Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “The tide from Hugo came up real high,” said Mr. Richmond. “They washed the markers away. Them markers likely at the bottom of the river.”

  A short distance from Comingtee stood the St. James Reformed Episcopal Church, a white cinderblock building framed by pine trees. Most of the parishioners came from Sawmill, and Mrs. Richardson’s family belonged to the congregation, which traced its history to the slave church on the plantation. One Sunday I went to St. James with Georgie Richardson and her family.

  It was raining, and a gray cloud canopy darkened the church door. The damp seemed to silence the neighborhood, the grumble of tires on asphalt making the only sound. Mrs. Richardson wore a dress and hat; Barbara Jean put on a white robe to sing in the choir, and Barbara Jean’s children turned out in their best clothes.

  The sanctuary of St. James contained twenty plywood pews, painted brown. Three fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, veneer paneling covered the walls, and in place of a crucifix was a cloth mural, a reproduction of an Italian Renaissance painting of the Last Supper, in red, blue, and gold polyester. According to the minister, the congregation numbered thirty-two. The turnout included fifteen in the pews, plus a choir of ten. As Mrs. Richardson introduced me, I recognized family names from Comingtee—Simmons, Wilson, Fayall, and others. Mrs. Richardson and I took our place in the second pew, and the first hymn came up. There were no instruments, just voices, clapping, and a tambourine.

  Episcopalianism, brought from England by the colonists, was the religion of the masters. After the Civil War, most black people joined Baptist or Methodist churches, rejecting the prayers of the slave-owning class. St. James, however, stayed with the old liturgy. The minister was a tall man with a big jaw and a clear, booming voice. As he read the order of worship, I recognized prayers from the days of King George III, redolent with the “thees” and “thous” of the old Book of Common Prayer.

  I held the prayer book in front of Mrs. Richardson so she could follow. She looked away, and ten minutes later I remembered she did not read.

  The story of St. James was the story of Sawmill. In the 1840s, there was a couple on Comingtee, Binah and Brawley. Brawley was the hog-minder, Binah a field hand, and the two lived in a cabin on a rise known as Indian Spring Hill. Brawley was a plantation preacher who gave sermons and gathered a following until about 1850, when he and his wife built a little clapboard church. Binah and Brawley became leaders on the slave street, Brawley preaching in the field hands’ church for many years. After the Civil War, the question arose of what to do, right away at least, with freedom. Some held that everyone should stay on the plantation and work as sharecroppers, while others wanted to leave. Brawley preached in favor of staying; listening, most of the Comingtee people signed the sharecrop contract. At another Ball place, Limerick, most everyone left.

  A few years into Reconstruction, Brawley died. His congregation kept going and built another church, bigger than the first, a rectangle with a vaulted ceiling and a steep roof. The building was made from pine and contained not a single nail, all joints being held together with pegs. The church pooled resources and bought a bell, which they placed in a little belfry above the front door. Mrs. Richardson would one day be baptized in this church. When the black people had to leave Comingtee, they decided to move the church to Sawmill. A new site was selected, the windows battened down, the bell removed. The building was hoisted onto wheels, rolled to a little clearing at the edge of Sawmill, set down, and consecrated as St. James Reformed Episcopal Church.

  “A good bit didn’t know how to write in those days,” said Mrs. Richardson. “But they had church. Preach out of the Bible, and had a good time, too! Someone would come to church and read to people, and they would memorize it. I can’t read the Bible, but when I go to church, I take the Word.”

  The original peg-and-board building served until Hurricane Hugo took it down. The congregation selected another site a short distance away, and put up the new cinderblock building. Someone retrieved the bell from the rubble of the old church. It was brought to the new building and placed in a corner, as a shrine.

  After services I went into a back room to see the bell. It was cast iron, twelve inches across at the mouth, and painted silver. When I rapped it, it made a high, pleasing sound.

