Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Mrs. Nesbitt looked at her husband, expressionless, her mouth flat, and sighed. She seemed accustomed to the crisp monologue.

  “My father move over here with his mother’s people and then he bought a piece of land, fifteen acres,” Mr. Nesbitt went on. “Do you know what land cost back then? Thirty cents an acre. Do you know what he started with? Five bushels of potatoes. The whole thing cost thirty-seven dollars.”

  “What is your earliest memory from childhood?” I asked.

  “I could see my parents’ house on the plantation. It was a little old pole house,” he said. “They put the pole one on another, and then they put clay, because the pole can’t lap down, you know? They put clay around the whole house, and then they took the clay and built a chimney. That was a rich man’s house in the poor time.”

  It was a cool day in December, and the rain stopped drumming on the roof.

  “I went to school a little while. Oh man, the school house looked like a dog house. It had benches built in it for you to sit on, and the teacher had a stool in the middle and the benches were all around it and he taught school. If you didn’t pay attention, he would take a strap and cut your head off. The old man couldn’t keep me in school because I had to mind the rest of the children. So I didn’t know nothing about no school book no more than what I heard. I still can’t read and write.”

  Across the room, Mrs. Nesbitt raised her head a little, but not much, catching her husband’s eyes.

  “I been married sixty-eight years,” the old man continued. “All I know is we’ve been living a rough life. After I got married, I was working for fifty cents a day, and that was on Cedar Hill plantation. Didn’t know anything about gas, electricity. One man put me down to fifty cents a day, said he didn’t care whether I wore clothes or not. In 1930, people were working for fifty cents a day that had ten children! You go to the store, you could get a sack of grits for a dollar. If you’re lucky, then meat—three and four cents a pound—but sometimes, no meat. Then that’s all you had to eat, corn grits, with cow peas thrown in.”

  Mr. Nesbitt’s eyes stared straight, looking back over the twentieth century.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, then we’ll stop,” he said. “When President Roosevelt came to office, I’ll tell you what he started off with. He had a truck with a load of provisions on the outside of Quenby plantation—where there was a big schoolhouse, the white man’s schoolhouse. Roosevelt fed the black people there for about four months. He stopped feeding the people, and then he put them on the job for ninety-two cents a day. The WPA gave out jobs digging ditches on the side of the road, just to raise wages so you could get something to eat. It went up to ninety-five cents, ninety-six, and it kept going up. It went up to ninety-eight cents a day, and they took two cents out of that for Social Security.”

  “Did you take one of those jobs?” I asked.

  “I had to. In those days, we were living a dog’s life. You couldn’t get shoes, had to make dresses for the children from a potato sack. Then, after the Yankees from up North bought one of the places, I worked a boat for seventeen years, for about four dollars a day, and raised my eight head of children.”

  He closed his eyes, and opened them. He was tired from the tale, living it and telling it. “Ain’t no use in asking no more,” he said. Finally, the story dropped off in the present.

  “You see where Social Security has me today, got me laying down and getting checks. I thank the Lord that I’m living. I don’t look to get rich, but I can live until I die. We’re living a millionaire’s life compared to where we come from. This here is heaven. It’s a glorious, glorious, glorious land compared to where we come from.”

  The waves of black migration rolled into most corners of America, and I followed some of them. From time to time I hit a case of mistaken identity, and arranged a meeting with a black family whom I thought came from the Ball places but, as it turned out, did not. The most interesting near miss of this kind took place in California.

  Of the many families who got free from Comingtee, one took an unusual name, for which I will substitute the pseudonym Withers. After several phone calls to Withers households, I located a middle-aged Ms. Withers, who said that her family had come from Berkeley County and that one of her relatives had known the last slave in the family, a man called Scipio. She put me in touch with a cousin whom she thought would know more, and that man led me to his older brother, a minister, known as the family historian. The brother was about eighty, lived in California, and in his childhood had known Scipio.

