Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “Now, who was Mary Louisa Moultrie, I mean, to you?” said Mrs. Whitlock. The surprises came more quickly, as Mrs. Whitlock dropped a familiar name.

  “Mary Louisa Moultrie was my father’s grandmother,” I replied. “She died in 1926.”

  “My grandfather, Edwin G. Harleston, was married to a woman named Louisa Moultrie,” Mrs. Whitlock said with a smirk.

  The Balls and the sepia-toned Harlestons moved another step closer together. Louisa Moultrie, I assumed, had been a woman with skin not unlike that of Edwina Whitlock, whose life, somehow, must have touched that of my great-grandmother. She was not “my” Mary Louisa, but the same name had been given to both a white and a mulatto child.

  I asked what had happened to Kate Wilson. Mrs. Whitlock explained that her story did not end well. Kate Wilson inherited money and a house from her slave-owning husband, William Harleston, but after his death, she was humiliated by his jealous relatives. It seems William Harleston’s sister, Hannah, had a son named Benjamin Huger, who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been Kate Wilson’s nephew.

  “According to my Uncle Teddy,” said Mrs. Whitlock, “Benjamin Huger went to Kate’s house, and there he persuaded her to sign all of her property, except the house, over to him.” For the first time Mrs. Whitlock’s face fell slightly. “Maybe Kate was ignorant, I don’t know,” she said.

  “Probably she was,” said Mae Gentry.

  “That’s the story of the South, state after state,” Mae’s mother finished.

  Kate Wilson was buried in Charleston, in a cemetery where mulatto families bought plots. Her gravestone made no mention of her white husband.

  “Mae, when did your mother start talking to you about this family business?” I asked.

  “Ever since I can remember, I heard the stories,” she said, rolling her eyes. Mrs. Whitlock giggled, and her eyes gleamed.

  “My baby son,” Mrs. Whitlock remembered, “one day he said, ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about all these dead people! I’ve got a Harleston problem of my own!’ ”

  Mrs. Whitlock laughed tenderly. Kate Wilson had lost everything, a white cousin was sitting in her kitchen, and it was all very amusing.

  There was a real if distant blood link between us by way of Red Cap’s wife, Elizabeth Harleston, and his brother-in-law John Harleston. I suspected there might also be a link through Mrs. Whitlock’s great-grandmother, Kate Wilson. In the paperwork a plausible connection soon appeared.

  Mary Louisa Moultrie, my father’s paternal grandmother, was born in 1846 on The Bluff, a 1,203-acre rice plantation on the western bank of the Cooper River. Her father, Dr. William Moultrie, a physician turned slave owner, was co-owner of The Bluff in partnership with members of the (white) Harleston family, the clan of his first wife, Hannah Harleston. Mary Louisa grew up on The Bluff and eventually inherited a stake in the land. In 1869, she married Isaac Ball, a twenty-five-year-old war veteran as well as my father’s eventual grandfather, the one my father referred to as Isaac the Confederate. Isaac and Mary Louisa settled at The Bluff and had twelve children, one of whom was my grandfather, Nathaniel Ball.

  In the 1920s, Mary Louisa Ball wrote down her memories of childhood on The Bluff. In the memoir, a few typewritten pages, Mary Louisa refers to her father as “the old gentleman” and describes the dinners that the slaves of the family would serve. “Uncle John and Uncle William Harleston, two old bachelors who lived across the river at Elwood, always came every evening to take supper,” she wrote, “and then after spending the evening with the old gentleman, would be rowed home again to their bachelors’ abode.”

  “Uncle William Harleston” was the “bachelor” with the black common-law wife, Kate Wilson. At the time, about 1850, he lived at Elwood plantation, a 605-acre tract across the river and two miles upstream from The Bluff. An unmarried man with a slave mistress was not a person who moved easily in white society. Yet he was family, so Uncle William was invited to dinner (though without his black lover) and his indiscretion overlooked.

  As it turned out, a few years before these memorable dinners, the two Harleston brothers had bought their home from the Ball family—along with, it appears, a slave named Kate. It may well have been this Kate, formerly owned by the Balls, who would become the matriarch of the mulatto Harleston clan.