  In 1736 the girl who would be called Angola Amy was brought from the vicinity of the Congo River in Africa to Charleston, South Carolina, where she was bought by Elias “Red Cap” Ball and taken to Comingtee. The papers showed that Georgie Richardson, in addition to coming from Maum Mary Ann, was the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Angola Amy. Amy’s daughter Easter, born in 1746 at Comingtee, grew up and gave birth, in 1778, to Judy, who had a daughter named Dorcas, born 1805, who had Celia in 1833, who had Dorcas in 1854, who had another Celia in 1875, who gave birth to a girl called Georgianna, in 1910, who grew up to be Georgie Richardson.

  With this revelation, Mrs. Richardson and her family joined a rare group of black Americans. Few people could state the name and place of origin of an African forebear. But Angola Amy, captured and sold as a girl, had left a long paper trail. Soon after I learned of her distant African ancestry, but before I had a chance to tell her the story, Georgie Richardson died, at eighty-seven, of heart failure. I attended her funeral, held at a church near Sawmill, Holy Comforter Reformed Episcopal, sister church to her own St. James.

  The church had standing room only when the service began on an old hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.” In front of the plain room, lying on a gurney with wheels, was Mrs. Richardson’s white coffin. It stood closed, and its silver handles gleamed. Mrs. Richardson was a church-going woman, and out of respect, five pastors had come to conduct her funeral. Each clergyman gave a eulogy, followed by a hymn. The alternation of homilies with singing took time; the service lasted two and a half hours.

  Barbara Jean, her husband Leroy, and the three children sat in the front pew. Mrs. Richardson’s daughter, Celia Ann, had come down from New Jersey. The grieving of Georgie’s family sometimes grew loud, and when that happened, a woman would appear from the back of the church with a paper fan, which she waved over the mourners to cool their tears.

  When the service ended, the coffin was opened and placed in the doorway of the church, so that mourners could file past and say good-bye to the deceased. On the way out, I looked at Mrs. Richardson for the last time. Her face was heavily powdered, her mouth wired flat, and she wore a gray wig. A half hour later, at the gravesite, I stood under a green tent in the crowd of black mourners. Two gravediggers lowered the coffin into the ground, and covered it with a concrete slab.

  9

  BLOODLINES

  With the death of the founding patriarch, Red Cap, in 1751, the Ball family business centered on three plantations, or work camps, near Charleston—Comingtee, Hyde Park, and Kensington—each with seventy-five to a hundred slaves. The little American business Red Cap took on in 1698 had grown to a scale far beyond what he had envisaged.

  To convey a legacy of any kind from one generation to the next was a rare feat in colonial America. Evidence shows that most of the other white families the Balls knew from the early years had died out or moved away. In the 1720s more than 150 family names appeared in the registers of St. John’s Parish, the church precinct the family called home. Fifty years later, only five of the original surnames would remain: Ball, Broughton, Cordes, Harleston, and Ravenel. The Balls had become part of a tiny hereditary cadre.

  Red Cap had fathered twelve white children by two wives, the last when he was nearly sixty, a boy who died in infancy. Of the four who survived into the late 1700s, two had inherited most of the patrimony. John Coming Ball, thirty-six at his father’s death, lived at Hyde Park with his wife, Catherine, and several children. Next door, at Kensington, forty-one-year-old “Second Elias” Ball lived with his wife, Lydia, and their children. None of the family lived at Comingtee, which had become purely a rice farm, run by overseers. Of the two sisters who shared the Ball legacy,
Ann, who was fifty when her father died, had two children, lived in Charleston, and was married to the slave trader George Austin. Ann’s sister, twenty-year-old Eleanor, had married Henry Laurens, Austin’s partner in the import-export firm of Austin & Laurens, which sold some rice and tools, but mainly human beings. John Coming was the richest of the four siblings, the new young patriarch. In addition to Hyde Park, he owned a sixteen-hundred-acre tract, Cypress Grove; a parcel called Three Mile Head; and much other land. His holdings in 1751 amounted to 14,459 acres and 216 people.

  There were three measurable parts to the success of a plantation family: land, money, slaves. About this time, the landowning elite added a fourth: blood. The mystical properties of blood—their own and that of their workers—were included in the language with which the Balls described their world.

