Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Mrs. England’s story was corroborated by paperwork, whose trail led to a daughter of Ann Simons Ball, or Captain Nancy. In 1815, thirty-nine-year-old Ann Ball had a daughter, Ann, who married the physician Elias Horry Deas. Ann Ball and Horry Deas bought Buck Hall, moved there in 1850, and the following year bought Pawley (or Pawley’s), a 793-acre tract next door. In the National Archives in Washington, I found records that placed Mrs. England’s family on Pawley and Buck Hall.

  The story of the Roper-Roberson family included a singular fact: Mrs. England had oral tradition about the way the Balls dealt with their former slaves.

  “The Balls were good to work for,” she said, speaking carefully. “One good thing came out of the plantations. My grandmother said that when they were children working for the Balls, they were one of the families that made sure their slaves got an education. She said there was another family, the Cordes, who were slave masters, who were very mean. After freedom, the Cordes family would not let the former slaves get an education. But my grandmother could read and write, because the Balls encouraged their people to get educated.”

  The dinner party chattered around us as Mrs. England explained there were differences in the way slave-owning whites reacted to emancipation. She pointed to the written version of her family’s story.

  “The Ropers … and Robersons were able to attend school, and they took advantage of the opportunity,” read the booklet. “After slavery, they continued to stay on the plantation and work for the Ball family, until Frank Roper was able to buy land, and build a small house.”

  Since I had found much evidence of cruelty and deprivation on the rice plantations, Mrs. England’s tale came as a surprise. But a few months later I met another family, who came from the Balls’ Pimlico and The Bluff plantations, who said much the same thing. In meetings with that family, one woman said that her grandmother had told her about the years after freedom, when the Balls at The Bluff encouraged their house servants, former slaves, to go to school. When they did attend, the woman said, sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Ball helped them with their lessons.

  Elsewhere I stumbled on an affidavit that seemed to support something of what Mrs. England and the other family said. In 1903, at an Army pension hearing, a former Ball slave named Patty Moultrie testified that Isaac Ball had written letters for her in the years after the Civil War. At the time, Patty Moultrie’s husband, Stepney Moultrie, was away from home in the Union army. While she and Stepney were separated, Isaac Ball, the Confederate veteran, helped them stay in touch. “When Stepney was in the Army,” Patty Moultrie testified, “and after my young master, Mr. Isaac Ball, came home from the war, he [Isaac Ball] used to read me my letters from Stepney, and write to him for me.”

  Later, Sarah England went further, saying that her ancestors not only had been encouraged to get an education but had actually done better in general than other former slaves, because the Balls had helped them.

  “Most everybody who worked for the Balls became more prosperous than other people,” Mrs. England said. When I looked surprised, she pointed her finger in the air and said, “This is a fact.” Another man at Mrs. England’s reunion, her cousin, Kenneth Cook, echoed this report. Kenneth Cook was a friendly, stocky man in his thirties, who worked for the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C. “Everybody in the family did well right after freedom,” he said. “Somebody had a shoe store, and a grocery. My uncle had his own business, and later someone had a dry cleaning store. In 1948, one of the family took flying lessons, to become a pilot. That was the unbelievable one, a black man trying to be a pilot during segregation.”

  I asked Mrs. England to tell me the names of other families who might have been helped by the Balls after freedom. Without hesitating, she said, “Besides the Ropers, there were the Chisolms, and the Evans families. They worked for the Balls, became literate, and later they owned a lot of property.”

  Some freedpeople took the family name. I met one black Ball family with branches in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. I could not link them to the white Balls with certainty, but their oral tradition placed ancestors on the South Carolina coast, near Charleston. They may well have been Ball slaves, but the documents to prove it never surfaced. Nevertheless, on a cool November afternoon, I met a member of the clan, Jacqueline Ball, a single mother living outside of Washington, D.C.

  Jackie Ball was tall and thin, with straightened hair that fell just below her ears. Jackie came from a military family and worked in the Pentagon as a petty officer, second class, in the Navy. Her father and his two brothers had fought in World War II, and in addition to her own ten years of Navy service, she had two cousins recently retired from the Army, a man and a woman, each with the rank of major. Rounding things out, Jackie’s daughter, LaShawn, was joining the Army Reserves. At the Pentagon, Jackie answered the phone with her rank—”YN2 Ball, may I help you?”

  “I’m in a classified, vaulted area,” she explained about her job, “with security clearance.” Jackie wouldn’t say much about the nature of her work. “It deals with warfare and bombing people,” she said airily. “I help carry out the bomb plans. I’ll tell you this, when the cleaning people come through at the end of the day, we have two trash bins, classified and not—and we make sure they empty the right trash bins.”

  “I met a man once who was a nuclear targeting expert,” I said. “His job was to single out places to drop those bombs.”

  “I can imagine,” Jackie replied. “They have protesters every Monday at the Pentagon. The police have a video camera, and they tape all of them. When they had the anniversary of Hiroshima, there were a lot more protesters, and it was really uncomfortable. They threw a substance on the building, symbolizing blood, and I was really shaken.”