  As I pointed out early on, the Roman name Scipio appeared often among Ball slaves. In the third century B.C., the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio (later called Scipio the Elder) fought his way through several campaigns and was given rule over Sicily. In 204 B.C., Scipio sailed with his army for Africa to invade Carthage, and two years later routed his enemy, Hannibal, and won the honorific surname Africanus for having seized a piece of the continent. Scipio Africanus became head of the Roman Senate, then an ambassador to Rome’s African colonies. In eighteenth-century Europe, the story of Scipio Africanus inspired a spate of history paintings—like “The Continence of Scipio” and “Scipio Granting Massinissa His Freedom” (or “Scipio Freeing the Slave”), both by Giambattista Tiepolo—after which time American planters picked up the name for black children. On an 1847 slave list from Comingtee plantation, I found one such Scipio (perhaps the one who, as Dorothy Dame Gibbs had told me, had been taught to mimic Latin).

  I telephoned the Reverend Peter Withers, who lived in the vicinity of San Francisco, and told him of our possible affiliation. His voice showed no emotion. When I fell silent, he cleared his throat.

  “They used to call him ‘Uncle Scip,’ ” he said, with a chuckle. “He was my grandfather.”

  The voice was reassuring, and had a sonorous lyric. Mr. Withers’s accent had the echo of several regions—part Carolinian, part Jamaican. I heard crisp Ps, sliding Ss, and the confident cadence of the pulpit. I asked whether the minister wouldn’t mind telling me about Scipio in person.

  When I met Peter Withers, he was standing on the lawn in front of the church he called home. His smile was vigorous and his handshake forceful, and he wore a white suit and white shoes. On the grass stood a lettered sign—MISSION WORD CHURCH, REV. PETER WITHERS, FOUNDER—next to which the minister seemed to glow in the light of San Francisco Bay. In the watery sun, my skin was colored by freckles and reddening patches, but Mr. Withers’s skin was like an eggplant, pitch dark and shining, with purple highlights. Fifty years of the New Testament had made the minister stand straight as a rifle, and prevented him from aging. His eyes were as bright as matches, and he had handsome cheekbones and a head of salt-and-pepper hair cut close to the scalp.

  Mr. Withers’s church occupied a converted suburban ranch-style house in a residential neighborhood, and the sanctuary consisted of a large room that had been added on. At the front of the room stood a drum kit, a pulpit, and an organ, and twenty wooden pews filled out the remaining space. I brought out the papers that had led me to his door. We looked at a map of Berkeley County and the plantation district, photocopies of the Comingtee labor contract, and, finally, copies of the slave lists showing the name of Scipio. Mr. Withers remained silent, then raised his hand like a traffic cop.

  “Scipio was definitely in slavery,” he said. “He told me all about it. I’m sorry I didn’t know the value of what he said at the time. Being young, I didn’t consider it until later. But he died at the age of ninety, happy. If I remember correctly, it was in 1935 or 1936. When he died—this was unusual, this might sound strange to you—but there were almost as many Caucasian people at his funeral as blacks.”

  The minister spoke slowly, with a lilt and a smile. He admired his grandfather, and hoped I would do the same. Everything fit what I knew of Scipio: by the minister’s account, his grandfather would have been born in 1846, about when Scipio appeared in the slave lists.

  “In these documents,” I said
, “the name Scipio appears on a plantation called Comingtee, in the year 1847. Where was your grandfather in slavery?” I asked.

  “All I know is that he was in Berkeley County, South Carolina.”

  Mr. Withers said that in the 1920s, his grandfather had seven children and owned ten acres of land. He lived with his second wife, Margaret, after his first wife, Alice, died. The sons, the minister’s father among them, helped to support the old man in his last years.

  “Scipio was tall, maybe six feet, and about my build,” said Mr. Withers. “He was straight, and walked upright until the day he died.” The minister himself had strong arms and a trim frame.

  “My grandfather’s facial expression was almost like Mr. Abraham Lincoln’s face,” he said. “He had naturally white hair. He was pleasant and relaxed. You could sit in his company all day long and never be tired of it.”

  I asked if he had a picture of his grandfather, and his face twisted when he admitted he had once had a photograph but had lost it.

  “Did Scipio ever tell you stories about being in slavery?” I asked.

