Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Bea had a polite way of putting it: about Frederick Poyas, Carrie Nesbitt “seemed to think that he might have been” the son of a Ball slave owner.

  “Did your grandmother tell this to you as a matter of fact,” I asked, “or as a terrible fact?”

  “Just in conversation,” said Bea.

  “In my generation,” Carolyn put in, “there were babies born from white men in relationships with black women. It was no secret in the community who these children belonged to. I’m sure there were problems with the wives of the white men to see these mixed kids walking around.”

  Later I learned that Carrie Nesbitt, the quiltmaker and source of the story, was born in 1893, within arm’s reach of the Civil War. For income, she worked as a midwife and, as a person who delivered babies, was not likely to be fazed by talk of white-black sex.

  Bea and Carolyn said that the two-room, lamp-lit house where they grew up stood on the same piece of land that their great-great-grandfather, Frederick Poyas, had bought from the Ball family. When the sisters were children, there was a framed portrait on the wall depicting Frederick Poyas and his Native wife, Caroline. The picture, drawn in graphite, showed three people posed outdoors in front of a shed—two men in dark, skinny jackets and a woman wearing a full-length skirt and high-necked blouse. Carolyn and Bea described the picture, and I had seen a reproduction of it. Along with Frederick and Caroline Poyas it showed George Poyas, one of their sons. To judge from the detail of expression, the faces had been drawn from a photograph, which had since been lost, while their bodies belonged to no one in particular, sketched like cutouts. In the picture Frederick Poyas had light skin, thin lips, and parted hair. His gaze was focused, beneath straight eyebrows, and he had a rather grim, flat mouth. He could easily have been a mulatto. Later Bea told me that when Frederick and Caroline Poyas died, they were buried not on their own piece of land but at Halidon Hill, a tract on the east branch of the Cooper River formerly owned by the Balls.

  When Bea and Carolyn were girls in the 1950s, they lived near Middleburg plantation, one of the last places held by the Balls. At the time Middleburg was the property of Marie Ball Dingle, a woman in her sixties who had inherited it from her father. Marie was married to an artist named Edward von Siebold Dingle, although for some reason Edward Dingle was known in the family as “Peter.” Peter Dingle made paintings of birds, and trapped and stuffed various species around the plantation the better to arrange the ornithological specimens in his studio. I imagine Peter and Marie were an odd couple in the eyes of neighboring blacks, the more so because they spent almost all of their time at home. In any case, Bea remembered going fishing on Middleburg. Every time, she and her family went to the big house to ask permission.

  “Marie Ball lived on the plantation, and it was always a question in the back of my mind,” said Bea. “She was hostile to some people, and she couldn’t see very well. But when my mother and I came to the door to go fishing, she would say, ‘Who’s that out there?’ ‘It’s Fredie Mae,’ my mother would say. ‘Oh, okay,’ she would say. It was like, ‘It’s okay if you come.’ It was always okay for us to go fishing, and it was always a question in the back of my mind—why?”

  “Because there was a connection?” I said.

  “Marie probably had been told that there is a relationship there, and that we were family,” Bea said.

  Bea sifted her memories and laid them out straight, like a math teacher demonstrating an equation. There was no written proof, but there were many stories, and I was beginning to feel the preponderance of the evidence.

  Frederick and Caroline Poyas had a daughter named Florence. “Aunt Florence was kind, humble,” Bea said. “I knew her—she died in 1952, when she was about eighty years old. It appears that my grandmother said that the Balls loved her.” Bea’s polite phrasing came back—”It appears.” “They said that if Caroline and Frederick would allow them, they would take her and educate her.”

  “My mom said that she studied cooking,” Carolyn added.

  “Aunt Florence started traveling with a Yankee family, and cooking for them,” Bea went on. “They were seasonal people, the Yankees, who came down to hunt, and would go back North. When Florence got married, her husband traveled with her.” It was rare that black country people got work with travel, and such a cook’s job would have been a prize.

  “A reason why the Balls might have done that, help her to get a decent job, is because she was kin,” I said.

  “She was part of the family,” Bea answered. She smiled for the first time since she began her story.

