Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  On good wages, Leon and Phoebe Smalls had raised two children, Leonard and Methena. Leonard Smalls, in his twenties, was in the Army. “He’s in Colorado now,” said Phoebe Smalls, speaking softly. “Methena, she’s out of school, and enrolled as a cosmetologist. She works at a beautician shop. She’s a shampooer there.”

  I turned the conversation back to Mr. Smalls. “Did you take part in any of the protest movements of the 1960s?” I asked.

  “No.”

  Leon Smalls leveled a vehement stare.

  “Would you have liked to?”

  “No. I had all the opportunity in the world to, but I didn’t choose that route. I wasn’t brought up that way, and I still don’t believe that that is the answer.” He spoke with a staccato diction, like a manual typewriter, loud and clattering. “You see, Martin Luther King, as much as he did, and there was progress made, but the man gave his life, and I still don’t see us much further than before his time. Many people benefited by him, in a sense more Caucasian than blacks. He don’t get that credit. You go into the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, those people were living like pigs up there until equal rights came about. And in order to distribute a piece of pie to us, they had to get their fair share. Yeah, they love him up there. But you come into the major cities, the first thing out of a Caucasian’s mouth is ‘Who the hell is Martin Luther King? He’s just a nigger that got killed, that’s all.’ No, I didn’t get into the protest, because protesting made me bitterer than I am.”

  When I began looking at the plantations, and speaking with descendants of Ball slaves, I thought that I might meet with a certain amount of rage. I presumed it would be directed at me. In fact, I had been surprised at how little rage I had found—that is, among black people.

  “You are conscious of your bitterness,” I said.

  “Very much so, that’s my personality.”

  “When did you become an embittered person?” I felt a twinge of admiration for Mr. Smalls, who both felt bitter and watched himself feeling it.

  “I can remember my first day that I realized that I had a problem,” he said. “I was about sixteen years old. I was working for a guy in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and we used to take peaches around the state and sell them by the bushel. We went to a place where we needed gas in the truck, and they had a big sign on the pumps, ‘No Negroes or niggers allowed inside.’ I could buy their gasoline, but I couldn’t go inside. I had a problem with that. Things like that lay fresh in my mind.”

  Mr. Smalls snapped a new gaze in my direction.

  “And if you would check the bloodline of some of these so-called righteous fellows that put those signs up, they had as much ‘Negroes or niggers’ in them that I have in me!”

  Leon Smalls’s face trembled a bit. Staring at me, he took in a deep breath through his nostrils and let it pass into the room.

  “We today think that things have changed,” Mr. Smalls went on. “No. Behind our back we are criticized the same identical way. I work with a group of people who, the only difference is they leave their sheet at home. But they still have them in their closets.”

  “Teamsters?” I said. He was referring to the hoods and sheets of the Ku Klux Klan, though neither of us let those words pass our lips.

  “Yeah, they call themselves ‘brother.’ Yeah, we are all union brothers. Such is not the case. It hurts them to their heart to know that a black man is putting food on the table.”

  Behind me I heard a rustling on the sofa, although I could not see Carolyn Goodson, the source of the noise.

  “See, a white man is sneaky,” said Mr. Smalls. “He is the type who will throw the brick and hide his hands. You have to be attentive to what he say and do.”

  “You would or would not characterize yourself as a racist?” I asked.

  “By no means do I consider myself a racist,” he answered, “nor would I want anybody to consider me an Uncle Tom.”

  It was time to come around to the facts. “I’m not shying from things, Mr. Smalls,” I began. “I’m trying to learn the whole story. Frederick Poyas, your great-great-grandfather, it seems that his father was a member of the Ball family.”

  “Yes, I’m very aware of that,” said Mr. Smalls, exhaling. “That is something that we knew and could not discuss. We know that going to school we were called ‘red’ and ‘cracker.’ ” Mr. Smalls’s skin was darker than that of his sister Carolyn, but it may have darkened with age.

