by Edward Ball
Sometime before the Civil War, a white traveler in South Carolina overheard black workers singing in a barnyard, and wrote down the words of the song:
Johnny, come down the hollow,
Oh hollow.
The nigger-trader got me,
Oh hollow.
The speculator bought me,
Oh hollow.
I’m sold for silver dollars,
Oh hollow.
Boys, go catch the pony,
Oh hollow.
Bring him round the corner,
Oh hollow.
I’m goin’ way to Georgia,
Oh hollow.
Boys, good-bye forever,
Oh hollow.
There is no way of knowing how the remaining Ball slaves consoled one another and recovered from the breakup of their world. But it appears that within three years, at least some were prepared to reply to what had happened. In June 1822, a black ship carpenter named Peter was arrested in Charleston on a rumor and accused of taking part in a conspiracy to overthrow white rule. Peter Poyas belonged to a brother of Eliza Ball, Isaac’s wife. The prisoner’s home plantation, Windsor, stood just north of Limerick, Isaac and Eliza’s country home. As it happens, Windsor was also the place where Mrs. Ball was born. Presumably Isaac and Eliza would have seen Peter around, but the accused had since come some distance from Windsor. He lived in Charleston, had his own shop on the Charleston wharfs, and had taught himself to read and write.
Peter was interrogated by the Intendant of Charleston, James Hamilton, head of the city’s guard and patrols. The prisoner proved composed under questioning and nonchalant in his denials, actually managing to reassure the nervous police. Peter was let go, and a black informant was instructed to spy on him.
Meanwhile, a slave already in detention, William, announced that there was in fact a plan for an uprising, due to go off Sunday night, June 16, at midnight. The authorities dismissed the new rumor. But on Friday, June 14, a slave owner came into the Intendant’s office in a panic. The man had not known about the investigation but had just heard from one of his own workers about the conspiracy. It was set to go off in two days, he said, on Sunday.
Patrols cut the roads into and out of town, and the city fell under the grip of an occupation. The guardhouses were fortified, and four companies of militia paraded the streets throughout Sunday night, brandishing their guns. Monday morning arrived without incident. The weekend had been “an occasion involving such deep interest and distressing anxiety,” according to a report, especially “among the female part of our community.”
A Court of Magistrates and Freeholders convened to investigate and make arrests. The list of conspirators grew as new names were extracted from each prisoner seized. Peter was arrested a second time, his name on the lips of half a dozen suspects.
As the dragnet widened, a young slave named Paris, identified by the court as belonging to a Mrs. Ball, was implicated. This time the trail of subversion led right to the family hearth. Paris seems to have been the property of Ann Simons Ball, mistress of Comingtee and the wife of John Jr. After John Jr. lost his first wife, he had married Ann Simons, an independent woman whose letters show that she held strong opinions about obedience among workers. A slave named Paris was born at Comingtee on January 16, 1805, to a field hand called Hagar. If this was the same person, he must have been sent during his childhood to work at one of the Ball houses in Charleston. Court papers say that “Paris Ball” was hired out in the city to William’s Wharf, probably as a stevedore. The wharf job put him not far from the carpentry shop of Peter, the lead prisoner.
The investigators titled their report “An account of the late intended insurrection among a portion of the blacks of this city.” They concluded that the scheme, headed off at the last moment, was supposed to have had three phases or military strokes. From James Island, across Charleston harbor, a party of rebels had planned to land at the southern tip of the city, where they would make an effort to capture the main arsenal and guardhouse. Meanwhile, another party was to have seized the guardhouse at the north end, on the narrow pass out of town known as the Neck. A third assault was to take place at the rice mill owned by Governor Thomas Bennett, on the banks of the Cooper River.
The “father of the plot,” in the words of the court, was a man named Denmark Vesey. Vesey was a free black carpenter in his fifties. According to testimony at his trial, for four years Vesey had planned the uprising, with Peter as his first lieutenant. The two men, witnesses said, had taken their inspiration from the 1791 revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in Saint Domingue. Vesey was a Christian, even something of an evangelist, whose favored passages in the Bible concerned the enslavement of the Jews. He was known to tell the story, over and again, of how the Israelites were delivered from four hundred years of captivity and made their way out of Egypt. Witnesses said that Vesey would often cite one verse, Exodus 21:16, to stress how black hardship might be brought to an end: “[A]nd he that stealeth a man, and selleth him … shall surely be put to death.”