  Kate’s road to common-law marriage took a meandering route. Among the many Ball men in the rice business, there was a playboy youth, Alwyn Ball. In 1826, Alwyn, eighteen and newly married, inherited some money from the estate of his father, John Ball Sr. Alwyn used the cash to buy Elwood plantation in a foreclosure sale from the sheriff of Charleston, and moved onto the land. Three years later, Alwyn took possession of eighty-two people, valued at $18,601, who lived at another Ball tract, Pimlico, in a division of more of his father’s property. These workers moved to Elwood, and on the list of their names there appears that of Katey, a girl valued at $300. Alwyn’s Katey, or Kate, was the only person of that name who came to live at the plantation.

  Six years passed, and in July 1835 Alwyn Ball died of malaria, at age twenty-eight. The executors of his estate sold Elwood and its people to a partnership consisting of Dr. William Moultrie and John Harleston. William Moultrie remained over at his home on The Bluff, but John Harleston decided to move to Elwood, together with his brother William Harleston, the two of them being unmarried. William Harleston was thirty-four when he arrived, and Kate, resident on the land, perhaps fifteen. Through these twists and turns, typical of the time, I gathered that the Balls had been the means of introduction between Kate Wilson and her future husband.

  The story told in the family of Kate’s descendants is that she moved eventually to the house in Charleston that William built for her and did not live with him on the rice farm. Kate would have had plenty of company among other black mistresses of white men in the city. Records show that of the thirty-two hundred free black people in Charleston, women outnumbered men almost two to one.

  William stayed for a time at Elwood but later moved to a plantation called The Hut, not far from the Balls’ Comingtee. At the time, Comingtee was the home of another bachelor, Keating Ball, who kept a diary. In his little daybook, Keating once made a note about his neighbor (and cousin) William Harleston. Keating was struck by the way William acted with his slaves. William, wrote Keating, was an unusual member of white society in that he could occasionally be found in the company of his workers, actually lending a hand. A diary entry that Keating made in January 1849 describes some road repairs being done by a team of William’s laborers, and by William himself: “[T]he hands in the roads [came] from Fish Pond and Hut plantations. In the road work I found Mr. William Harleston of the Hut plantation an able assistant and to him the credit is due of any good work done.”

  No photograph of Kate has survived, and it is difficult to say from what place she took the name Wilson. When William Harleston died in 1874, his eight mulatto children took his name.

  “There is a published genealogy of the Harleston family,” I said, “which states that William Harleston was unmarried.”

  “I know,” said Edwina Whitlock with an amused air. “I published an essay somewhere that says that writer didn’t do a good job of researching, because there were plenty of black Harlestons around, and everybody knew them. My aunt used to say that the postmen at that time were black, and anything that came to Charleston addressed to Harleston, they brought the things to us. We knew all their business—I mean, all y’all’s business.”

  Mrs. Whitlock raised her eyebrows, giggled, and put her tongue on her upper lip. The past seemed lighter than it might have been. Then her manner suddenly went flat.

  “There’s an expression to refer to children,” she said without smiling, “who are called ‘step-asides.’ That means that the white father does not acknowledge his black children. He has them, and he ‘steps aside.’ You never heard that expression?”

  Edwina Harleston Whitlock was born Gussie Louise Harleston, September 28, 1916, on th
e third floor of a large house on Calhoun Street in Charleston. On the first floor was the Harleston Funeral Home, a prosperous business owned by her grandfather, one of the sons of Kate Wilson and William Harleston. The funeral home benefited the entire family and gave the mulatto Harlestons a high standard of living, with chauffeurs drawn from the ranks of hearse drivers, and servants. The burial trade—“They called the business ‘the firm,’ ” said Edwina Whitlock—was one of the few ventures in which it was possible for a black family to earn considerable sums of money, because white morticians would not handle the corpses of black people. On the second floor of the building was a rented hall, and on the third, two family apartments. One of these apartments was the home of Robert Harleston and his wife, Marie Forrest Harleston, parents of Edwina Whitlock.

  When Gussie, or Edwina, was two, it was discovered that her parents had contracted tuberculosis. The disease later killed her mother, and her father remained ill for many years. In the crisis, the child was given to her uncle and aunt to be raised.