  “Marie Ball was married to a German guy, Dingle, who was very quiet,” she went on. Bea seemed to be picturing Peter Dingle and Marie Ball in her mind. “She ran the house. He didn’t have nothing to say. They would come to see Florence, driving very slow. Marie would be sitting up there, her hair in a bun. Her husband drove so slow, I don’t know how he didn’t get a ticket!”

  I looked at Carolyn, and she broke open her many-toothed smile. We all smiled a moment, then fell serious.

  “Anyway, they would come to see Florence,” Bea went ahead. “After Florence passed, I remember Marie and her husband came to give their condolence.”

  There was a silence in the room, and I thought I heard the humming of the refrigerator. I felt a pack of emotions and was not sure which to single out and hold.

  “Part of the touching fact of our getting to know each other,” I said, grasping for words, “is the possibility that you and I are distantly related.”

  Carolyn nodded, and so did Bea. There was a feeling of roominess around the table, as though we had walked into a clearing from the woods. We talked some more, until eventually Carolyn picked the right emotion, and laid it out.

  “The only thing that can cure what’s happened,” she said, “is for us to administer love.”

  Carolyn and Bea did not know the name of the white man who fathered Frederick Poyas. I might have accepted their oral tradition that he was a Ball, but this would not be enough to satisfy a skeptic.

  Frederick Poyas had left a drawing of himself, but his descendants did not know when he was born. In the federal census for the year 1880, Poyas and his family of five children, living near the Balls’ Limerick plantation, are described as mulatto, the only family designated by that term for miles around. The census enumerator took down the age of Frederick Poyas as forty. The number might have come from Frederick himself or perhaps from a neighbor’s guess, which meant his birthdate fell around, but not necessarily in, 1840.

  I looked in the Ball slave lists for the birth of a child named Frederick. In records for Limerick plantation, the largest Ball place, one appeared, born to a field hand named Diana on June 25, 1841. Mulatto children were often given names that distinguished them from the larger slave population, and Frederick was such a name. Checking other slave lists, I found this was the only Frederick on any of the Ball places for some twenty-five years.

  Mulattoes often were fathered by the so-called young master, the unmarried heir to a plantation. In the year of Frederick’s birth at Limerick, there was indeed a young man around the place, my great-great-grandfather, William James Ball, born in October 1821 to Isaac and Eliza Ball. When William was only four, his father died of malaria; William grew up with his mother, possessed of large estates managed by executors. When the child Frederick was conceived at Limerick, about November 1840, William would have been nineteen. Fourteen months later, in February 1842, William married Julia Cart, a seventeen-year-old girl from a Charleston family.

  From the circumstantial evidence, it seemed likely that William Ball might have fathered Frederick. William was on the plantation at the time, in power, and about to marry.

  I looked further for clues. Frederick’s mother was named Diana. His descendants described Diana as the African “bought by the Balls from a slave ship.” Unfortunately, I could not determine Diana’s ancestry, nor much else about her life. She may or may not have been born in West Africa. However, r
ecords show that when Frederick was born, Diana already had a two-year-old daughter, Harriet. After Frederick, she had another daughter, Lizzie, in 1842. The father or fathers of the children were not named by the young William Ball, who by this time was keeping the slave lists. But one thing leaped out from the pages: in 1849, William decided to send Diana and eight-year-old Frederick away from Limerick to Cedar Hill plantation, a tract about eight miles down the Cooper River, where some seventy-six slaves lived and worked. Diana’s child Lizzie had died; Lizzie’s sister, ten-year-old Harriet, was not sent to Cedar Hill. According to William’s ledger, Harriet stayed at Limerick, where she was apparently taken in by a black woman named Eve.

  For the next few years, Diana and Frederick stayed together on Cedar Hill. Diana appears for the last time on slave lists in 1856, after which she apparently died. Frederick continued to live at Cedar Hill until at least 1860. That year William wrote down Frederick’s name for the last time, and struck a line through it. The line did not mean he was dead (which William would have noted with a date) but that he might have been either sold or moved to another plantation. A year later, the Civil War began and William stopped keeping his slave lists.

