Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “You know, my father said that his father used to say, ‘If you are ever in trouble, go see one of the Balls in their Broad Street office.’ ” The distant memory came back on Mr. Martin’s long face. “My father never said why—or that there was a connection to the Ball plantations.”

  There was a rising in his voice that said we had struck something, like a boat against a submerged tree, and we nodded at each other. The Martin family had this trace of lore about the slave days, half hidden, half in the open.

  In a moment, Mr. Martin disappeared and came back with an old photograph. It showed a black family consisting of nine people, handsomely dressed, posed in a photography studio. The family sat on wicker furniture against a backdrop that resembled a Victorian parlor. The portrait had been taken around 1900, when an urbane English style crept into the lives of upwardly mobile Americans. The boys wore knickers and jackets with little ascots at the neck, and one girl had a dark dress with long sleeves and ruffles at the shoulder.

  “This is a picture of the entire family up to a certain time,” said Mr. Martin. “My grandfather, my grandmother, Anna Cruz, their children.”

  The two parents, P. Henry Martin and his wife, Anna Cruz, appeared to be in their forties. Anna Cruz had a broad face and straight hair gathered in a bun. Mr. Martin said that he had heard she had Native ancestry. There was a circle around her head, and numbers written on each person in the photograph. Long ago, someone had made the markings, but Mr. Martin didn’t know who.

  “My grandfather wrote a tablet with information about each of his children,” said Mr. Martin, bringing out a little booklet. The booklet ran to fourteen pages and contained the names and birthdays of the minister’s children, their first words, and other firsts. “Maybe the numbers on the photograph were his private code.”

  Mr. Martin pointed at a boy in the picture, about thirteen years of age, wearing breeches and a coat with wide lapels. “My father,” he said.

  From the photograph, it was obvious that P. Henry Martin had done well after the end of slavery. He wore wide-rimmed eyeglasses, a starched shirt, and a satisfied expression. His seven children were carefully attired. He had a trim mustache, and laid his eyes firmly on the camera. Mr. Martin put back the picture and eased into his chair.

  “I think if my grandfather were here now, he probably would be murdered,” he said suddenly.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If he were to tell the average black youngster about his association with the Ball family, they would resent it so much. They would be so angry, because of his kind feelings towards the white people, that they would do something to him.”

  I uncovered more about the life of P. Henry Martin. He was born simply Henry on October 6, 1855, at Limerick plantation. Henry’s father does not appear in the plantation records, but according to slave lists his mother’s name was Dinah. Near the end of his life, P. Henry Martin would write several letters to the Balls, his former owners, and in one he would remind them that his grandfather was a man named Peter Robards. Although his letter does not say so, I suspect Robards was white. Martin would point out in his correspondence that the Ball family “gave my Grandmother her Freedom and a servant to wait on her.” Freedom for Henry’s grandmother may have been a late reward for years of hard work—or it may have been that she was the mistress of Mr. Robards, a person known to the master’s family. In any case, Dinah’s infant was baptized in the arms of Julia Cart Ball. Julia, Isaac Ball’s mother, was thirty-one at the time. Inside the master’s house, she held the child as an Episcopal clergyman poured water on his brow.

  The closeness of the baby Henry to the Ball family probably meant that his parents worked in the plantation mansion as house servants. If Henry’s grandfather was white, his parents may well have been light-skinned, and many house slaves came from families with both white and black forebears. The child’s intimacy with the master’s family seems to have become a theme of his life.

  When Henry was nine, the old world came to an end. On Sunday, February 26, 1865, a band of soldiers in blue uniforms arrived on the lawn at Limerick. The Federal troops told the slaves they were free—a fact they knew the moment they saw the cavalry, whose arrival they had been expecting. Some of the freedpeople, with some soldiers, emptied the food storerooms, then searched the mansion. Henry later remembered that while the raid was going on, he found himself walking around, going from building to building. At one point, he happened on the cooper’s shop, where he saw several old men praying. When he asked the elderly slaves why, Henry was told that they were pleading with the Lord not to let the Yankees burn the plantation buildings, as they had been known to do.

  After the war Henry took part of his grandfather’s name, Peter, and added the surname Martin. Sometimes, for good measure, he would sign with his grandfather’s surname, as well: Peter Henry Robards Martin. P. Henry Martin seems to have spent his teens getting a rudimentary education. In 1866, the occupying Yankees opened the first school for blacks in the area, the Nazareth Church School, in the town of Pinopolis, a few miles from Limerick. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedpeople, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau—was disdained by local whites for doing this. According to a report in the agency’s files, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., most landlords in the Cooper River area did not favor the education of black people, though a number of middle-class whites, evidently in Charleston, did. The one-room school closed in March 1868, and another school opened in the neighboring town of Moncks Corner, where there was apparently less hostility. A white woman named Mary von Hagen did the teaching. It is likely that P. Henry Martin, then thirteen, got his first taste of written language at one or both of these schoolhouses. He later lived in Pinopolis, location of the first school, where he taught black children, reliving the scene of his own early classroom awakening.