The trials began June 19 and continued for a month. Peter was the fourth tried. According to the court, Peter “possessed the largest share of the confidence of Denmark Vesey” and was “the most efficient of all the ringleaders.” Many witnesses named Peter as the recruiter who had brought them into the conspiracy. In the course of testimony, it emerged that Peter had written letters to Saint Domingue, seeking help for the uprising from the black government there. The court, impressed, called him a man of “boldness and sagacity.” Peter was apparently also military-minded, his job in the scheme having been to lead the assault on the main guardhouse. After a two-day hearing, the court found that Peter had made “great efforts to induce others to join in the insurrection” and sentenced him to hang. According to court papers, while in jail awaiting death, Peter told his comrades to keep faith. “Do not open your lips!” Peter was overheard saying. “Die silent, as you shall see me do!” Denmark Vesey, “in whose bosom the nefarious scheme was first engendered,” came to trial June 27, and was sentenced to die with Peter. Vesey also refused to talk. Although the court papers bulge with testimony, they contain nothing from Vesey or Peter themselves. The two men were hanged, along with five others, on the second of July.
There are three pieces of evidence that show how the Balls felt about these events. While they wrote much to one another, the letters from the summer of the conspiracy have strangely disappeared from the family papers. Of the few that survive, none mentions the arrests or trials. This odd omission is made more peculiar by the fact that family correspondence resumes in the fall, after the case was closed. Either the Balls regarded the conspiracy as unimportant, which is unlikely, or what letters they wrote to one another about it have gone missing. Nevertheless, one measure that the family was overtaken with fear can be found in a religious diary kept by twenty-eight-year-old Eliza Ball, who had grown up at Windsor plantation, as did one of the ringleaders, Peter Poyas. “O heavenly Father,” wrote Eliza, composing a prayer about the uprising. “[H]ow great has been thy mercy to us, in a public way in protecting and saving us & our city from fire & murder which threatened us … from a class of people among us, continue this thy mercy O God in still protecting us from such an evil. … Change their hearts O Lord that they may never meditate such evil things, but may live in peace, contentment as thou willed.”
A letter from a distant relative points to more distress. “May the Almighty protect you … from their devilish machinations,” wrote John Moultrie, an in-law in England, to Isaac Ball. “[I]n these times of emancipation freedom and liberality, you gentlemen freeholders in the Southern States will be in constant apprehensions [of] insurrection and murdering of the Whites.”
A third piece of evidence comes from oral tradition. A cousin told me the story that when she was a child in the 1950s she sat with her grandfather and mine, Nathaniel Ball, as he was telling plantation tales. Grandfather Nat described how on the night of the expected uprising the Balls
armed themselves with guns in their houses; bonfires were set around the district, and the family stayed awake till dawn, trembling at every noise. Grandfather Nat would have said more, but he was interrupted by his daughter, who stopped the story so as to prevent the old man from frightening his grandchildren.
When a new round of trials began, Paris Ball went before the court on July 16. Beyond a birthdate, the Ball records are silent about Paris. He pled not guilty to the charge of “attempting to raise an insurrection among the Blacks against the Whites.” The testimony of Monday Gell, an Igbo who ran a harness-making shop, was crucial to Paris’s fate. Monday Gell had plotted with Peter and Vesey, then turned state’s evidence. When he took the stand, the harness-maker said that Paris was in league, too.
“[He] frequently came to me to know how the thing was going on,” Gell testified. “The week after Peter was taken up,” Paris “came to me and said, ‘Your name is called—be on your guard.’ ” Gell depicted Paris as a footsoldier who had surrendered eagerly to the plot. When another defendant giving evidence for the state, a black man named Perrault, took the stand, he confessed and also implicated Paris. “I knew that he [Paris] knew of the business,” Perrault said. “I saw him at Monday’s [harness shop] and heard him speaking of it. He was as much in it as I am.”
