slaves. Once, Elias hired a shoemaker from the nearby settlement of Goose Creek to sew shoes for his son, and, in the same order, to make similar high-priced footwear for Dolly. There is no evidence that other slaves ever received such treatment.

  Dolly was about twenty when she went to work in the Ball house. After a year or two there, she began to have children. Her son Cupid was born in April 1735. Because the slave owners often left out the name of the father in records of slave births, I cannot say who Cupid’s father was. In all likelihood he was another slave on Comingtee, because Cupid went on to become a field hand, lived his entire life on Ball plantations, and died sometime after 1784.

  In the 1730s, Elias and Mary were also having children. Mary gave birth to her last, a son, in 1734; he died as an infant. There is no record of Mary’s death, but soon after the birth of her final child, Mary herself passed away and Elias buried her sometime around 1735, ending a marriage of fifteen years. Upon Mary’s death, Elias was left with three daughters to look after—Mary, Eleanor, and Sarah—ages two to thirteen. In 1736, he turned sixty. When Elias married Mary Delamare, he had made clear his preference for younger women. Now Dolly, twenty-four, was on hand.

  Mary’s death seems to have made possible a liaison between Elias and Dolly. On September 16, 1740, Dolly gave birth to her second child, who was given the name Edward. Among the slaves on Comingtee, none carried English forenames. What’s more, when Edward grew up, records show that the Ball family paid him respect. Edward was given his freedom and lived among the Balls, who handled his business affairs. When he died, at eighty, his will and other papers went into the Ball family collection. According to probate records, Edward was a mulatto, described in his estate papers as “a free yellow man.” If Edward had been able to take the name of the man whom I believe was his father, he would have been called Edward Ball.

  A few years later, while still working in the big house, Dolly had another child who received an English name, Catherine. Like her brother Edward, Catherine would also later gain freedom, evidently granted to her by the Balls. The two siblings, Catherine and Edward, were the only people owned by Elias who would ever be freed from slavery.

  Around the time Dolly began to have her mulatto children, sex between whites and blacks was a topic of sharp discussion in the local newspaper. The frequency of the editorials suggests that Elias and Dolly’s relationship had plenty of precedent. In July 1736, one writer for the South Carolina Gazette pleaded with “Certain young Men” of Charleston to hide their relationships with colored women. He called on them to “frequent less with their black Lovers the open Lots and the … House on the Green between old Church street and King street.” If they did not keep their heads down, he added, other whites might step in “to coole their Courage and to expose them.” The writer ended his cranky editorial with an appeal to white men to stay away from women slaves, if only in solidarity with other whites. White women, he maintained, were “full as capable for Service either night or day as any Africain Ladies whatsoever.”

  When he sat down to write his will, Elias kept young Dolly high in his mind. After declaring that his property would pass to his white children, he added this unusual clause: “I give & Bequeath the Molattoe Wench called Dolly to such of my children as she shall within three months next after my Decease make her Election for her master or mistress.” Elias wanted Dolly to be able to decide her fate after he was gone: she was to choose which among Elias’s white children would give her a home. It was an incomplete gesture—Dolly could select only her next master or mistress, not freedom—but in this way Elias acknowledged her humanity. The telltale clue is the phrase “within three months next after my Decease.” Dolly would have a period of mourning to collect herself before deciding her next step, a graceful interval of grief.

  If Dolly and Elias kept up a relationship for several years, was it rape? Or could they have cared for each other? Mockery and danger would have faced the couple on both sides. Not only would Elias have felt ostracized by some whites, but Dolly may have angered some of the other slaves at Comingtee by sleeping with the master. As for the sex itself, could Elias and Dolly both have felt desire? Or did Dolly trade sex (willingly or not) for more lenient treatment? Despite the pitiful circumstances of their attachment, could these two have, somehow, loved each other?

  I imagine several of these things may simultaneously have been true.

  6

  WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD

  I had reason to believe that I was related to a black family in Pennsylvania, though I could not be sure where the family had once been enslaved, on which plantation owned by the Balls; neither did I know who among the Ball slave owners might have been their ancestor. As I drove to our first rendezvous in Philadelphia, I wondered how it could be settled whether we actually shared some blood.

  It was February, and there had been a snowstorm in the Northeast. The roads were plowed and scattered with rock salt, which flew up from the wheels and pelted the car, making a noise like rattling fingernails. A chalky mud covered the windshield, and the snowy banks of the Delaware River looked like fields of cotton.

  I had received a letter from a woman named Carolyn Smalls Goodson, inviting me to visit. Carolyn Goodson’s family tradition held that some of her ancestors were enslaved by the Balls. Since she was a child, she had heard that her great-great-great-grandmother was bought by the Ball family off a slave ship. In America, she was told, this African forebear had become the mother of a man named Frederick Poyas. The father of Frederick Poyas, tradition said, was one of the Ball men.

