by Edward Ball
“Jews taught me a lot,” Ray remembered of the time. “They were very open. I remember one guy who called himself Yogi. His real name was Harold Zimmerman. He wore an earring, and this was the late fifties! He brought me copies of Nietzsche. He loved to talk about Cervantes, and even St. Augustine.” In addition to hanging out in Village cafés, Ray kept up a second nightlife along 125th Street in Harlem, at the Apollo Theatre and other temples of rhythm and blues.
“In the Village, a Jewish friend of mine, named Harvey, said, ‘Man you need a job. You’re getting thin. These girls ain’t going to take you in forever. Get a job.’ I said, ‘Harvey, I’m not used to doing work.’ ‘Be a salesman,’ Harvey said. So I started working at a record store, in midtown Manhattan. When I was a teenager, I played the trumpet, and the saxophone. It’s what led me into the music field. The record store was on Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, and it was run by Syrian Jews. I used to be able to memorize thousands of records. People would come in, tell me a lyric, or hum the tune, and I could name the song. It made me valuable, and after a while I became the music buyer. I was late to work five years in a row, but it didn’t matter. ‘Leave him alone,’ my boss used to say. ‘We need him.’ The Twist was big in those days, so I wrote a song, ‘The Whole World’s Doing the Twist.’ The owners of the store paid to produce the record, and we played it in the store, and around town. That gave me a taste for the business.
“I started making friends and falling in with music people. I met a guy from Texas, Jimmy Jones, who had recorded a number one pop record, called ‘Handy Man,’ in 1960. Jones said, ‘You’re a good music writer.’ After a while he introduced me to his producer, and I got signed on Screen Gems Music, on retainer, to write songs. I was in my mid-twenties.”
Along the way, the songwriter started using a stage name, Beau Ray, that reminded people of his good looks.
“Then I got interested in jazz. I hung out at Birdland, on Broadway and Fifty-second Street. I stopped going to the Apollo and listening to the R&B groups, and I was in the jazz clubs every night. After a while I began to produce records of my own, black acts. Every time I produced something, I would sell it, get money, and do more.”
Beau Ray Fleming signed on a jazz singer, a crooner named John Lucien, and with him cut an album for one of the big music houses, RCA. “They called him the new Nat King Cole,” said Ray. “Then I did a record with a guy called Milt Matthews, blues rock, also with RCA.” Beau Ray made his way through the next decade, producing here and there until the 1970s, when he picked up on the dance scene and began turning out disco music.
“One of my acts was called Mandrill,” Ray remembered. “They were seven guys, Panamanian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Jewish. They had a top-ten record called ‘Fence Walk.’ Another disco act I had was called GQ, which I produced for Arista Records. I had a group called Sun, which we produced with Capitol. And there was Zulema, who was a girl who did a kind of symphonic soul—with strings, horns, percussion. Her big record was ‘Wanna Be Where You Are.’ ”
In the 1970s, Ray’s company was known as Royal Gentlemen Productions, with offices at 12 West Fifty-sixth Street.
“We had a whole floor,” said Ray. “I had three personal assistants. I was living large.”
We got up from the sofa and went to the hallway where the four gold discs hung on the wall in frames. There was a 1973 album by the group Mandrill, a 1978 record by Sun, titled “Sunburn,” a 1979 compilation of dance songs, “A Night at Studio 54,” and a 1979 single by the group GQ, “Disco Nights.”
In the 1980s, Ray’s business came apart. A sadness came over him as he told this part of his story, and his monologue broke up into a few stray facts. Ray’s face fell for the first time as he groped for an explanation.
“You get caught up in your own charisma,” he said, looking down. “I did too much celebration, and not enough work.”
When the money stopped flowing, Ray’s wife, Tina, started working, and the two moved from New York to Los Angeles. When we met, Ray Fleming was trying to get back into the business, putting himself in touch with people he had known years earlier, and finding new talent.
“I’ve got one record of jungle music and techno that sold big in Europe, and I’ve got a female black crooner,” he said.
Ray pulled out a new compact disc, his first recording in several years. It would be coming out soon. On the back of the package there appeared a few liner notes, and at the bottom of the label an acknowledgment that read, “Thanks to the Fleming family, to the Harleston family, and thanks to the people and my friends in Charleston, South Carolina.”