Either Paris Ball himself refused to testify or his words were ignored by the court. On Friday, July 19, he was sentenced to death.
With the second of their people slated to die, the Balls were probably frightened out of their wits, and feeling betrayed. The family was convinced that it treated workers with the watchfulness of parents. I have often heard this characterization of relations between the family and the slaves myself, from one or another relative. There was some proof of this assertion, to be sure, in the span of the business. By 1822 the Balls had been in the plantation trade 125 years. If their people were badly handled, no amount of force could have kept them down so long. So why would Peter and Paris, raised in the contented clan of Ball slaves, want to kill those who looked after them?
One night after reading about Paris Ball, I returned to my temporary home in Charleston, the Branford-Horry House on Meeting Street. In the court papers, I had seen mention of a conspirator who once lived at the same address. The plotter’s name was John, a coachman who belonged to rice planter Elias Horry, owner of the house at the time. According to witnesses at his trial, John had a piece of personal property, a sword, and in the weeks before the uprising often talked about what he planned to do with it. John said that when the signal went out, he intended to run upstairs in the mansion and kill his master and family in their beds.
“I’m ready whenever the blacks break out,” John boasted to one witness, who later turned against him. The coachman was arrested, tried, hanged.
That night, I returned to house where John had once lived, went upstairs, and closed and locked the door.
The investigation and trials of 1822 continued for eight weeks. Thirty-five were hanged, and fifty-two acquitted. In the end, the family seems to have extended forgiveness, at least to Paris. On July 24, 1822, two days before Paris was to hang, the Balls filed a petition with the governor, asking that he be deported rather than killed. Peter was a ringleader, everyone knew, but Paris was a follower. Governor Bennett agreed, and commuted the young man’s sentence to “banishment beyond the limits of the United States.”
Three months later, on Saturday, October 26, the Carolina Gazette ran a small notice about several slaves, including Paris, who had been pardoned from death. They were aboard a cargo vessel in the harbor, the newspaper reported. The governor had set a deadline for Paris Ball and his comrades: “seven days for the vessels in which they have been shipped to leave the port.”
13
A PAINTER’S LEGACY
One day at the end of winter the telephone rang and a voice said, “This is Edwina Harleston Whitlock.” The voice wavered with age but had a beautiful diction, every syllable crisp. “I understand you have been trying to research your blood relations of color.”
It was a gentle sentence that did not reveal its motive. I had received unpleasant phone calls and letters from white people who had strong views about protecting “our race,” and I suspected this was the beginning of a similar communication. My suspicion did not relax when I heard the name “Harleston,” a family associated with the Balls from the time Elias “Red Cap” Ball married Elizabeth Harleston in South Carolina, around 1700, and continuing straight down.
“I’ve been talking to descendants of people whom the Balls enslaved,” I said. “Some of them might be also descendants of the Balls.”
I could not say, from her voice, whether Edwina Harleston Whitlock would describe herself as white or black. (The old middle category, mulatto, was no longer operative.) Whatever her appearance, she had a memorable way of speaking, and she began to unroll a story over the phone. Edwina Whitlock listed her forebears, who, as it happened, were also some of my forebears; and as she spoke, her dialect had the rhythm of a dance, with poised stops and starts, and coy bursts of laughter. Finally, the voice arrived at the name of a couple that seemed significant.
“My great-grandparents were Kate Wilson and William Harleston,” said Edwina Whitlock.
I knew William Harleston as one of the Ball cousins from the mid-1800s, but I did not know Kate Wilson. “Was Kate Wilson a person of color?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” the voice said. “In every sense of the word, William Harleston, the rice planter, and Kate Wilson, his slave, were man and wife. They had eight children, one of whom was my grandfather. I am one of their descendants.”