  Blood could be seen at work in horses. In the 1750s horse tracks were cleared in the village of Childsbury, next to Comingtee, and Moncks Corner, a few miles northwest; and later the Strawberry Jockey Club opened on land adjacent to Second Elias’s Strawberry plantation. Horse racing became a main social occasion for whites outside the city of Charleston, and the Balls would have attended many races. To be sure, they had an appetite for the chase, but more fascinating was the element of blood. Racehorses were said to be blooded, and thoroughbred racing meant the competition of animals subjected to controlled breeding. A certain “Red Doe stock,” horses descended from a fast mare called Red Doe, became famed along the Cooper River, and most planters clamored to own a few. At Kensington, Second Elias Ball kept a notebook about his stables, in which he recorded the birth and parentage of his horse teams. “Charlotte foaled a bay horse colt got by a woods horse,” he wrote. “Sylvia foaled a black mare colt with a small star got by Shim.” The stable book confirmed the ancestry of each horse, and traced the path of its blood.

  A horse was a piece of animate property, not unlike other breathing possessions. One day, Second Elias made a note that he had traded one blooded thing for another. “I made a [deal] with Mr. Philip Sandford,” he wrote. “I gave him one young Negro man … for two horses, one … a bay horse that was old.”

  Blood coursed through the family business, until the bloodline of black people became almost as important to Second Elias and John Coming Ball as their own English blood. Just as they saw themselves as part of a lineage—English parents, rice planters—the brothers began to see blacks as products of bloodlines. The notion of blood meant that for a long time the Balls thought of Africans in terms of their tribe and birthplace. One year Second Elias wrote down the birthplace of thirty-five of his male slaves at Comingtee plantation. “Gambia” he put down for some, “Angola” for others. The categories were rough, but real. Other men he described as “country-born,” meaning born in South Carolina. For Second Elias, country-born blacks may have been less desirable, because their blood had been diluted after a generation in America.

  Second Elias’s brother-in-law Henry Laurens understood blood better than anyone. As an importer of people, the husband of Eleanor Ball was in the business of bloodlines and throughout his life paid attention to the cultural origins of the Africans he sold. Eleanor’s spouse came to consider himself something of a connoisseur of black clans and blood. He gave instructions to his ship captains, the men who dealt on West African coasts, and insisted that they bring home the right kinds of people.

  “The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferr’d to all others with us save the Gold Coast,” Laurens wrote to one captain in 1756. “Gambias” included people from the Gambia River and the latter-day nations of Gambia and Senegal. The Gold Coast was what eventually became the Republic of Ghana, where gold as well as people was traded. “Gold Coast or Gambias are best,” Laurens wrote to another man. “Next To Them The Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angolas.” The Windward Coast was a west-to-east stretch of shore from Cape Mount to the port of Assini—what would eventually become the nations of Liberia and Ivory Coast. Angola lay twenty-three hundred miles to the south, around the mouth of the Congo River.

  Long before the idea of race came along, the Balls paid attention to a hierarchy of black people based on clan and tribal origin. Henry Laurens told ship captains to write down what he called the “Species” of slaves on their cargo lists, since different tribes (as everyone knew) had different traits. The idea took hold that the blood of people determined who they were and what they were capable of doing. The English were born to rule, the “Gambias” to till rice.

  Black blood could be good or bad. If Second Elias liked “Gambias” (his lists have many), the people he tried to avoid buying were “Ebos” (that is, Igbo). The Igbo lived in the area known as the Bight of Biafra, centered in the delta of the Niger River, and brought low prices on the market. It was not because they were unable to do heavy work, or even because they were less familiar with rice agriculture than people from the Gambia, where rice was a staple. Igbo were thought by planters to be morose—so melancholy, whites thought, that they had a reputation for suicide, which made them a risky investment. They were, in fact, statistically prone to hurl themselves into the Atlantic, killing themselves before their captors had a chance to sell them. Henry Laurens once wrote a letter complaining about suicide in the ranks of Igbo; another time he instructed one of his contacts that Igbo captives, should the ship be forced to buy any, should be between the ages of fifteen and twenty. According to Laurens, young Igbo people were “not accustom’ed to destroy themselves” as much as the adults. Laurens evidently found out otherwise, because he later revised the age limit downward, to fourteen. The Igbo affinity with suicide became so well known that a boat landing in the vicinity of Beaufort, down the Atlantic coast from Charleston, acquired the name Igbo Landing. Numerous people plunged in the waters there after they glimpsed the welcome they were about to receive on the American shore. Whether their deaths came from melancholy in the blood or intelligence is unclear.