Ray shifted his shoulders. “Never mind the record business. Charleston is in my blood. I’m going to be buried there.”
It was a cool, rainy afternoon in Charleston when Edwina Whitlock took me to visit the grave of her great-grandmother, Kate Wilson. The descendants of Kate Wilson were spread from coast to coast. Edwina Whitlock had lived away from Charleston much of her life and did not get back often, but she had come from Atlanta for the weekend.
“Your hair is changed,” she said when we met. “It’s more curly. Are you trying to be black?” Edwina laughed familiarly.
On that gray day Edwina Whitlock looked typically stylish, in a black overcoat with a flared lapel, and trousers. She carried an unusual carved cane, with naked figures on it, which completed her image of handsome eccentricity. We went out to lunch before the rain began to fall; then, with umbrellas high, we headed for the cemetery.
We arrived in a small patch of three or four acres at the northern edge of Charleston, the graveyard of the Unity and Friendship Society, a social club of light-skinned blacks founded in the 1840s. The cemetery contained many families of elite people of color, most of them descended from mulattoes who got free before the end of slavery. In a single place, the gray of the light on the green plain of grass was interrupted by a fresh grave smothered in bright flowers. As we walked between rows of neat family plots, Edwina pointed with her cane at the headstones.
“Now, here is Dr. McFall,” she said, aiming. “He was a real civil rights person. And he supported Uncle Teddy. What I mean is he bought Uncle Teddy’s paintings.” A bit farther, “These are the DeCostas.” The DeCostas were an old Charleston family of Sephardic Jews who at some point crossed over; most who now carried the name were prosperous blacks. “This woman’s husband was a doctor and a very dear friend of Uncle Teddy’s. They used to go hunting together.”
Edwina Whitlock pushed on between the graves. “You could write a history of Charleston blacks just walking through this yard,” she said. In front of a big granite headstone, she pointed. “Oh, here is the Mickey family—Hannah Harleston Mickey. Hannah was one of Kate Wilson’s children with William Harleston. She married a man named Mickey, and had five children. One of them, Ellen, the youngest, she shot a man. You see, Ellen was in love with the man’s wife, and wanted to do him in.” Edwina Whitlock cocked her head and giggled.
“Ellen was in love with the wife?” I asked.
“Yes. I don’t know if she killed the husband. This might have been about 1925.”
“She was a lesbian, and she was jealous that this man was married to her lover?” I clarified.
“That’s it,” said Edwina. “Uncle Teddy, in one of his letters, writes to his wife that, ‘We had to spirit Ellen out of town.’ You know, we have a lot of scandals in the family, and some of them don’t come out until later.”
Edwina shrugged and walked ahead. “Now, where’s Kate?” she said. “Oh, there.”
We came to the handsome granite marker inscribed with several names. The first read, “Kate Wilson Harleston, November 17, 1886.” The name William Harleston did not appear on the stone. Edwina looked down, squinted between the raindrops, and teetered on the soft ground.
“You see, sometimes the white man gives his bastards his name, but makes no provision for them at all,” she said. “Those are the step-aside children. But one thing about William Harleston
, he bought a house for Kate, and I know he left it to her. He did that, so I think I can forgive him.”
14
THE CURSE OF BUZZARD WING
There is a legend in the Ball family; some call it the curse of Buzzard Wing. “Buzzard Wing” was the posthumous nickname attached to Martha Caroline Swinton Ball, the coddled, beautiful second wife of the richest of the rice planters, John Ball. Caroline, as she was also known, was the young mother whose infant twins each received a pair of child slaves. It is said that Buzzard Wing put a curse on the descendants of John’s thrifty and devout first wife, Jane Ball—that is, a curse on the rest of us.