  “I feel a very strong connection to you,” Carolyn Goodson wrote. “Our lives have touched, and we are no strangers to each other. … I hope that you will be able to help me as I am willing to help you. There are so many unanswered questions, so many things about the past I want to understand.”

  I made my way through the muck and slapping slush, through a large, hilly park in northwest Philadelphia, to a well-kept neighborhood of stone and brick. The settlement of Philadelphia had been cleared on the shores of the Delaware in 1682, by the followers of William Penn, a thirty-eight-year-old aristocrat who had gotten a grant of land in the colonies in exchange for money the British Crown owed his dead father. Penn and his adventurers were Quakers, from a small group of religious dissidents in England. Although at the outset the Quakers owned people, in time they recanted and became the loudest voices in America for the end of forced labor. In March 1780, in the middle of the Revolution, Pennsylvania became one of the first states to pass an abolition law, promising freedom to the children of enslaved blacks. In the 1920s, and again after World War II, black people migrated out of the South to Pennsylvania and factory jobs.

  Carolyn Goodson’s family had a two-story home on a block of brick-and-stone row houses. The neighborhood had been built in the 1940s for working people, and each h
ouse had a little lawn in front and a single-car garage in back, facing an alley. Though the street looked empty in the snow, the sidewalks had been shoveled and the driveways cleared, signs of civic responsibility.

  Carolyn Goodson’s face was radiant as she opened the door. She embraced me, and told me to use her first name. Carolyn was in her midforties, but looked ten years younger in trousers and a long-sleeved white satin blouse buttoned to the neck. Her brown hair fell in long braids around her shoulders, and her skin was the color of cherry wood. The roseate tint of her hands and face glowed against the whiteness of her shirt. Next to her red-brown skin, Carolyn’s eyes were her most pronounced feature—clear, loving, vulnerable.

  The house felt roomy, with three bedrooms upstairs, living and dining rooms, kitchen and basement. In the living room were black chairs and a sofa; in the dining room, a large table and sideboard with china; and in the kitchen, new cabinetry and a bright linoleum floor. There wasn’t a particle of dust in the house.

  Carolyn had been married for many years, but had lately divorced. She introduced me to her sons, Michael, in college, and Randall, in high school and a basketball player. Carolyn’s sister, Beatrice McGirth, the oldest of eight siblings, had also come to talk. She was in her fifties and had a no-nonsense air, though she went by the nickname Bea. While Bea McGirth was raising her children, her husband had died, and she now lived alone in Philadelphia.

  Michael Goodson was handsome and soft-spoken, with respectful manners and an unblinking clear gaze like his mother’s. He knew that I had been visiting black families.

  “I have one question, Mr. Ball,” Michael said, soon after we met. In the pause, I wondered whether it would be about common blood. “What’s it like to go everywhere and be surrounded only by black people?”

  “Maybe it’s like being black and going through life surrounded by white people,” I answered.

  After dinner, Carolyn, Bea, and I sat under a light around the dining-room table.

  “I graduated from high school in 1968,” said Carolyn, “and came to Philadelphia immediately. I was seventeen, turning eighteen that summer.”

  At the time, she was Carolyn Smalls.

  “My first job was at a hat factory. I helped to make hats, and steam them,” Carolyn said. “I was only hired for a short period, then they laid everybody off. After that, I started working at Sears. I got the job at Sears over the Christmas holiday. What we did, it was a packing department that if you ordered clothing through a catalogue, the clothing would come to us, and we would pack it. It was a hard, demanding job. Every fifteen minutes you would have to drop ten customers’ orders—box them, tape them up, and tie them with strings. After Christmas, I had made plans to go home, and everybody else was laid off, but they kept me on.”

  Carolyn’s eyes were loving. The whiteness around the brown iris glowed, and her eyelids hung softly. There was something accepting and tolerant about her eyes that lingered even after she looked away.

  “Did you send money home?” I asked. She had grown up in the country, in South Carolina, in a cottage with no electricity.

  “Yes, because of the conditions at home, it was so poor,” she said. “We were all somewhat ashamed of the house we came up in. It had only one bedroom, and a wood stove. Our walls were wallpapered with magazines. My parents couldn’t afford to buy wallpaper. That was a game for us—we would lie in bed and tell the next brother or sister to find this particular word. A few people around had electricity, like our next-door neighbor. We always looked at them as if they had a little money. We would beg our neighbor to let us come watch their TV.”

  I asked what the family did for light, and to keep food fresh.

  “We had an old icebox that they would get ice by the pound, and lamp light, oil or kerosene,” Carolyn said. “When I turned eleven, my parents took the money they had on a ten-year policy and put electricity in the house. That was 1961. We didn’t have bathrooms, even after we got electricity, just outdoor toilets.”

  Carolyn’s eyes met mine, and her face continued to glow. It occurred to me that as a child she had seen the end of the segregation laws in the early 1960s, and I asked for a story. She looked at the table, and a hazy scene seemed to gather in her memory.