  “For us growing up,” Carolyn put in, “we were lighter than the average people around us. Not only the skin, but the texture of our hair. They would say, ‘You got white people’s hair.’ There was always fighting about it.” I looked at Carolyn’s skin, with its rose tint.

  “We fought many days because we were lighter,” she went on. “It was very painful. The kids of our generation would always say, ‘Who’s your mother and father?’ I remember them even saying that the mattress on our bed was from a white man. My mother talks about it, the family history, more now, but she didn’t talk about it all when we were small. The reason for that is that not everyone is so open and able to accept what happened over a hundred years ago.”

  Leon Smalls peered at me. “These are some of the things,” he said, “I’m quite sure that your great-grandfather, or whatever, if he was alive, he would get very angry about. But interbreeding was something that happened in those days. These guys rode around and walked around on their horses as if they were kings during the daylight hours, and at night, they did their share of slipping around in the slave quarters, and their wives knew it as well as anyone else. That will make them turn over in their graves about their bastard children, about who they weren’t man enough to come forward and say, ‘That is my child.’ Why do you think we are so messed up in colors? Think about it. We all come here one color. We couldn’t interbreed ourselves.”

  “Isn’t it better to talk about it than not to talk about it?” I said.

  “It’s better to talk about it,” came the answer. “And as I was saying, many Caucasian Americans have traces of Negro blood in them, too. So the same way how the slave master was slipping around in the houses at night, his mistress was also slipping around in the big house during the day. It happened.”

  “What do you feel about the idea that you and I are distantly related?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t faze me, because it’s something that I had no control over,” Mr. Smalls said. “I’m not going to jump off a bridge because it happened. It don’t bother me one way or the other, and my life goes on. I just don’t want it to end up similar to Imitation of Life.”

  “You’re referring to the movie?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Sirk, a German immigrant not especially known for his treatment of race, came out of Hollywood in 1959. It was a big-budget melodrama, shot in the pinks and blues and greens of late-1950s Technicolor, the story of a colored girl who tries to pass for white. In the plot, a white stage actress named Lora Meredith (played by Lana Turner) hires a live-in black housekeeper, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore). Annie Johnson has a daughter, Sarah Jane, whose pale skin evidently comes from a white father, long absent. Sarah Jane (played by Susan Kohner) grows up and tries to pass. She leaves home and cuts off contact with her mother. Annie Johnson grieves as her daughter disappears into white life, never to return. Eventually Sarah Jane’s mother dies of apparent sadness. At the funeral Sarah Jane reappears for the first time since leaving home, throws herself on the casket, and apologizes to her dead mother for having abandoned her.

  “The sad part of the movie,” Leon Smalls remembered, “is the part about the Negro mother losing her child, the fact that she wants to be white. Things of that kind have been happening since the beginning of time. It’s saddening for an African American to see someone as trying to portray themselves as something that they are not, but it’s been going on forever.”

  Leon Smalls bit down on his words, which escaped his mouth as though they were
trying to flee.

  “Until you walk in my shoe you don’t understand what makes us tick and what makes us feel the way we feel,” he said. “The racial situation, it’s worse today than it were then, when I was young. As an eighteen-year-old African American male, you are fast becoming an endangered species, simply because the opportunity of employment is just not there for you. The world will tell you, ‘There are plenty of jobs out there.’ But what they are going to do for you is give you wages you can’t buy clothing with. If you look around, you can walk into any establishment that is paying a decent wage, and you’ll find the racial balance almost nine to one Caucasian. So that tells you there. And you walk into a place that is six-to-one African American, you walk out because you know they are not paying anything.”

  It occurred to me that Leon Smalls was not a person filled with rage, after all. His dominant emotion, perhaps, was pessimism. Pessimism is more corrosive than anger, and more complete. Anger settles in a clenched jaw, while pessimism fills the body to the fingertips.

  “Do you have a ray of hope in your heart for the future?” I asked.