  “What he said over and over was how he organized a prayer group among his friends, and how they were never beaten. He said that over and over,” Mr. Withers answered. “What is interesting is that Scipio was a man of God. He told me never hate. God takes care of everything. Because of that fact, Scipio said, he wasn’t tortured or anything. They didn’t set dogs on him.”

  “Did he tell you stories about other people who had dogs put on them?”

  “Oh yes, he did.”

  “Can you remember any of those stories?”

  “Not so clear,” said the minister. “But he said many of the—”

  The minister stopped himself. His memory turned away from Scipio’s harsh stories and drifted in the direction of euphemism.

  “You know, there was quite a deal there,” he went on from his new footing. “Many of the slaves and the slaveholders, they had a lot of conflict. But my grandfather said he never had any.”

  “Did he tell you about the conditions under which he lived?” I asked.

  “He used the word ‘flogging’ to describe punishment meted out to some slaves,” said the minister, relenting. “Another, older man I knew confirmed the same thing that Uncle Scip said. They used to call him ‘Uncle Scip.’ ” The minister laughed, and his careful manner became serene. “And this man said he knew Uncle Scip way back in slavery, and that they never had any problems in terms of torture, or anything. This was his testimony to me, over and over.”

  It was a confusing record. Scipio had spoken about plantation violence, but had also said that at least some of his friends and family never felt the whip.

  “You know, Uncle Scip told me this,” Mr. Withers began, settling on a last memory. “He said, ‘In slavery, the people who were really against us, and tried to torture and flog us, they were in more slavery than I was. They were slaves to their idea of punishing me, but I was a free man in my spirit.’

  “A godly man has wisdom, just like the prophets of old,” he went on. “When you are in a place like that, rebellion is not going to get the job done. To stay on the place, that’s wisdom.”

  I asked about his grandfather’s manner, the way he talked to people.

  “When you would meet him, he would quote something from the Psalms, or from something else. One of his favorites was Psalm Thirty-seven, ‘Fret not thyself because of evil doers, neither be thou envious against them.’ You see, Scipio didn’t believe, from what I could gather, in retaliation.”

  “You have to love your oppressor,” I said. “You have to believe in the humanity of your oppressor.”

  “Definitely.” Mr. Withers pursed his lips and lifted his voice. “‘Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you!’ You see, when I was young, I hated the system of segregation! But bitterness is no good for the mechanism of the body. You have to purge yourself of it.”

  “I want you to try to remember your hate,” I answered.

  “I’ve seen some injustices that were horrible,” came the remark, after a long pause.

  “For example?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to bring up memories that are detrimental.” Mr. Withers withdrew again. “It’s not there anymore. That system is gone, that lifestyle—it’s been swept away. And when I found out about the Lord, it decimated my hate.”

  In 1946, at age thirty-one, Peter Withers was born again. He became a missionary, and began traveling as an evangelist in the Caribbean, starting in Jamaica in 1949. Flying between the United States and the islands, the Reverend Peter Withers developed a lifestyle he would keep. In 1958, with his wife—by then also a missionary—the minister moved from Jamaica to Haiti.

  “There we really got involved,” he said. “We have fifteen churches in Haiti. Each has a mission school, because the illiteracy rate is very high. We have three thousand children attending the schools, and sixty teachers. In the main mission compound, we have a medical clinic staffed with a Haitian doctor. We also have a nutrition center, which gives one hot meal a day to the children.”

  “Why are you a missionary?” I asked.

  “Because people are in need. We have everything here in America—hospitals, churches, schools, comforts. There, they have nothing … nothing!”

  In 1976, Mr. Withers began to evangelize in Africa.

  “Kenya has forty-three different tribes,” he said. “Each has its own culture, its own dialect. We’ve concentrated mostly with the Masai. The average Masai’s house is a little hut, covered with refuse, built out of patches of wood.” In Kenya, the minister said, he and his wife arranged for the translation of the New Testament into the Masai language, and his church financed a well to bring running water to a dry village.