Caroline was born on Edisto Island, south of Charleston, and raised in the tiny white world of that fundamentally black place. A miniature painting of her in her twenties depicts her as comely and complacent, with sly eyes and ringlet curls dripping around her forehead. In 1805, at nineteen, Caroline married John Ball, forty-four, and soon gained a reputation among her stepchildren (who were slightly older than she) for frivolous spending and wild fertility. The stacks of receipts that survive show that Caroline’s world turned on an axis of shopping. In a modest excursion, a trip to the clothier in 1813, she came home with a feathered hat, beaver gloves, a fur stole, a bottle of pink dye, “a Moroccan dressing case,” some silver tassels, a broach, and “two ounces of spangles.” Caroline’s large wardrobe evidently needed care, because one year she bought a man who could work on it—George (“a tailor,” in the bill of sale, “and lame in the hip”). She probably spent large sums on maternity wear. In twelve years of marriage to John Ball, Caroline gave birth to eleven children, including one born after her husband’s death, which occurred when she was thirty-one.
A cousin of mine remembered the lament about Buzzard Wing uttered by his great-grandmother, Mary Gibbs Ball. Mary lived through the Civil War and watched the family fortune vanish. “Greatie used to say,” my cousin reported, “that when all the slaves had gone, and she was plowing the field by herself, she would lift her eyes to the sky and shake her fist at old Buzzard Wing.” Greatie evidently thought the Balls had ended badly—between the Confederate defeat and the loss of the slaves—because of a single successful gold digger.
With the death of John Ball in 1817, John Ball Jr. and Isaac, thirty-five and thirty-two, respectively, took charge of the family. Their three full brothers were dead, but John Jr. and Isaac had a brood of half siblings to provide for—Caroline’s nine surviving children, all under age twelve. Money was not a problem. In 1821, John Jr. noted that he had invested $167,537 in stock for Caroline’s children, an enormous sum. Labor was also available. In 1824, Isaac Ball owned 571 people on six plantations, while John Jr. personally owned 542 and managed another 173 people belonging to his half brothers and half sisters.
The problem in the family was the young widow, Caroline, and her grasping ways. Shortly after her husband’s death, Caroline sued the Balls, evidently for a larger portion of the inheritance (the will divided an amount equally among the widow and her children, meaning Caroline got one-tenth). Next, she married a rice planter named Augustus Taveau, known for his gambling and dissipation. In a letter to John Jr.—who controlled the estate of his father and therefore any money going to Caroline—Buzzard Wing announced her wedding to Taveau, then asked for money, enclosing a doctor’s bill. The doctor had prescribed port wine for a recent illness, she said, and, “being short of cash,” she had bought the liquor on credit. Regarding the “medicine,” Caroline asked John to pay. “If you do not come” to the wedding, she wrote, “you could send the check enclosed by Bob [a messenger], who is coming on Monday.”
Caroline had five more children with Taveau, bringing her output to sixteen babies in a little more than twenty years. Shortly after the marriage, Caroline and Taveau, out of money, sued the Balls for mismanagement of the trust fund set up to support Caroline’s children by John Ball. Two years passed and Caroline sued again (the third lawsuit), claiming that John Jr. was not sending her enough to raise the young ones in proper style.
John Jr. and Isaac lived much of the time with their families in Charleston—John on Hasell Street, Isaac in his mansion on East Bay and Vernon streets. Buzzard Wing’s children lived with her and Taveau. By the 1820s the Ball world was no longer the old country idyll of meadows, three-day parties, and friends seen at church. The family lived a city lifestyle fueled by plantation earnings. With thirteen hundred workers between them, the two brothers were captains of an agrarian industry. The work camps themselves were left to be run by overseers, while John Jr. and Isaac focused on money. Previously the Balls had bought new lands and new people with their profits; now they speculated in stocks. John Jr.’s account books, with their meticulous and constant churning of investments, would make for an auditor’s case study.
Far from the master’s authority, and white society, the Ball slaves carved out separate lives. Field hands, especially, saw few whites—the overseer’s family and a few hired extras—and on visits the Balls were not likely to recognize many of them. This lack of contact gave black people more freedom, but it also brought more insecurity. With so many hands, it was easy for John Jr. and Isaac to treat “their people” like pieces of equipment. Throughout the 1820s, accounts show that black villages were often broken up by the renting out of single workers, or whole families, who were told on short notice to pack up and move out for six months or a year. The fees that resulted went into John Jr.’s revenue books, next to the interest payments and dividends.
