Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The defendant was twenty-three-year-old Tony Lewis McNeil, nicknamed T.J. McNeil’s two co-defendants had already been tried and jailed on lesser counts. McNeil himself was small, about five feet, seven inches, and 140 pounds, and wore a blue blazer that did not seem to fit. His head was nearly shaved, and he sat with his shoulders slumped, facing the judge. From time to time he turned around to look at his family, and when he did I saw that McNeil’s face appeared very young, and very scared. Throughout the trial, McNeil, who was black, sat between his two court-appointed lawyers, a man and a woman, both white.

  Larry Deas, an accessory to the murder, had plea-bargained and had been brought in from jail to testify. Deas was twenty-five, dark black, with short untreated hair. He wore a white shirt and oversized khaki pants without a belt; as he took the stand, his pants sagged, showing his underwear. Sitting in the witness box, Deas rocked back and forth, and his mouth drooped open.

  Early in the trial, the Charleston County Medical Examiner testified that an autopsy found five bullets in Smalls. He had been shot four times in the back, and once in the right side. He seemed to have been running when he was hit with the bullets.

  “We keep guns,” Larry Deas said about his friends, “because nowadays, it’s not that we start no trouble, but when something happens you want to protect yourself. You know Mosquito Beach. Everybody out there got a gun.”

  Deas testified that he was leaving the Lake House Club when McNeil, or T.J., shot Steven Smalls. Then, Deas said, “I got into my truck, drove around and picked up T.J. When T.J. got into the car, he just turned to me and said, ‘He dead.’ ” Deas said he and McNeil made a getaway and later buried T.J.’s gun, along with a shotgun they had, in a corn field.

  The trial, which lasted five days, had a feeling of inevitability about it. McNeil had admitted to police that he had shot Steven Smalls, and eyewitnesses placed the gun in his hands. In court, McNeil invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence and did not take the stand. The public defenders assigned to McNeil tried to make a case that he had shot Smalls in the back in an act of self-protection. A couple of witnesses testified that Steven Smalls had a gun, or that he was wearing a jacket with a bulge in it which might have been construed to be a gun. The night of the crime, however, no witnesses made such statements, and no gun was found on the body by police.

  After two hours of deliberation, the jury found Tony McNeil guilty of murder and possession of a gun in the commission of a violent crime. He was sentenced by the young judge to life in prison for the murder, and five years on the gun count. Serving the sentences concurrently, McNeil would become eligible for parole after twenty years.

  Before the verdict, there was a moment when I looked at the victim’s grandparents, Postal and Fredie Mae Smalls. I had gotten to know Mr. and Mrs. Smalls, two loving people in their seventies, and felt much affection for them. Postal Smalls was a stout and jolly man, but the mood on our side of the courtroom was quiet, watchful. As members of the jury returned from their chambers and took their seats, Postal Smalls tipped his head back, and slowly closed his eyes.

  Over a couple of years I spent much time with members of Frederick Poyas’s family. During some of these visits, the radiating smile and limpid eyes of Carolyn Goodson fixed in my mind. Once Carolyn and I were on the way to have lunch, talking about the past. She reminded me that it was possible both to laugh and to weep about the old days.

  “I have a friend,” said Carolyn, “who gets all exasperated about it, and he makes me laugh. He says, ‘I don’t understand these white people! They forced us to come here … then they hate us!’ ”

  I laughed, and Carolyn peeled back her lips and showed her teeth, but her laughter was a little sharper than my own. As we arrived at the restaurant, Carolyn put in another word.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you can tell me.” I looked at her, and could not tell for a moment if Carolyn was about to laugh or to weep. “I mean, the plantations, who thought this thing up? Who said, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to this continent, take a bunch of people, chain them up, bring them over to this place, and make them work.’ Who was standing around and said, ‘Hey! That’s a great idea!’ ”

  I laughed and shook my head, but Carolyn was no longer laughing.

  7

  THE MAKING OF A DYNASTY

  In 1736, a young African woman, perhaps sixteen, set foot on the dock at Comingtee plantation. She arrived alone, in all likelihood having been sold away from her parents. Elias Ball, who bought her in Charleston, named her Angola Amy.

