Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  17

  THE PRESERVATION SOCIETY

  The doorbell rang at the Branford-Horry mansion on Meeting Street, my temporary home in Charleston, and out on the sidewalk stood a distant cousin, John Gibbs. John, approaching sixty, has coarse hair and noticeably dark skin, the color of cardboard. Owing to the slight negritude of his appearance, he had acquired a nickname in childhood: Black John. The branch of the family that John came from once owned Hyde Park plantation, a tract that stayed in the hands of the Balls and their kin for 253 years. Black John was a grandson of Anne Simons Ball, one of the last heiresses, and his mother was Dorothy Dame Gibbs, venerable carrier of the family story. John had come to take me to dinner at his club, the South Carolina Society.

  “The South Carolina Society is basically a bachelor party,” said John, standing in the gray shade of the streetlights, beneath the overhanging piazza of the house.

  Black John is a physician who smokes cigarettes. He had stopped drinking in middle life, but the combination of decades of liquor and tobacco had given his face good character. His head was square, his brow furrowed, and his cheeks had little rivers of lines, like streams through the mud of a marsh. The tobacco had given his voice a lot of depth; when he spoke, John rasped and boomed.

  “Do you know who used to live next door to you?” he graveled. Next to the Branford-Horry House, on the same side of Meeting Street, was a smaller building made from stuccoed brick, the old carriage house and slave quarters for the mansion. It had since been converted into a townhouse, lined with marble and lit with chandeliers. “That was Judge Waring’s place,” said John. “I’ll tell you the story sometime.”

  Our destination, the South Carolina Society’s clubhouse, stood within sight of the carriage house, across the street and up about shouting distance, near the intersection of Meeting and Broad streets. In the distance, the building looked like a whitewashed mausoleum, the hard shine of its face, bright during day, gone flat with night. The South Carolina Society is one of the oldest institutions in Charleston, and John was pleased to have the chance to show it off. It is a men’s club, founded in 1737, though the Ball family men joined a little late, beginning only in 1803. A brotherhood with strict rules of belonging, the Society can be counted on as one of the city’s most unforgiving judges of blood. Members consist almost wholly of descendants of plantation owners—a coterie held together by repetition, in which each new generation of the clique tends to be sons of the old. The Society takes pride in its orthodoxy; this was a Tuesday, night of the monthly dinner, the same weeknight the club has been meeting since the 1700s.

  “We have a rule that a speaker can be invited to address the dinner meeting only once every hundred years,” said John, as we walked to the clubhouse. He smiled at the thought, a little joke that was true. The last dinner speaker, it turned out, lectured in 1937. “That’s so they don’t bore us,” he said.

  The Society is exclusive, but that is local habit. Most associations of interest to white people in Charleston have no black participation—not clubs, churches, or professional groups. Some clubs admit only men, with women in the permanent role of guests. The South Carolina Society is older and more efficient in the sifting out of color and sex, and sets the standard for the way others operate.

  From the street, the clubhouse—known as South Carolina Hall—resembles a modified Roman temple. Built in 1804, the hall has two tiers of columns, like a set of teeth, the lower group rising to twenty-five feet and holding up a balcony that extends over the sidewalk like a tongue, so that pedestrians have to cross under it. A second array of columns goes from the balcony to the roof, and supports a large, triangular pediment. Fixed to the pediment, like a medallion on the forehead of the building, there appears a symbol or crest in a gold oval frame. The crest contains a wooden relief of a hand holding the stem of an indigo plant. Indigo is a bush that produces a blue dye once exported from the colonies; in the 1740s indigo rivaled rice as a money source for some landlords. The crop faded after the American Revolution, but the Society held on to its symbol and its motto, carved around the edges: Posteritati, “For posterity.”

  In a formal anteroom the size of a chapel, some forty men in jackets muttered and milled about. Right hands held drinks; left hands were jammed into pockets. A spartan do-it-yourself bar to the side had a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of scotch, a few softer drinks, and ice. The average age of the men was sixty, but in the middle sat a man in his forties, stage-managing the others. This was the president, or steward, of the Society, who belted out greetings to a stream of men coming through the door.

  “How do you do, Budge? How do you do, René? How are you doing, John?”

  The steward’s chair resembled a wooden throne, with a tall back and coat of arms attached. Next to the throne was a less ornate seat reserved for the steward’s deputy, the clerk (pronounced “dark” in imitation of colonial English). The clerk called out each member’s full name as he entered the room. From the anteroom, a pair of tall wooden doors opened into a long ballroom, the more graceful of the two spaces, with twenty-foot ceilings and detailed woodwork. On the walls hung portraits of men in powdered wigs and gold-buttoned jackets, forebears of the membership.

  The steward rapped a gavel.