  For a bombing analyst, Jackie had a manner that could not have been more sweet, and there was something tender about her speech. Jackie, fortyish, had been raised in Los Angeles by her mother. During childhood, her father, Joseph M. Ball, was completely absent.

  “I did not know my father that well,” Jackie said. “My parents met when my father was a student-teacher in Baltimore. My mother was a daughter of a Methodist minister. They married, and moved to South Carolina, his home. My mother didn’t care for the South. In fact, she hated it. They broke up soon after I was born, then my mother moved with me to Los Angeles.”

  Jackie went to college at San Diego State University, married a fellow student, then had a daughter, LaShawn McGhee. The marriage didn’t last, and Jackie moved with her daughter from California to Washington, D.C., where she raised LaShawn alone. I asked whether her father, who died in South Carolina, knew where his family had come from.

  “Someone contacted my father in the 1980s, by mail,” Jackie replied. “The letter was about the Ball plantations, and whoever wrote it wanted to tell him something, or maybe ask him something. And I heard from my stepmother that my father just threw the letter away.”

  “Why?”

  “Apparently he didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” she said. “So he just got rid of it. I think whatever it was, he didn’t want to remember.” Jackie’s father died before she could ask about the letter.

  I spoke on the phone to Jackie’s cousin, Denise, a retired major. She was excited and chatty, and wondered aloud when we would meet. “I’m so happy someone in the family is doing the history,” she said. Denise talked about where her ancestors might have lived, and where the family ended up, then said something that told me Jackie had not given her a full briefing.

  “I’m a nurse,” she said, “and once I worked with a Dr. Ball, a white guy.”

  “I have kin in medicine,” I answered.

  “No, this guy was white,” Denise said.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m white.”

  There was a pause on the phone.

  “You are! Okay!” Denise shrieked. “Well! You just happen to be!”

  I explained who I was, and asked whether Denise wou
ld still like to meet.

  “Well, it’s very interesting, and it’s nice to know your history,” she answered carefully. “We’ve all made improvements, and that’s a part of history, that’s what happened.”

  Jackie, Denise, and I met in a steak restaurant on a suburban strip. Denise was shorter than Jackie, with more flesh on her bones, and in her late forties. She had a blunt manner and seemed able to say whatever came to mind.

  “Denise was shocked when you told her you were white,” Jackie said. “Then we had a big laugh about it.”

  “Yeah, I’m not hung up,” Denise said sarcastically.

  I had sent the family a handwritten letter, and Denise brought it up.

  “That was such a beautiful letter you wrote to us.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I was going to act like a real field slave, and write you back on some lined paper with holes in it,” Denise went on, straight-faced. “I was going to have the spelling and punctuation correct, but use block letters. My family talked me out of it.”

  We laughed a good laugh, rocking a bit in the vinyl booth. Denise said she was a retired officer who once supervised teams of nurses.

  “You have so many in the service,” I said, “you could start your own Ball division.”

  “We’ll get you in the military with us,” Jackie joked.

  “They’ll take you in a minute, make you an officer,” Denise put in. “They’re looking for an original, blue-blood white boy.”

  Jackie had the service records of her father, Joseph Ball, and one day we went over them. Born in 1910, Joseph Ball got a degree in education from Morris College, in Sumter, South Carolina, and when World War II began he was a school principal at a black public school, earning $16.50 a week. He enlisted in the Army in April 1942, was sent to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, spent three months as a private, and was promoted to sergeant. In a photograph taken after the promotion, Joseph Ball appeared trim, with a pencil mustache, a smile, and a direct gaze. The Army medical put his height at five feet, eight inches, his weight at 154 pounds. In January 1943, Joseph Ball was sent to North Africa to the campaign against the German army there, where he worked as a sergeant, running the company supply room. In September 1944, Joseph Ball’s battalion passed through southern France, as the Allies retook occupied areas; and at the end of the war, he was in Germany, in the Rhineland campaign of spring 1945. Returning to the United States that fall, he went back to his education career and spent the rest of his life as a principal in the South Carolina public schools. He died in 1985.

  “I was an only child,” Jackie said. “And believe it or not, I only met my father one time. I must have been about twenty-nine. It was so uncomfortable, though it’s kind of funny now that I look back on it. I was working at the Library of Congress, in Washington, and I drove down to South Carolina and stayed the afternoon. I remember introducing myself. I was his daughter, but I introduced myself! He was friendly, and his wife, my stepmother, was there. But my father and I didn’t talk about each other, or where I had been for thirty years. I remember that Ronald Reagan was the President, so we talked about him. We talked current events, and the price of clothing—everything but us. It was so awkward. When I went back a second time to see him, he had passed away.”

  Jackie’s daughter, LaShawn McGhee, grew up with her mother in the Washington suburbs. She spent a couple of years in college in Ohio, left before finishing, and joined the Army Reserves. The week I met her family, LaShawn, still a teenager, was set to graduate from basic training on a huge military base.

  Jackie and I arrived at a parade ground flanked by bleachers filled with hundreds of families, half of them black. Five hundred young soldiers in new green uniforms marched to the center of the field. On the day of the event, I showed Jackie some slave lists and letters from the Ball plantations. We looked at a deed of gift, with which one of the Ball masters offered a child to a relative as a present. As she pored over the documents, Jackie was silent, trembling.