  “I remember that grandmother took me from South Carolina to New York, to visit my aunt Beatrice,” Carolyn said. “When we boarded the train in Charleston, I looked up and saw that we were in one car, and white people were in another. In fact, we had to pass through the white car to get to the black car. It was summer, and the temperature was different in the white car. It was cooler. I seem to remember also that the white car was more plush. Of course, all the porters were black, and well-dressed, and one of them must have led us to the black car. It was perfectly strange.”

  Carolyn said she was living with her brother in Philadelphia, and dating men, when she got a job at Thomas Jefferson Hospital, as a clerk in a nurse’s unit.

  “My first decent job.”

  She moved out of her brother’s house and into an apartment in 1972. Then Carolyn Smalls met James Goodson.

  “I got married,” said Carolyn, “but I didn’t do it in the order you should have done it. My son Michael was born in July, and James and I got married the next June. He was a bus driver for the Transit Authority. We separated two years ago. Seems like a long time.” The memory of the divorce cast a brief shadow on Carolyn’s open face.

  “I was at Jefferson fifteen years when I requested to look at my personnel file,” she remembered. “It was on microfilm, and going through it, I read the notes on my first job interview. It said I was ‘a dull person with possibilities of being sharpened.’ Looking back, I think I was a dull person. Coming to Philadelphia, I had to learn how to speak all over again. Even though we studied English in school, we didn’t speak it.”

  “You spoke country English,” I said.

  “Back home, our English teacher would say about the way we talked, ‘This is going to hurt you later on.’ But everybody else spoke the same way.”

  I asked Carolyn how she spoke.

  “It was a broken dialect,” she told me. “Instead of saying ‘this,’ I would say ‘dis’ and ‘dat.’ It wasn’t important to use the past tense. ‘I break that glass.’ Not ‘I have been,’ but ‘I been.’ And, ‘gimme dis.’ If somebody insulted you, it was ‘I frauded you.’ Everything was quick and easy—just get it out, no need to concentrate.”

  Gullah, the black English of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, is thickest on the sea islands, a necklace of sandy islands from Charleston to Savannah, though it was also spoken in old inland rice lands like those on the Cooper River. The dialect, which came from a mingling of English with West African grammar, helped shape a national black English in the post-Civil War period.

  “I hear country English, or Gullah, as a beautiful thing, not as bad English,” I said.

  Carolyn smiled, as though surprised, then gave her own assessment of white English. “Yes, and I find white people have what I call a ‘drool.’ It takes them forever to say one thing. They just drool things out.”

  This gave us both a laugh, and Carolyn grinned, a powerful smile, like a flare in the room. Carolyn had a large set of teeth, and when she smiled, peeling back her lips and screwing up her nose, she got them all into the open.

  Carolyn’s sister, Bea McGirth, wore a lavender jacket and matching pants, and her hair was treated with straightener. Raised in the same two-room house as Carolyn, Bea Smalls moved out and married her husband, Barry McGirth, in the early 1960s. She had two daughters, Carrie and Willa. Barry McGirth died in 1977, and Bea went to work.

  “He left me no money,” Bea said. “As a matter of fact, an insurance policy didn’t even pay his funeral, so I had to pay it at fifty dollars a month.”

  Ten years later, the children raised, she moved alone to Philadelphia. I asked what launched her journey North.

  “Money. I was in debt to the top of my head. My baby daughter was in college, and I
had borrowed and mortgaged everything for her education. I moved to Philadelphia with fifty dollars cash.”

  In Philadelphia, Bea got a job in a nursing home, and later in a hospital. When we met, she had worked for many years as a supervisor in the hospital’s dietary department.

  As we went over the lives and loves of the two sisters, one story hung in the air between us. All of us knew it, and wondered how to make sense of the tale. Suddenly Bea McGirth’s eyes leveled, and in her matter-of-fact way she began to talk about our presumed common blood.

  “I lived with my grandmother, Carrie Nesbitt, when I was in my teens,” she said, “starting in 1959. She was my mother’s mother. We used to sit up late at night and make quilts, and while we sewed, I used to ask her a lot of questions concerning the family.” As they quilted, Bea said, Carrie Nesbitt used to talk about her own grandparents, Frederick and Caroline Poyas, whose name was pronounced “pious.”

  “She said that Caroline Poyas was strict, and part Indian,” Bea remembered. “She didn’t know what tribe. My grandmother said that she kept her hair long. She either just pinned it up, and it was long and straight, or she just wore it down. And Frederick Poyas—my grandmother said that his father was white.”

  “Did she ever say who that might have been?” I asked.

  “No, but from what my grandmother said about the Balls, they must have been—their masters must have been the Balls,” Bea came back. It sounded like an answer to a slightly different question, until Bea finished the thought. “The Balls had allowed Frederick Poyas to buy a piece of property from them, and my grandmother seemed to think that he might have been the son of one of them.”