  “Now we are working on a building project, a combined mission and medical building, in which the Masai ladies can give birth to their babies. Because the paganistic way is horrible—it’s being supervised by the witch doctors.” Mr. Withers twisted his face on the phrase “witch doctors.”

  “In Haiti, did you deal with voodoo?” I asked.

  “Voodoo is demonic,” he came back. “You cannot suppress it successfully. You’ve got to deal with the root of it, which takes time. It cannot coexist with Christianity. What we believe is nonnegotiable.”

  We talked for a minute about voodoo, and traditional African religion, which Mr. Withers clearly wanted to exterminate. Suddenly the minister asked, “Mr. Ball, what do you think caused slavery?”

  “I think greed cause slavery.”

  “That’s your concept,” he said skeptically. “But you see, the Christian culture was well planted in Africa when slavery came. Africa went astray from the teaching of God. Understand me?”

  “Did Africans bring slavery on themselves?” I asked.

  “Through disobedience and rebellion.” The minister put his hand in the air. “They brought destruction, and it could happen to any one of us. Take the story of Israel. God loved Israel. But when the Israelites disobeyed God, He said, ‘I’m going to punish you. I’m going to send you into slavery.’ ”

  “Africans, and the Jews, were punished with slavery for disobeying the word of God?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  I told Mr. Withers that I did not accept his idea of black racial guilt and punishment, and I asked what he would say to black people who live with the legacy of the plantation.

  “I would say to them, ‘Let God straighten you out.’ America has superabundance. Much of the American suffering could be alleviated.” His bright eyes were unblinking, with a punitive gaze. “There are many lazy people in America. We have no excuse for them.”

  I got up to leave. As I reached the door of the church, Mr. Withers took me by the arm and gave me what seemed to be a painted-on smile. Outside, standing near the placard of the Mission Word Church, the Reverend Peter Withers waved good-bye.

  Later I tried to sort out Mr. Withers’s family. I
looked again in the Ball slave lists, and saw the name Scipio in the year 1847. But this Scipio wasn’t a child, as I had initially thought. In fact, he was fifty years old. Looking further, I found a note that the Scipio on Comingtee had died of “dropsy” on August 19, 1857, at age sixty. Peter Withers could not have known him, or been his grandson, and the Withers family had no ancestral connection to the Balls.

  Every summer around the country, the progeny of ex–Ball slaves gathered at family reunions. I had spoken with a woman named Sarah Roper England, who said her people came from the Ball places, and wanted me to meet her relatives. The right occasion, she added, would be a big dinner that brought together two branches—some people named Roper, others called Roberson. (“Sometimes we spell it Robertson,” she said.)

  “My grandmother used to talk about ‘Maussa Ball,’ ” said Sarah England. “It was never ‘Mr. Ball,’ always ‘Maussa.’ ”

  The reunion dinner was to be held at a new suburban hotel, whose cookie-cutter architecture, which rose in the midst of a big parking lot, resembled that of ten thousand other freeway inns. I arrived on the appointed day to a lobby in which a Formica counter sat on synthetic carpet and nondescript music tinkled from hidden speakers. In a conference room rented for the occasion stood two rows of tables set for dinner, and some thirty-five black people milling about. My acquaintance, Sarah England, in her late fifties, showed her warmest manner and took me to a corner, where we went over the family story.

  “Our people came from Pawley’s plantation,” Mrs. England said, “and from Buck Hall.” She brought out a booklet she had compiled for the reunion, with thirty pages of photographs, family trees, traditions, and an address list of relatives. On one page, Mrs. England had transcribed stories she learned from her grandmother. In the early 1800s, the booklet said, ancestors of the Ropers and Robersons lived at Brick House plantation on Edisto Island, down the coast from Charleston, where they were the property of planter J. W. Roper. After Roper lost his land, the text went on, “our ancestors went to work for the Ball family, on Buck Hall, next to Pawley’s plantation. … When the Civil War ended, the Balls freed all slaves. The family continued to use slave master J. W. Roper’s last name, instead of ‘Ball.’ ” A roster at the back of the booklet listed 186 family members around the country, descendants of the last two or three slaves. The clan lived in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.