  “I was really shaken after you showed me the slave lists,” Jackie admitted. “It was too emotional, I had to hold back the tears, but I told myself to try to feel what was written.”

  The columns of soldiers, separated into companies of a hundred each, marched to a brass band. From the faraway bleachers, the clusters of recruits looked like clouds floating across the grass.

  “Try to remember,” I told Jackie, who was quiet, “that those people, the slaves, had a community. They had pleasure, they had music, and they had love, in the midst of everything.”

  LaShawn was part of the Second Battalion, Thirty-ninth Infantry Regiment, the “Fighting Falcons.” It was the same battalion that had fought in North Africa in 1943, when LaShawn’s grandfather, Joseph Ball, served in World War II.

  “What was it like to be given as a gift to somebody?” Jackie asked. “Not a pony as a gift, but a person?”

  A stern male voice came over the public address system: “This is a landmark occasion that symbolizes a new beginning for each and every one of you, a fresh start in life. It makes no difference who you are, where you came from, your race, religion, or cultural background. You are each now members of a single team, the United States Army.”

  Jackie free-associated about the past. “How could you really love someone? Yes, they were in love, like you said, but at any moment, that love could be snatched away.”

  We found the graduate after the ceremony. LaShawn McGhee, a model of youth and vigor, stood about five feet, four inches, and held her body straight as a door. Her green jacket, pinched at the waist, showed the wave of her figure. She affected a tough pose, jutting out her jaw and swinging her shoulders when she walked. During the eight weeks of training, LaShawn had been made a leader of her platoon, and her voice was hoarse from yelling orders.

  “Let me take a look at you,” Jackie said, widening her eyes. “I don’t recognize my daughter—or even her face. The haircut!”

  “I lost a lot of weight,” LaShawn said.

  “What are these medals?” asked Jackie, fingering her daughter’s chest.

  “One’s for marksmanship, and the other is for throwing grenades,” said the recruit.

  The most mysterious of all the black Ball families was a clan in New York. One day I received a letter from an elderly lady, a stranger who said that someone had given her a photograph of me. She asked that I protect her privacy, and to do so I will call her Evelyn Post. Mrs. Post said that in studying the photograph, she saw a resemblance to a long-lost member of her own family. The connection was distant—the man was the nephew of her dead stepfather—but her stepfather was called Luther Ball, and the man in question, his nephew, was named Edward Ball.

  Mrs. Evelyn Post was about eighty, with skin the color of cardboard, white hair, a delicate frame, and precise diction. She lived in a townhouse with a small backyard, and when we sat down, she served a slice of cake followed by coffee in good porcelain. Edward Ball was a mulatto, she explained. When Mrs. Post’s mother was married a second time, in the 1920s, to a man named Luther Ball, Edward, Luther’s nephew, had come into her life. Mrs. Post had a beautiful photograph of Edward Ball. The studio portrait showed a young man with light skin and wavy dark hair, wearing a high, starched white collar and wool jacket. He appeared to be in his early twenties when the picture was taken. Later I learned that he had been born in 1888.

  “He lived up on the Hudson River, many years ago,” Mrs. Post pointed out. “Then he moved with his wife to the Bronx. After that, my stepfather died, in 1945. I gradually lost touch with the family.” Mrs. Post knew little about Edward Ball, except that she thought he came to New York from South Carolina. “I haven’t been in touch with the Balls in thirty years,” she said, “but I had his photograph, and I’m sure the picture is from Charleston, because that’s where my mother came from.” Edward Ball died in the 1960s, Mrs. Post said.

  “My grandfather was white,” she went on. “And Edward Ball, whom I knew when I was a young woma
n, was also very light. Mrs. Edith Ball, Edward Ball’s wife, was quite a pretty woman. The two would visit my mother from time to time, after my stepfather Luther died. Later, as we drifted out of touch, I would write to them on behalf of my mother. Edward Ball’s wife would write us back, but she never put their return address on the envelope. I think they were, they used to call it, ‘gone on the other side.’ I mean they passed for white. That’s why some people never put the return addresses on their letters, because they didn’t want to show a connection between themselves and black folks, where we were living. I was afraid to mention all this to you. Anyway, when I saw your picture, I said, ‘My goodness, this is a relative of Mr. Ball.’ Look at the ears! Now that I see you, I remember that he also had hands like yours.”

  I searched, but was never able to locate the family of the mulatto Edward Ball, or find his connection to the Ball plantations, if there was one.

  Eventually I retrieved Edward Ball’s death certificate from the New York Department of Health. He died in November 1969, at eighty-one, on Riverdale Avenue in the Bronx. The coroner’s statement described him as a retired postal clerk who had lived in New York City for sixty-four years. The death record listed the names of his parents, James Ball and Matilda Faison, but the coroner gave no indication of the dead man’s color or ethnicity. It did state, however, that Edward Ball was buried not far from Manhattan.

  “Sometimes, it just be’s like that,” Mrs. Post said.