After John Sr.’s death, relations between Buzzard Wing and the children of his first wife, Jane, became testy. John Jr. sent Caroline an inventory to make sure she knew that everything in her house, down to “2 ironing tables … and 4 toilet covers,” would be counted as part of her inheritance. As executor of the estate, John Jr. made Caroline sign receipts for money he sent her to buy clothes for her children. In reply, she sent him nuisance bills, including one from her pharmacist for castor oil and “4 tablespoons Spanish flies,” an aphrodisiac.
John Jr. and Isaac worried that Caroline’s ways might be passed to her children, which could tarnish the family name. Among Caroline’s children were three brothers close in age—Alwyn Ball, Hugh Swinton Ball, and Elias Octavus Ball. Alwyn’s portrait, a miniature, depicts him as rather sweet. But a painting of Hugh Swinton (who went by Swinton) shows a somewhat jaded, dark-haired swain. Elias Octavus got his unusual name by being the eighth person in the family to carry the name of the patriarch. When their father died, all three were younger than ten. In their teens, they became restless. John Jr., himself a dutiful father of seven, complained in a letter about the added responsibility he had looking out for the young men, especially because they had begun to show signs of greed. The brothers, he wrote, had “the same thirst for money” he saw in Caroline, and John worried that the boys might become rakes. “My only hope [rests] upon their being far removed from the influence of their mother,” he told a friend.
Taking things in hand, John Jr. and Isaac decided to send their half brothers to military school. In 1823, Alwyn, sixteen, Swinton, fifteen, and Elias O., fourteen, were packed off to Patridge’s Military Academy, in Norwich, Vermont. Once they arrived, Isaac wrote the students to reassure them amid their loneliness and to insist that this was surely the right path. The boys should apply themselves and become good soldiers, Isaac said, because inevitably more black revolts would have to be put down.
“[R]ecollect for what purpose you have been sent to Capt P[artridge]’s Academy,” Isaac wrote, raising an imaginary index finger. “That we will stand in need of military men before many years will have rolled over our heads I feel confident, for the abolition societies of Europe and of some of our own northern brethren appear very anxious to set our slaves in commotion.”
The teens, who were accustomed to light tutoring and heavy spending, seem to have been put off by the spartan living conditions and endless drills. They rebelled, and began to plague the schoolmaster, Captain Alden Partridge,
with demands for cash. When Patridge refused them money, they stopped going to classes. Sensing that their half brother John would not bail them out, Swinton wrote to Isaac instead, complaining that the military school reminded him of the plantations—only now he stood on the wrong side of the deal:
It is almost as bad as slavery here for we cannot go out of the village without being called to account and we have to attend four roll calls a day and are not allowed to leave the quarters after 2 o’clock. I am likewise in debt and I will be obliged to sell my watch to pay if I don’t get money from home. We were obliged to sell some clothes to get money. … [Captain Partridge] has not given us a cent since we have been here nor have we received a cent from home which I think is a very hard case as it is our own money.
Before Partridge had the chance to kick them out, Alwyn and Elias O. picked up and left, using money from the sale of their clothes to pay the trip to Charleston. (Swinton reconsidered, and decided to stay on.)
A little desperate, John Jr. next tried sending Alwyn and Elias O. to boarding school in England. In June 1824 he placed them in the hands of his rice agent in Liverpool, Thomas Crowder. John enclosed a draft for £300 and a nervous note to the effect that he simply did not know how much money Crowder would have to spend on the boys.
In Liverpool things with the two dropouts worsened. Thomas Crowder soon found himself fending off the brothers’ demands for cash, and their new schoolmaster, the Reverend James Balfour, wrote to John Jr. with upsetting reports. Balfour complained that the boys were “independent,” refused to learn Latin, and were “backward.” Alwyn and Elias O. did not make friends, Balfour added, because merely being around students their own age reminded them of how little they knew. John Jr. wrote letters imploring his half brothers to straighten out, and sent embarrassed excuses to their guardian. “In fact, sir, my brothers are sons of a second marriage,” John explained to Crowder, “and unfortunate [to have] a mother, who thinks much more of the external acquirements than of those qualifications which give respectability and usefulness to a community; and this will account to you in some measure why my brothers are so backward.”