  Gussie’s new guardians were her father’s brother, Edwin A. “Teddy” Harleston, and her mother’s sister, Elise Forrest, themselves married. Uncle Teddy and Aunt Elise lived comfortably on the firm, but they worked hard at their preferred vocation: art. Elise Harleston was a photographer, and Edwin Harleston was a painter who had trained at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Chicago Art Institute. As a young woman with a close attachment to her adoptive father, Edwin, Gussie would one day legally change her name to Edwina, to give honor to him.

  In the 1920s, Uncle Teddy and Aunt Elise were perhaps the most prominent couple in Charleston in the politics and culture of black life. In 1916, Edwin Harleston became one of the founders of the South Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and served as its first president. By 1919 the NAACP chapter had eight hundred members, and Harleston launched its first major action, a march on the state capitol to protest the exclusion of black teachers from jobs in Charleston’s black public schools. On January 18, 1919, with Edwin Harleston at the front of the column, black protesters from around South Carolina arrived at the capitol to present the state legislature with a petition, signed by 4,734 heads of households, criticizing the teaching ban. The legislature responded by removing the ban from the education code.

  As a child, Edwina Harleston witnessed meetings of the NAACP in the Harleston home above the firm on Calhoun Street.

  “Du Bois was our greatest intellectual since the Civil War,” Mrs. Whitlock stated, sitting at her kitchen table. W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and educated at Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. His book The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, was the founding manifesto of black identity in the twentieth century. When Edwin Harleston ran the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, Du Bois was editor of the association’s magazine, The Crisis, which had a circulation of more than fifty thousand. At the end of his life, Du Bois would renounce his U.S. citizenship and move to Ghana, despairing of any answer to the race stalemate in America. Du Bois, said Mrs. Whitlock, came to Charleston from time to time on NAACP business, and socialized with the Harlestons.

  “I guess I was eight when I remember Du Bois came,” Mrs. Whitlock recalled, looking at the table. “They used to have meetings at our house. There was a long hallway, and a door going to the studio, which was huge, with thirty or thirty-five people in it. I was always kind of bad, I was curious. I saw these people walking down the hall going to the studio, and got down on my hands and knees, looking at ’em. And they were talking, and I saw Du Bois looking around to see who was looking at him. Then he pulled his crotch up, and adjusted it.” Mrs. Whitlock giggled, and her eyes glinted. “He must have felt my presence, the way he was looking around. That’s my recollection of the great man.” Mrs. Whitlock laughed, and the specter of the saintly Du Bois fled the room.

  Edwina Whitlock was the child of a privileged mulatto family. When she was a girl, she said, she did not feel the struggle of working black people.

  “My grandfather owned a lot of tenements where people rented,” she said. “We would be going to collect the rents, and he would say to me, ‘You talk to these people! They’re putting bread in your mouth. Don’t think you are any better than they are!’ So I would go skippin’ along, and the tenants would say, ‘Oh, here come Mr. Harleston and his grand.’ ”

  Edwin and Elise Harleston raised their adopted girl until Edwin Harleston’s death in 1931, when his niece was fourteen. Edwina Harleston went on to attend the Avery Normal Institute, a high school for children of the city’s elite class of light-skinned African Americans, and then Talladega College, a private black school established in 1867 in Alabama, graduating in 1939. From there she went to graduate school in journalism at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.

  Edwina Harleston began a career in journalism at the Baltimore Afro-American and later returned to Illinois to work for the Chicago Defender, both newspapers produced by black staff for black readers. She met her future husband, Henry Whitlock, whose family owned the Gary, Indiana, American, a weekly black paper in Whitlock’s home state. They married in 1945, bought the newspaper from Henry Whitlock’s father, and ran it for fifteen years. Edwina Whitlock wrote a weekly column.

  “My husband was the only person who could sit at a linotype machine and write an editorial,” Mrs. Whitlock remembered, a little proud. “I used to write a column called ‘First Person Singular,’ and I would send it to him. He would change it, and it would come back to me to proofread. I would change it again and send it back to him.” Mrs. Whitlock gave a twinkling glance. “And that’s when the Coke bottles started flying. He was pretty good at ducking.”