  Ideas about blood grew more elaborate, until slave buyers like Second Elias believed each African clan to have deep-rooted traits. In the second generation of the Ball business, planters who bought large numbers of Africans developed the following beliefs:

  • Mandinka people, from the Gambia region, were good-looking and gentle of manner, but could not be trusted.

  • Coromantees, from the Gold Coast, were strong, courageous, and stern, but bore grudges.

  • Popo people, from the region around the port of Whydah, east of the mouth of the Volta River, were the most reliable slaves that could be found. They were accustomed to hard work, had an even temper, and were both dextrous and obedient.

  • Slaves from the region the traders called Sierra Leone, which reached from the Casamance River in the north to Sherbro Island, three hundred miles south, were regarded as good all-around “rice Negroes,” because they had grown rice for centuries.

  • Angolans, from north and south of the Congo River, were thought to be less vigorous than Popos, but mechanically minded and attractive, although apt to run away—and sometimes to stage uprisings.

  In 1762, Henry and Eleanor Laurens bought Mepkin plantation, three miles north along the Cooper River from Eleanor’s birthplace, Comingtee. In becoming a landowner, Laurens finally joined blooded plantation society. Peopling Mepkin with workers was no difficult matter, and Henry and Eleanor divided their time between Mepkin and their house in Charleston. Laurens knew little of rice agriculture and relied on advice from his brothers-in-law in the Ball family. What Laurens did understand was classification. The ship captains who reported to him often brought back unusual plants, roots, and seeds from overseas, which Laurens, in gardens he kept in town, used to develop his interest in botany. He placed the specimens just near his house, where his slaves tended them. Laurens was said to favor a particular species, the Chinese tallow tree, Stillingia sebifera, which has heart-shaped leaves and a little waxy berry that grows in clusters. Perhaps Laurens himself got down on his knees from time to time, weeded the ground around his fo
reign saplings, and then labeled them.

  Second Elias Ball came from English blood, on both his mother’s and father’s side. In paintings that survive, the middle-aged rice planter has a distracted air, his chin disappears under heavy jowls, and he appears portly and bald. Second Elias had three sons, whose patrimony he had to worry about. Fortunately for him, as his boys grew into adulthood, rice sales soared and the family man collected a windfall.

  In the 1750s, Britain went to war with France over the American territories and the issue of which monarchy would dominate the eastern half of the continent. In the so-called French and Indian War, dozens of Native clans fought on the side of the French in an effort to break up English rule. The battles unfolded in the northern colonies, far from the Ball tracts, but the war brought a boom to the rice business. Rice, as a grain, was seen as versatile, durable, and filling. With its regiments roaming the hinterland, the British crown bought up the crops of the Carolina rice planters. The price of rice nearly doubled in the last years of the 1750s, handing the Balls a lucrative reward.

  Looking after his own, Second Elias chose this moment to expand the business. In March 1764 he bought Limerick plantation, intending the place as an inheritance for his sons, who were still young enough to play on the lawn. John Coming Ball’s place, Hyde Park, bordered Limerick, the better for family togetherness. At first Limerick came empty, since the workers evidently moved with their owner before the sale. Though there were no people, the seller, Daniel Huger, was not above pawning a few items with the house. Among other things, Second Elias picked up a mahogany dressing table, two wine decanters, a bed, a set of china, and ninety-five pigs. Now there were three Ball plantations in a row on the same side of the Cooper River—Limerick, Hyde Park, and Kensington—a solid block of fifty-eight hundred acres.