  The pieces fit crudely together into a pattern familiar around the South: a young master fathers a child with a black woman, gets married to a white woman, and eventually sends his mulatto son and the mother away from home.

  The story seemed persuasive but in fact I had no thread that would link the child Frederick with the mulatto Frederick Poyas. Suddenly, one appeared. As it happened, there was another young master raised at Limerick about this time, William’s first cousin, James Poyas. James Poyas was born in 1806 at Windsor plantation, to Windsor’s owners, Henry and Elizabeth Poyas. When he was about seven, James was given up for adoption to his uncle and aunt, Isaac and Eliza Ball, a mile away at Limerick. Eliza Ball had been born Eliza Poyas, at Windsor. Isaac Ball and Eliza Poyas were married in 1811, but for several years had no children. Eliza turned to her brother, Henry Poyas, who agreed to surrender his son James so that the couple might have a boy to raise. Little James Poyas moved to Limerick around 1813. Even when Isaac and Eliza Ball (without explanation) began to have their own children five years later, James, by this time twelve years old, stayed on in the house. James Poyas grew up alongside his young cousin William, but never married. He became a rice planter and slave owner on the Cooper River, like the rest of the Balls, and died in 1850 at age forty-four.

  In addition to being an adopted son, James Poyas was a blood member of the Ball family. Because of the frequent intermarriage of the plantation families, both James and his adoptive parents were all, in one way or another, descendants of Elias “Red Cap” Ball. James’s biological father, Henry Poyas (1787–1824), was a son of a Catherine Smith (1768–1836), of Old Goose Creek plantation, herself a daughter of Elizabeth Ball (1746–87), who was, finally, a granddaughter of Red Cap.

  Having learned about James Poyas, I now suspected that he, and not William Ball, was the father of Frederick. Three pieces of evidence pointed to this conclusion—two of them circumstantial, one physical. First, in the year of Frederick’s birth, James was thirty-five, unmarried, and living near Limerick. Second, at the end of the Civil War, when young Frederick became free and able to choose a surname, he took the name Poyas. The third piece of evidence was the most convincing. Shortly before his death, James Poyas had his portrait taken using the new photographic process, the daguerreotype. In the picture, James, wearing a jacket and tie, has a focused gaze beneath distinctive eyebrows and shows a rather grim, flat mouth. It was a simple matter to compare this image with the drawing of Frederick Poyas in the hands of his descendants. Frederick’s portrait was probably made during his forties, about the same age at which James had his picture taken. There is an unmistakable resemblance. The “mulatto farmer” of the census has the same flat mouth, eyebrows, and cheekbones as his putative father.

  By the standards of his caste, James Poyas had a conventional life. At age nineteen he was involved in an auction of some black people whom his aunt evidently wished to be rid of. The same year, 1825, he inherited money from Isaac Ball, the late owner of Limerick. Using the capital, James bought Cedar Hill plantation, a 996-acre place a few miles from home. Twenty-five years later, on January 1, 1850, James signed a deal to sell Cedar Hill to his cousin and adoptive brother, William Ball. James was on his deathbed, and William wanted to expand his own business. Four days later, James died.

  Frederick Poyas was freed from the ownership of William Ball in 1865, at age twenty-three. His story continues in his family’s oral tradition. Frederick married Caroline, from a Native family in the area, and started a family. The couple had eight children, beginning with Frederick Jr. at the end of the Civil War and ending with George, fifteen years later. Soon, Frederick Sr. bought fifty-seven acres of land from the Ball family, at a price of fifty cents an acre, and moved with his family there. Rebecca Poyas, the second child, was born in 1866. Rebecca grew up and married James Nesbitt, and they had a daughter named Carrie in 1893. Carrie married Frank Ladson, and they had a daughter, Fredie Mae, in 1924. In 1941, at age fifteen, Fredie Mae married Postal Smalls. The Poyas homestead was handed down to Fredie Mae and Postal Smalls. Fredie Mae Smalls had eight children, two of whom would grow up to be Carolyn Goodson and Bea McGirth, of Philadelphia. The descendants of Frederick Poyas who remain in touch with one another number about fifty people, in Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and beyond.