  When Amy reached Comingtee, there were other people on the place with names that told where they came from, like the field hands Mandingo Jack and Igbo Clarinda. “Mandingos” were what whites called the Mandinka clan, in the vicinity of the Gambia River, where Jack evidently grew up. Igbo Clarinda came from the delta of the Niger River, where the Igbo (or Ibo) people lived.

  Angola Amy was part of a different group. During the 1730s, people whom slave buyers called Angolans began to stream to America, with thousands each year brought to South Carolina from the area around the mouth of the Congo River. In a twelve-month period between 1736 and 1737, 2,891 Angolans arrived alive at Charleston, including young Amy. They came on nine different ships: the Berkeley, the Bonetta, the Garlington, the London, the Phoenix, the Scipio, the Shepherd, and the Speaker, as well as one ship whose name was not published with the others in the Charleston newspaper.

  A few years after she came to Comingtee, Amy took a mate, Windsor. In time, she had seven children: Christmas, Easter, Judy, Surrey, Dinah, Sabina, and Cleopatra. Amy and Windsor worked for the Ball family for nearly fifty years, until their deaths around 1790, when, according to plantation lists, they were still a couple. Their descendants would continue working for the Balls for another five generations, and Amy’s kin grew until her American relatives became the single largest clan of black people on the Ball rice tracts, her direct progeny numbering nearly 180 over the course of 150 years. In early 1865, Angola Amy’s great-great-great-granddaughter, twenty-one-year-old Penny, would be freed from Comingtee, along with dozens more of Amy’s descendants. Eventually, I would meet some of Penny’s progeny, who by then carried the name Gadsden. Later, I will tell the story of one of these families, eighth- and ninth-generation descendants of Angola Amy.

  For English slave dealers, the word “Angola” referred to an area on Africa’s Atlantic coast, north and south of the Congo River, which cuts east to west across the belly of Africa, two thousand miles below the great bulge in the northwest of the continent. Portuguese adventurers built depots and set up a trade in slaves on the coast south of the Congo in the 1600s, calling the area around their forts Angola. The trading posts stood in a local district, the Mbundu kingdom, from which captives were deported to sugar plantations in Portugal’s chief colony, Brazil. Wary of armed rivals, British slave ships avoided the shores of Angola. English captains traded instead with black slave sellers along a hundred-mile stretch that began at the mouth of the Congo and continued north. This area, the coast of Loango, included a port settlement, Cabinda. The Royal African Company, which brought slaves to Charleston, made the Loango coast its trading base, so much so that the company’s records from the 1720s show that all of its ships going to central Africa during that time listed Cabinda as a destination.

  By the time Amy was captured, whites had long before given up making raids themselves and instead operated forts on the coast known as “factories.” These were heavily armed buying centers to which black slave-handlers delivered their merchandise in exchange for guns, rum, and fabric. The captives brought by the black middlemen to the factories had previously been held by chiefs and headmen farther interior, away from the coast. These chiefs rounded up victims in several ways—by staging raids on villages for the purpose of getting prisoners of war, by punishing people in debt through sale into slavery, and sometimes by selling members of their own tribe for personal profit. With this black involvement at the source of
the capture business, slavery became a shared venture.

  Forced labor was practiced in West Africa before the Europeans began to carry people off, but it was not plantation slavery like that in America. West African slavery consisted of the subjugation of whole villages by invading chiefdoms, which led to arrangements that resembled the vassal societies of feudal Europe. As it was in medieval England, the vanquished were required to make oaths of obedience to the conquerors, and to meet obligations; slaves were attached to a piece of land and made to work it, giving tribute to their lords in services and in crops but holding on to personal identity. By contrast, American slavery meant the denuding of individuals of all rights and property, one person at a time. In the Asante kingdom of southern Nigeria, for example, a slave could own property, testify in judicial processes, own a slave him- or herself, intermarry with the kin of the ruling family, and be an heir to his or her master—none of which rights were held by captive American blacks. When the Europeans arrived on the African coast, this patriarchal system became rapidly more harsh, and the pace and methods of slave capture were sharpened to suit white demand.