  I asked what she wrote about.

  “Things that the white papers ignored that were going on in the black community,” she replied.

  When Henry Whitlock died in 1960, Edwina Whitlock sold the American and moved with her four children to Los Angeles. The family lived in California until her retirement. When the children were grown, Mrs. Whitlock returned to Charleston, her childhood home, after an absence of fifty years. She lived in South Carolina for twelve years. Finally, at age seventy-five, she moved to Atlanta, to be near two of her children.

  Paintings done by Edwin Harleston hung in Mrs. Whitlock’s living room. Half of them were portraits, half landscapes. At Uncle Teddy’s death, Mrs. Whitlock had inherited some of his work, and in her older years spent much time getting his name around museums and into art history texts. A walk around the living room showed much about the Harlestons and the history of the black South.

  “That’s Teddy Harleston, a self-portrait, and that’s his wife, Elise,” said Mrs. Whitlock, in front of two paintings. Mrs. Whitlock’s daughter, Mae Gentry, joined our private gallery tour.

  Elise Harleston was painted by her husband in the year of their marriage, 1920, when she was twenty-eight. The painting combined Baroque chiaroscuro with realist character study. Elise’s figure appeared to be lighted from above, with her body disappearing in dark shadow. She had an oval face and full cheeks, and her husband had given her remarkable deep eyes.

  Next to her painting was one of the artist’s self-portraits. Edwin Harleston had painted himself with chiseled features and close-cropped hair, against a blood-red background. Like his wife, he was lighted from above, although there was even more contrast, with deep, dark passages. The light whitened his forehead and nose, while the lower half of his face was thrown into black, as though he had been made of two colors.

  “Did you see Congressman Miller?” asked Mrs. Whitlock, pointing at another picture.

  “He was the last of the black Reconstruction congressmen,” said Mae Gentry. She meant last in the sense that he was the final black congressman elected after the Civil War in the years before white people took back control of Southern politics. The painting showed a use of light and shade similar to the first two.

  “This
is of Aaron Douglas,” said Mrs. Whitlock, moving to the next.

  The painting showed a handsome man in a blue shirt, with a painter’s palette and brush in hand, looking straight at the viewer. Behind him was a glimpse of a mural, as though he had just stepped away from it. Mrs. Whitlock explained that Edwin Harleston’s last major work, in 1930, was a collaboration with Aaron Douglas, another African American painter. Together the two made a series of murals at Fisk University, in Nashville.

  “The murals show a history of the black man from ancient times, going back to ancient Egypt,” said Mae.

  The story of Edwin Harleston, painter, grandson of the slave Kate Wilson, had been published by Mrs. Whitlock in an essay she wrote for a museum catalogue to accompany a show of his work.

  Edwin A. Harleston was born in Charleston on March 14, 1882, one of eight children of Louisa Moultrie Harleston and “Captain” Edwin Gaillard Harleston. Captain Harleston was so named because he once operated a schooner on the Atlantic seaboard. Louisa Moultrie Harleston had been born free during slavery and, to judge from her name, may well have been a mulatto from The Bluff plantation, home of Mary Louisa Moultrie Ball.

  When Edwin Harleston was a boy, one of his aunts, Hannah Harleston Mickey, owned a funeral home, once run by her husband. Aunt Hannah invited Edwin’s father, Captain Harleston, to run the business. The captain agreed, ran the company for many years, then set up his own firm, the Harleston Funeral Home.

  As a pupil at Simonton Public School in Charleston, Edwin Harleston made sketches, to which he devoted much care. At the time the teachers were white, and not likely to conceive of a future in art for their black charges. According to Mrs. Whitlock, one day Edwin brought to school a drawing he had made of a horse, and showed it to a teacher. Eyeing the page, the woman observed, “That’s nice, Edwin. Maybe you’ll grow up to become a hostler.” To Edwin’s parents, the idea that their well-heeled child was being patronized by a white teacher, and compared to a stable boy, was like a dose of acid. When Edwin told his mother about what had happened, she pulled him out of the Simonton School.