  Young P. Henry Martin developed a close relationship with Isaac Ball, one of four brothers who lived at Limerick. When Martin was twenty, Isaac was in his early thirties, and running another plantation as a sharecrop landlord. Martin may have worked for Isaac doing carpentry. Their friendship seems to have been real, because later Martin would credit Isaac, saying, “he set me right in the church.”

  About 1880, when he was twenty-five, Martin married Anna Cruz and the two moved to Charleston. In the city, Martin became involved with the founding of a black church, on Smith Street. With a religious conversion helped along by his moderate book-learning, he gave sermons at the new church as a deacon, while continuing to earn an income from carpentry and construction.

  Isaac Ball traveled a similar route to Martin, back and forth between Charleston and the countryside. Isaac’s sharecrop farm was an old plantation called The Bluff, which stood on the west branch of the Cooper River across the stream from Comingtee, and had been inherited by his wife; he also did business in the city. It is likely that Isaac gave Martin referrals for work and helped him in other ways. In letters that Martin later wrote to the Balls, the ex-slave asked his former owners for donations of clothing and books to be used at black-run schools. The requests were perfunctory, as though he was used to making them, and the Balls evidently complied.

  P. Henry Martin and Anna Cruz had ten children, three of whom died young. Their second child, Peter Henry Jr., born in 1886, grew up to become a roofer. Peter Jr.’s son, Thomas Martin, would become an educator and assistant principal of a public high school in Charleston. The roofer and the educator each broke off a piece of the ex-slave’s skills.

  After the children were raised, Henry Sr. moved inland to the little town of Pinewood. At some point, he built a church and, when it was finished, started a school inside for the children of the parishioners. Martin lived in other country towns and in each place seems to have devoted himself to the education of black children.

  When he grew old, Henry Martin renewed his acquaintance with the Balls, who had enslaved him and also helped him. In the 1920s, when Martin was in town, he visited Isaac, blind and in his l
ate seventies. Martin was given the gentle reception extended to family retainers. It’s not clear how often Martin and Isaac saw each other when they were old men, but it was at least several times. After one such visit, in 1932, Martin wrote to thank his hosts:

  I arrived home safe, we are all well. It was a deal of pleasure for me to find you all. When I got home and spoke of seeing my old and young mistresses, the young negroes laughed, but I told them as long as there are Balls that I will have mistresses and masters. I remembered when the Yankees came to Limerick and wants to burned master dwelling house. … And they asked the people what they want out of the house. They said master [William James Ball, Isaac’s father] was good and kind to them and they would take nothing out of master’s house. When Christmas came that year master called up all the people and told them because they was so good not to take anything from him as other people had done down the river, master give them an ox name Mulberry for their Christmas. … I can remember many things of old Limerick [like] some of master’s animals names. [He had] two bird dogs, Bounce & Bill. Mas Frederick Gibbs [William Ball’s brother-in-law] had a dog at Windsor named Riot. Master told me once that he wants me to remember that there are no better people than my father’s people …

  I am your obed’t

  Henry

  On March 26, 1933, Isaac died, and the news traveled the same day to Martin. By this time, he had moved back to Pinopolis. The day after his former master’s death, he wrote a letter of condolence addressed to one of Isaac’s children, Julia Ficken:

  Pinopolis, S.C.

  March 27, 1933

  Mrs. Henry H. Ficken

  35 Meeting St.

  Charleston, S.C.

  My dear madam,

  The sadness of the passing away of Mas Isaac came as a blow to me. He’s the last of my oldest masters. Mas Isaac has done a deal for me. Bishop Thomas said in his council Mas Isaac had spoken very well of me. [He] set me right in the church. I was to have seen him last year but was unable. He promised me some books and other things but he has gone to his long home. Writing you I can’t keep my eyes dry. Mas Isaac and Mas Elias treated me as one who belongs to the family. His mother named me. The last word my father told me was on his death bed, he said when I need advice always go to a Ball. We will bow from above.

  Your obedient Henry

  After the burial, Julia Ficken went up to Pinopolis with some friends to visit Martin and thank him for his letter. Martin wasn’t home, so Julia left him a note. Martin was touched, and replied:

  My dear mistress …

  My father’s people was loved by the Balls. … I was picked and cared for by Mas Willie, Mas Isaac, Mas John, and Mas Elias [four Ball brothers at Limerick]. Master Isaac was the most fine in the bunch. If he was alive and doing business I would be under him now. I told the world, as long as there are Balls I will have mistresses and masters.

  P. H. Martin

  P. Henry Martin died later that year, in November, eight months after the death of his former master.

  Not all ex-slaves experienced the same world after freedom. Where many ex–field hands struggled, former house slaves sometimes found themselves in a stronger economic position. Their old masters helped them to get loans and housing, they got better educations, they got their photographs taken, and some simply earned more money. As a member of a family who had lived among the Balls, P. Henry Martin seems to have done better than many freedpeople. But his improved station in life seems to have been bought with subservience. He addressed his white helpers as “Master” and signed his letters “obediently.”

  Victor Martin, the third child of P. Henry Martin and Anna Cruz, was born in 1889. One of Victor Martin’s daughters, Mrs. Carutha Williams, was still living. I visited her to talk about what happened to the Martin family in later years.