  Angola Amy may have been a captive brought to shore from the interior, east of Loango, but people shipped out by the English also came from black slave suppliers to the south, that is, from Portuguese Angola. A trading network among the Vili tribe used a caravan system to smuggle people out of the Portuguese sphere and a hundred miles north, to British depots, which for some years offered higher prices than their rivals. Although I cannot say precisely where Angola Amy was born, or where she was captured, it is possible she left Africa after several days’ march in a slave coffle from south of the Congo to the northern Loango coast, where she boarded a ship at Cabinda.

  The English looked for people around the Congo River in part because captives from the region, compared with other Africans, could be bought with goods the British had in abundance. At the Gambia River, a week’s sail up the coast, a slave might be got for trade goods, like knives and guns, amounting to £9 or £10 sterling. At Cabinda, by contrast, slaves were sold by black captors in exchange for mere cloth, an English specialty. The unit of currency was a length of fabric called a peça, or piece (also a cabeça, or head), based on the amount of material thought necessary to clothe one person, usually two yards, sometimes a bit more. Before 1750, the average price for a healthy worker at Cabinda ranged between fifteen and twenty pieces—a saving that the slave handlers may have passed on to South Carolina customers like the price-conscious Elias Ball.

  Because their human cargo was relatively less expensive, the ships that plied the coast around Cabinda may have been larger and more miserable than the sloops sailing from elsewhere in Africa. In 1736, when Amy was hijacked, the number of people leaving Cabinda averaged 325 per ship, more than that of ships sailing from other ports.

  Elias Ball was now a sixty-year-old rice planter, one of two hundred or so men who controlled large Carolina estates. He had bought Amy as a business decision, merely to increase his cache of workers. After thirty-eight years as a slave owner, Elias would seem incapable of thinking about Amy as a person, yet his business had recently turned slightly away from the worst cruelty of its early years. The threat of violence was no longer the only incentive used to get Africans to go along with the system; now, in some cases, money actually changed hands. About the time Amy arrived, Elias had begun to pay his slaves for a kind of extra work. For black families, an income, however small, was a way to snatch a bit of comfort. For Elias and other planters, a thin system of wages was a means of buying cooperation.

  The unpaid workweek on the plantation lasted six days, including a half day on Saturday, with Sunday off. Away from the master’s rice fields, however, some people raised goods that they sold to Elias. A Comingtee slave named Abraham raised fowls, and in 1728 earned the sum of £1 10s from Elias for eighteen birds. The same year, a field hand named Marcia raised some hogs, which Elias bought for several pounds. The number of such deals—money for work on the side—doubled and tripled in a few seasons. In January 1736, Elias distributed more than £50 among twenty-two people for food they grew on their own. The workers usually sold him small amounts of rice grown in tracts separate from the main fields. In the mid-1730s, Windsor, Angola Amy’s partner, grew three bushels of rice, for which Elias paid £1 3s. A man called Carolina raised twenty-nine bushels, and a field hand named Devonshire, twelve. Abraham, the bird man, was the most entrepreneurial, one winter selling thirty-four bushels of rice, which earned £12 15s for his family.

  To raise these extra crops, workers seem to have negotiated a set-aside of a piece of land, one extra plot going to each household. The plots were as small as a tenth of an acre per family, though some were larger, and lay behind or near each cabin. Later Elias evidently saw the backyard rice market as competition and therefore started paying field hands only for corn. Slaves also grew vegetables and kept chickens on “their” land, not to sell, but for their own use. One thing remained constant about the wages: Elias made sure people never saved enough money to purchase their own freedom. The practice of paying slaves seems to have lasted for two or three generations, until the American Revolution, after which it disappears in the Ball accounts.