  “No, I really don’t see anything great coming to my people within my time,” he replied, his baritone firm. “We have to have hope, without it we are doomed. But then they say, hope ends in frustration.”

  I admired Leon Smalls. From the well of his despair, he had brought up an accommodation of his own design. His bitterness protected him, while he left open the dim prospect of a different life.

  Mr. Smalls talked about his children, his work, and his pleasures. He told me that he kept a vegetable garden, on some land owned by a friend a half-hour drive from his house. During the warm months he spent every Saturday alone with his vegetables—com, okra, string beans, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, mustard greens, and tomatoes. They were Southern vegetables for the most part, which he grew in the short Northern season in defiance of the climate.

  As I made to leave, I thanked Mr. Smalls.

  “Yeah, well,” he answered.

  “I know your heart is heavy,” I said. “One reason I wanted to see you was to take a step, to make a gesture, and hold out my hand.”

  “No problem,” said Mr. Smalls. “Someone has to break the ice. I gotta give you credit, you were man enough to do it.”

  Michael Goodson sat at the dining-room table in his mother’s house in Philadelphia. Michael was twenty-one, handsome, polite, tall, and mild-mannered. His eyes, like those of his mother, were clear and white. But while Carolyn Goodson’s eyes were vulnerable, Michael’s eyes showed determination. When he directed his eyes, it was as though Michael held out two white lights, unblinking, focused, adamant.

  Born in Philadelphia, Michael was a student at Temple University, where he studied biology and anthropology. He had attended an all-black Catholic school, St. Raymond, then transferred to Martin Luther King Jr. High School, a large, all-black public school. Michael graduated first among a class of five hundred students before enrolling at Temple. In college, he was a cadet in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), which helped pay tuition, and he had plans to go to graduate school.

  Michael was the one who had asked what it was like for me to be surrounded by black people, so I returned the question by inquiring about his dealings on the white side of the color line.

  “I first had to deal with white people when I was about thirteen,” he said. “Before that, I had no white friends. I guess I saw white people from a distance, or as teachers in school.” There was something matter-of-fact about Michael’s manner that reminded me of his aunt, Bea McGirth; and for that matter, his uncle, Leon Smalls. “When I was thirteen, I got involved with the Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force. The Civil Air Patrol teaches search-and-rescue techniques, like what to do in the event of a plane crash. And also some things about aeronautic technology.”

  With his direct manner, Michael Goodson seemed self-possessed and as free of stress about blackness and whiteness as a person might be. “I’ve never had a problem with white people, and never have been thought to have a problem,” he said.

  “You and your mother have reached some accommodation with racial identity that is rare,” I said. “You seem to have drained yourself of anguish.”

  “I guess,” he came back. “My friends these days, I guess you would call them ‘multicultural’—they’re black, white, Asian, Latino.”

  Later Michael and I talked more by phone. In one conversation, we wheeled between subjects, finally settling on South Carolina, our shared ancestral home. He loved the South, he told me. “In the South,” said Michael, “the white people are more hospitable. White people speak to you who don’t know you.”

  Michael recalled trips he had taken to the South to visit family. One of the great places of escape, he said, was a certain fishing hole near his grandparents’ land.

  “My cousin, Steven Smalls, and I, with my other cousins, went fishing constantly,” said Michael. “There is a swamp behind my grandmother’s house in South Carolina that is plentiful with fish. Every time we went down there, we came back with bundles. We didn’t have a string to hold them on, so Steven and I used branches to thread them through the gills.”

  Michael Goodson told his fishing stories with softness and regret in his voice, and less assertiveness than usual.

  “To keep the mosquitoes away, Steven and I hung cloth dipped in oil all around us, and burned it for the smoke. Later we would go hunting for squirrels, with a twenty-two rifle. Steven and I had an inseparable bond,” he said.