  Carutha Williams was in her seventies, gentle and soft-spoken, with a reserve that resembled that of her cousin, Thomas Martin. Like Thomas Martin, Mrs. Williams had a large house, having landed comfortably in widowhood. Mrs. Williams had a sweet face, a genuine smile, and a careful handshake. Nearly blind, she stretched out her hand waiting for my grasp. She moved slowly around her living room, which she knew from before her sight failed, guided me to the dining-room table, and sat down. With soft, polite cadences, Mrs. Williams finished the story of P. Henry Martin, as far as she knew it.

  “His oldest child, Henrietta, died as a young woman, of tuberculosis,” she began.

  Although she couldn’t see it, Mrs. Williams held in her hand the photograph of the Martin family in their late-Victorian costumes. She had had it reproduced and distributed throughout the family. Mrs. Williams had memorized the positions of the children in the picture, and counted them off as she spoke.

  “There was another daughter, Rosa, born about 1898.” Rosa married a man named Johnson and had children in Maryland and New York, said Mrs. Williams. “There were twins, a girl named Mattie and her brother, Morris.” Mattie married and moved away in the 1920s, then fell out of contact with the Martins. “Morris disappeared from the family entirely,” said Mrs. Williams. “He joined the service at the time of World War I, and sent postcards back from time to time. Every year someone would get one, generally from the New Jersey, New York area.” Then the cards stopped coming.

  Mrs. Williams spoke neutrally, and it seemed her evenness disguised a melancholy mood. In her stories, I saw the large, prosperous Martin family drift away from each other. The plantation legacy was never a simple story of recovery and perseverance.

  Victor Martin, the third child and Mrs. Williams’s father, grew up and moved with his wife to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to take a job at the women’s college of the same name as the town.

  “We moved to Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Williams remembered of her childhood. “Each building of the college had its own dining room and pantry, with maids, butlers, and bellhops. My father was a pantry man, where he made the salads. My mother, in another dormitory, was a waitress. The students were girls from rich families from around the country. My mother always talked about the movie actress Katharine Hepburn, because she was a student when my mother worked there. She knew Katharine Hepburn, and served her in her dormitory. The girls at Bryn Mawr were mostly generous. They were very free, and happy people.” Mrs. Williams paused, then said flatly, “As long as you took care of them.”

  Anna Cruz died in the early 1900s. Her widower was remarried, to a woman named Ida Royal.

  “My grandfather had an eleventh child by his second marriage,” said Mrs. Williams. “A man we called B.B., for Barnabas Blyden. He had a family, too.”

  After Mrs. Williams went through all the children, she came back in her stories to Charleston. P. Henry Martin Jr. married Jennie Singleton, a woman in good circumstances. With the marriage came a good piece of property in Charleston. This consisted of a lot and buildings at 18 Norman Street—a two-story house in the front, and a cottage in back—property that became the Martin homestead in the city. The house seemed to represent the continuing good fortune of the Martin clan. It was the first house built on its block after the lane was cleared and given its name. It was the first house in the neighborhood that had running water, and the first with a telephone. (The number in the 1920s consisted of a mere four digits, 8383.) The house had the first complete bathroom in the neighborhood, with a tub, toilet, and basin, at a time when almost all black families had outhouses.

  Mrs. Williams, born Carutha Martin, lived briefly at the family homestead. When she was a teenager, Carutha Martin carried forward the success of the family, becoming one of a small number of black women who were able to attend college.

  “I went to South Carolina State College,” she said, naming the historically black school. “I was lucky. I graduated in May 1944. My first job was in Alabama, as a secretary on the campus of Tuskegee Institute.”

  After two years in Alabama, Carutha Martin came back to Charleston, was married, and settled in the city. She smiled sweetly as she talked about her h
usband, Clarence Williams, who died in 1981. In her early married life, Mrs. Williams worked in a black high school in the city, the Avery Normal Institute. It was the second of her jobs with a black-run school.

  “Was there a change in racial climate that you can remember in the early 1950s?” I asked.

  “In the 1940s, I was young, and it didn’t matter,” Mrs. Williams said. “Or it mattered, but we just had hope. We didn’t have a clear picture of anything happening. But when court decisions started being made, then breakthrough came.”

  Mrs. Williams referred to local cases involving integration at the workplace. Many of the lawsuits emerged from the courtroom of J. Waties Waring, a white federal judge in Charleston who, in the late 1940s, made a series of rulings that favored black civil rights.

  “That was when the government said that some black people should work in offices in the shipyard,” Mrs. Williams remembered.

  The Navy shipyard, a little upriver from Charleston harbor, was one of the largest employers in the region. As workplace segregation began to loosen, Mrs. Williams, a well-educated, mild-mannered woman, found herself on the front line of change.

  “All the black people who worked in the shipyard until that time were caretakers, or clean-up people, and some mechanics,” she said. “With the legal breakthrough, there came a struggle, because white people were not interested in seeing black people move in. In 1954, I took the tests for a job at the shipyard, and was hired as a secretary. The room I worked in had one hundred and twenty people in it.”

  “How many black folks worked in that room?” I asked.

  “I did,” came the answer.