  On a Sunday afternoon in February, I visited Leon Smalls, another descendant of Frederick Poyas and, more distantly, Elias “Red Cap” Ball. Like his sister Carolyn, Mr. Smalls lived in an attached brick two-story on a street of nearly identical houses in Philadelphia. It was good family quarters in a hardworking neighborhood.

  Leon Smalls greeted me at the door with the corners of his mouth turned down. He was a strong man in his fifties, with short hair, a broad, implacable face, and brown, unlined skin. He wore a button shirt, dark workman’s trousers, and sneakers. Mr. Smalls took in a long breath, and exhaled it slowly through his teeth. In marked contrast to Carolyn, Leon Smalls seemed to have a closely watched anger.

  “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said with a hard handshake, disdaining either me or the idea I had asked to visit. I could feel his anger as I walked into the house.

  A collection of potted plants stood in the foyer, brought in against the cold. The living room had furniture with plastic covers, and a big television. We settled at the dinner table, and Leon Smalls propped his head on an index finger and thumb. He refused to look at me, preferring the tabletop. Carolyn Goodson sat, circumspect, on a nearby sofa. Mr. Smalls’s wife, Phoebe Ann Smalls, a slender, gentle woman, brought me a drink and settled nervously near her husband. Mr. Smalls and I sat within reach, and I could sense him seething, as though he could hardly stand to be in the room. When I described again what I was doing—visiting black families whose ancestors were enslaved to my family—his simmering increased.

  Leon Smalls was born in 1942 and, like his sisters, raised on the old homestead of Frederick Poyas. After he finished high school, in 1961 Mr. Smalls became the first of his siblings to move to Philadelphia. I asked him why Pennsylvania, and not some other place.

  “I had an uncle here. I could find somewhere to stay until I could get on my feet,” he answered, in a blunt baritone voice. “I got a big job—$1.09 an hour. I could make $100 a week, but that means working a hundred hours a week.” Mr. Smalls seemed to spit out his story, his voice wet with sarcasm.

  “It was a linen company called Apex, since went bankrupt. I sorted linen. Everything come bagged up—the napkins go one place, tablecloths another place, uniforms another place.” He pursed his lips, and a ripple of contempt rolled across his face.

  “I came North because, as a young African American in the South during those days, if you weren’t lucky enough to get a job hanging sheetrock, there was nothing to do!” Mr. Sm
alls kept his eyes fixed on the tabletop. “I worked for Apex about a year. From there I went into automobile body and fender. I worked there until I got my first break. I painted a guy’s car, and he liked the job. He offered me a job, and I told him I was not going to go back to work in an automobile garage. He says, ‘Can you drive a truck?’ I says, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Come see me on Saturday and I’ll put you to work.’ I did such, and I’ve been driving a truck ever since.”

  Leon Smalls looked at me for the first time.

  Soon he married his wife, Phoebe Ann. After a stint in the military, he began to drive rigs for the Ford Motor Company.

  “In 1970, I feel like if I’m going to be on the street, driving a truck, I might as well do something and make some money out of it,” Mr. Smalls went on, unblinking. “I went back to school and got my degree to drive a tractor-trailer. I started hauling automobiles for Ford Motor Company July 6, 1970. I’m still there.”

  “You haul tractor-trailers with ten cars?” I said. I hoped that by sticking to concrete things, we might communicate.

  “My equipment is built for twelve small ones,” he answered.

  “Where do you drive them?”

  “From Maine to Florida—all over the Northeast and Southeast.”

  “I imagine you’re well-placed in the union.”

  “Yeah, I’m as far as I can go. I’m a member of International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 312, out of the town of Chester.”

  “You must have a position of influence,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m union rep.”

  Describing his job, Mr. Smalls released himself a bit. There were about ninety union members in his truck terminal, he said, including seventy-four drivers, eleven mechanics, and three clerks. “I’m an ex-steward, but everyone comes to me as if I’m still the steward. It’s hard to say, but I’m about the last say in my terminal. It’s something that I’ve built and I would hate to see tom down.”