Edwina Harleston Whitlock made her home in Atlanta, having moved to Georgia after retirement to be near her daughters. She was in her seventies, and had been widowed for many years. Mrs. Whitlock lived in a prosperous neighborhood, in a house with a lawn under the shadow of some pine trees. It was a bright day, and the brick of her house seemed grainy in the full, rounded light of the Southern afternoon. Mrs. Whitlock opened the door and stretched out her hand, but my first gaze fell behind her, because she stood at the entrance to what looked like a portrait gallery. For a moment I ignored her outstretched hand as I peered at the walls lined with paintings. Even in the dimness, I could see the pictures, many of them portraits, with some landscapes in between.
Edwina Whitlock wore black trousers, a white long-sleeved shirt, black hoop earrings, and light pink lipstick. Her face described a smooth oval, and her eyebrows were very fine. Mrs. Whitlock’s skin was the color of brown paper, or the color of sepia from an old photograph, and her hair was white. Her eyes glinted, and she had a slight smirk.
“It’s a great pleasure,” said Mrs. Whitlock, with a pause, “to meet a long-lost cousin.”
Edwina Whitlock’s daughter, Mae Whitlock Gentry, was also on hand. In her late thirties and slender, she was an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and had much of her mother’s face and eyes. She was divorced, she later said, with two daughters, Alison and Sylvia.
Mae Gentry, her mother, and I sat around the kitchen table, and went through the family story.
“The lineage begins with John Harleston, who immigrated in 1699,” said Mrs. Whitlock, “with his sister, Elizabeth Harleston.”
“Elizabeth Harleston married Elias Ball, founder of the American Ball family,” I said.
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Whitlock.
“That means that our earliest connection is through the parents of Elizabeth and John Harleston,” I finished.
“So you really are cousins,” said Mae Gentry, a little surprised. “I suspected as much.”
“So are you,” Mrs. Whitlock corrected her daughter, then giggled.
Our common forebears were white people, it appeared, whereas Mae Gentry and Mrs. Whitlock “lived black.” I fell silent, waiting for the story of how the two sides crossed.
“The son of John Harleston,” Mrs. Whitlock went on, “was John Harleston the second, and that John’s
son was William Harleston the first. William the first had five children, including William Harleston the second. William the second was the common-law husband of Kate Wilson.”
Mrs. Whitlock’s voice meandered hauntingly, beginning a sentence in a low register, wavering on a phrase, then shooting up an octave, finally drifting down to a satisfying cadence, like a cello performing a partita. As Mrs. Whitlock spoke, the rests and measures seemed to appear in the air.
“Who was Kate Wilson?” I asked.
“Kate Wilson was my father’s grandmother,” Mrs. Whitlock answered. “She was born in 1820, we think in Barbados. William Harleston built a house for Kate in Charleston, at 28 Laurel Street, now called Ashe Street. When he died, in 1874, William Harleston stipulated in his will that his property was to be equally divided between his white relatives and, as he put it, ‘my colored woman Kate, formerly my slave.’ Kate lived in that house until she died, in 1886.”
“Pretty much it was a marriage,” Mae put in, “because William Harleston never had a white wife. He had one other child that we know of by another black woman, Sibby, or Hattie. So he wasn’t completely faithful to Kate.”
“Was it common for white planters to sleep with their slave women?” I asked.
“How many people in Charleston do you know who look like us?” Edwina Whitlock replied, an eyebrow raised.
“Some,” I said truthfully.
“Yeah, it was common,” Mae Gentry came back. “We don’t believe it was common for planters to leave their property to these women. In fact, this is the only case I have heard of.”
Mrs. Whitlock’s face showed undiluted pride. These events had determined the pattern of her life, and she embraced them.
“Kate and William had eight children,” Mrs. Whitlock said, “including my grandfather, Edwin G. Harleston, who was born in 1852. One of his sons was my father, Robert Harleston, and another was my Uncle Teddy Harleston, or Edwin A. Harleston, who raised me.” The cast of characters filled up, and I momentarily lost the thread. I asked about Uncle Teddy. “The painter, who did those pictures in the living room,” Mrs. Whitlock answered. Our families were apparently connected, but the Harlestons had something the Ball family could not boast, a serious painter.