  Michael was in mourning for his cousin Steven, who was shot to death November 26, 1994, at the age of twenty. Steven lived in Charleston but “grew up in the country,” according to Michael. After high school, Steven got a job with a computer repair shop, because, Michael said, he liked to take things apart, to see how they worked.

  “Steven sometimes came to Philadelphia,” Michael remembered. “One Christmas he visited, and we spent a lot of time talking about the future, like what our sons and daughters would call each other when we grew up, what kind of houses we were going to have, and how we were always going to go fishing and hunting together. Steven was so easygoing, I don’t see how anyone could not like him. If people didn’t like him, it was because of the fact that everybody else liked him.”

  The week he was killed, Steven Smalls had gotten a job in the city of Greenville, in upstate South Carolina, at an engineering plant. He had found his first apartment and was packing to make the move from Charleston.

  “In my dorm room, I keep a photograph of the two of us together,” Michael told me. “In the picture, we are dressed up for a wedding anniversary party. Steven’s wearing a gold jacket and matching pants, and I’m wearing a blue suit with a white shirt.”

  By the family’s account, on Friday, November 25, 1994, Steven drove from Charleston to James Island, a suburb of the city. A keen deer hunter, and good with a rifle, he planned to stay with a friend for the night and go hunting later in the weekend. That night Steven went with friends to a bar, the Lake House Club, in a section of James Island known as Mosquito Beach. Around midnight, an argument suddenly erupted inside the club. The bartender did not want a fight on his watch and so turned everyone involved in the commotion out into the parking lot. As the crowd stood on the pavement outside, the ruckus softened. A few moments later, however, one of the men who had come out of the bar approached Steven Smalls from behind and called out his name. Before he turned around, he was shot five times. He died in the parking lot.

  The funeral service took place at the Azalea Drive Church of Christ, in Charleston. Michael Goodson drove down from Philadelphia with many other family members. Newspaper and television reporters had covered the killing, and hundreds of acquaintances of the family came to the service. Michael was one of the pallbearers.

  “A lot of my family believe the first bullet killed him,” Michael told me. In the cemetery, the Smalls and Goodson families stood over the grave, and the lid of the coffi
n was raised. “He looked so much at peace. When somebody gets killed, the grimace they had normally stays on the face, due to rigor mortis. But my cousin looked like he was resting.” There was an evenness in Michael’s voice, and an absence of rage, as though the anger he might have felt about the crime had been siphoned off.

  “I miss him every day. We had a bond that a lot of people in their lifetime don’t find. I could always talk to him, and he had an answer for everything. The answer was so simple, but so right.”

  I asked Michael about his cousin’s killer, and he told me that three people had been charged—one with the murder, and two as accomplices who helped him get away.

  “In any way justice can be served, let it happen,” he said. “If they convict them, all right. But what they do to them doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to bring my cousin back. I don’t wish that these people have their lives taken because they took my cousin’s life. I don’t wish them any harm. There are times I wish I could be in the same cell with them. All the pain and anger I’ve felt, they would catch that rap. But I have to let things take their course.”

  I had never met Steven Smalls, another descendant of Frederick Poyas, and of the Balls, but I decided to try to pay my respects by attending the trial of his accused killer. On a Wednesday in late October, I arrived at Courtroom B of the General Sessions Court, Charleston County, South Carolina. The room had rectangular fluorescent lights in a dropped ceiling, brown steel doors, and a big kitchen-style clock on the wall. Nearby, a gold-colored seal, which looked like tin, represented the authority of the state. Some sixty people, most of them black, sat on courtroom benches that resembled church pews made from painted pine.

  On one side of the middle aisle sat the family of the victim, on the other, the defendant. Michael Goodson’s grandparents, Postal and Fredie Mae Smalls, sat with their kin, all of them motionless. I could see the family resemblance among them. The defendant’s clan were more restless, young and old, wigged and braided, thin and heavy, all shifting and looking around. The judge was a thirty-five-year-old white man with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a prominent chin. In the jury box sat eight whites and four blacks.