  Another innovation, the “task system,” arose to regulate the amount of unpaid labor each person was forced to do. A task was a specific measure of work that could be completed in a day. The most typical task called for a field hand to hoe weeds from around rice plants on a given piece of land—specifically, one-quarter acre, or about 105 feet square. After the plot was finished, the worker had the rest of the day off. Tasks eventually covered all plantation operations, from caring for horses, to pounding rice, to making fences. For removing the husk from the rice grain, the daily quota was seven mortars of rice pounded in a day, and for fences, one hundred logs split into rails, each rail twelve feet.

  The task system differed from the gang system on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. A slave gang on Barbados worked all day under a white overseer, while in Carolina workers went into the fields at sunrise under the command of a black “driver.” Eight or nine hours later, a worker might finish the task. The task system gave slaves more control, as well as time to work on their own plots for spending money.

  Elias Ball’s records show that many hands bought personal property with wages picked up on the side. A trade developed in caps, handkerchiefs, smoking pipes, blankets, and knives. Most who grew extra food for money, and thereby acquired little luxuries, seem to have been men, although women may have had goods other than corn to sell, perhaps yam made from fleece or clothing sewn on off-time. The most inventive person in the subsidiary economy, however, was a woman named Hannah.

  Hannah was a field hand, apparently without a partner, who grew neither corn nor rice, but tobacco. In the 1720s one of Elias’s daughters, Elizabeth Ball, married Richard Shubrick, a ship captain. After that, Shubrick and Elias sometimes sold people to each other—one of whom was Hannah. Elias first called her Hannah Shubrick to signal that he had gotten her from his son-in-law, and later Captain Hannah, I suspect either because Shubrick had been a sailor or because Hannah was personally commanding. After a few years working tasks in the rice fields, Captain Hannah planted her own set-aside, choosing tobacco as the crop. In 1740 she collected £2 15s for the leafy plant, more than several of her neighbors earned from com. It is possible that Captain Hannah brought her tobacco-growing skills with her from Africa. Tobacco was common in parts of West Africa, and at least some black Carolinians may have carried the skill with them when hijacked to America. Perhaps Captain Hannah knew of the tobacco markets in Virginia, several hundred miles north, and realized she could always get a price for her harvest. Or maybe Hannah herself smoked tobacco.

  Red Cap was old and rich, had lived a long time in the swamps, and wanted to get out of the daily business of rice planting. In the late 1730s he sealed his decision: he would move to Charleston. In preparation, he began to hand over his estate t
o his sons, Elias Jr. and John Coming Ball. As a gesture, the father gave his namesake a thousand acres so the young man could try his hand as a plantation patriarch. The tract, known as St. James, stood farther up the Cooper River, north of the old Comingtee homestead. That same year Elias also bought ten new slaves, perhaps to give to his younger son. Next he hired a new overseer, Charles Pemberton, and began to turn over responsibility for Comingtee to him. The new overseer took wages in kind—tobacco, sugar, and a gallon of rum a week. In May 1738, Elias had Pemberton take up residence in the original wooden dwelling house on the plantation. Pemberton worked with a slave called Quaco to repair the old building before moving in. Finally, in February 1739, Red Cap retired from rice planting and moved to his house in Charleston.

  After he was in town just six months, a violent black uprising exploded. A small band of Angolans began a desperate bid for freedom that became the largest, bloodiest slave revolt in the British colonies of North America.

  The rebellion started on a Sunday, the single day off for slaves and the day almost all free people left their townhouses and plantations to attend church services. The Christian sabbath became the moment in the routine of society when slave owners felt the most vulnerable. Chances of a “servile revolt,” everyone knew, were highest when white people gathered to give thanks for the blessings of supremacy that God had bestowed. On September 9, 1739, the much-feared Sunday uprising came twenty miles southwest of Charleston, along the banks of the Stono River, in St. Paul’s Parish. The Stono River ran parallel to the coast for a few miles before cutting inland and, like the Cooper, was home to a dozen or more rice plantations. On the banks of a western tributary of the Stono, an hour or two before dawn a group of blacks led by a slave named Jemmy left their houses. They broke into a general store, overpowered and decapitated two white men guarding it, and made off with guns and powder. They left the men’s heads on the steps.