  “Gentlemen, please come to order!” he said. “We’re going to close the doors.”

  The room fell to murmuring, and, herdlike, we sat down in a semicircle of chairs around the steward’s throne. The clerk opened a ledger and began to read from the minutes of the last meeting.

  “The regular meeting was called to order at 7:30 P.M.,” he said. “Those present at the meeting …” The clerk’s voice began languidly, but it soon turned into the voice of an auctioneer. With a barker’s honk, he made a single word out of the last names of the membership.

  “Those present at the meeting were RavenelBennettGibbsStevensLucasSimmonsPringleLowndesMaybankWalkerWilsonClementPorcher-GaillardKingRiversFordBryan …” As the clerk read off the names, there appeared in my mind’s eye a map of the area near Charleston. The names settled one at a time onto the large squares and rectangles that marked the boundaries of the old plantations.

  Many of the names were those of slave owners from the Cooper River. Among the oldest white families there used to be a distinction between families on the Ashley River, which winds from the west down to Charleston harbor, and those on the Cooper River, which comes down from the north. The geographical separation and difficulty of travel meant that each river had its own white community—churches, horse tracks, taverns—and people along those banks married one another rather than going “outside” to the other river to find a partner. The names read off by the clerk showed that the South Carolina Society was heavily a Cooper River club, from the slave days down to the present.

  The minutes were approved, and the steward cracked his gavel to open the evening agenda. Before dinner there were several pieces of business and a vote on new members. The first agenda item concerned the Society’s portrait of George Washington. The painting had been on loan to the local museum, which wished to extend the deal and make it permanent.

  “I suggest we draw up a renewable contract for the loan with a term of five years,” said one member, opening the debate. A wave of muttering crossed the room. A man in a gray wool suit rose to say that it was a rather nice picture, but in any case the walls of South Carolina Hall had long ago been filled with portraits. There wasn’t room for another, so let the museum have it.

  I remembered George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball. The South Carolina Balls did not appear to be linked to the clan of the Founding Father. Too bad. It was a subject that dangled in the imagination, a nugget of genealogical gold hanging just out of reach.

  The tone of the discussion suddenly sharpened when an agitated man stood up. “You give a painting, and you get back a piece of paper!” he said. “Pieces of paper get lost!”

  A white-haired gentleman rose, displeased, and said that he had lent a painting of one of
his favorite ancestors to the same museum. “And when I went to get it back from them, they treated me like I was trying to steal a horse!” The red in his old cheeks glowed as he sat down, spent.

  The subject of Washington’s portrait seemed too upsetting, and the steward tabled the issue.

  The next item seemed safer. A woman had given the Society a beautiful chandelier, and one member made a motion to send her a letter of thanks. The motion was seconded and passed. Another member moved to have the chandelier cleaned. Passed. The steward clapped his gavel.

  The South Carolina Society takes more than passing interest in the purity of blood. Blood is its reason for being, which made the nickname of my host, Black John, seem all the more strange. Once, John and I talked about his skin color. By his manner, I gathered he’d been talking about it his whole life. John laughed at the suggestion that there might have been some mingling on the slave street, then he told a story.

  When he was a child, the other children did not let him forget the sepia color of his skin, until one year he went through a frightening incident. As a boy of about eight or nine, John said, he had a black friend. One day he and the friend were riding around Charleston in a trolley, sitting in the back of the streetcar, with black people on either side. Suddenly, a police officer jumped on the trolley, grabbed John and the other boy, and threw them into a patrol car. The policeman took the children down to the station, where John’s parents and the parents of the black child were notified. All four parents rushed to the depot. By the time they arrived, the boys had set the police straight, and the officer admitted a foolish mistake. The policeman explained sheepishly that he thought the black child had kidnapped John, because the two boys had been riding together in the colored section of the trolley.

  “Did I tell you the story of Judge Waring?” said Black John one day after the Society dinner we attended. “Judge Waties Waring, who lived on Meeting Street in that carriage house, next door to where you live.” John’s eyes were conspiring.

  The story of the hated and loved Judge Waring is known to everyone in Charleston.

  In 1880, a son, Julius Waties Waring, was born to an old Charleston family. In harmony with his bloodline, Waring attended the local college, studied law, and became an attorney. He moved with his family into the converted carriage house next door to my borrowed home and across the street from South Carolina Hall. Waring was named assistant U.S. attorney for South Carolina, then attorney for the City of Charleston; in 1942 he was appointed to a federal judgeship, the capstone of his career.

  At that time something in Waring turned. The new judge, in his early sixties, began to use his position to chip away at the society that had made his own path smooth. In February 1944, a case came to Waring’s bench that involved black teachers suing for equal pay with whites. To everyone’s surprise, Waring favored wage parity. In 1947, a peonage suit came along in which some black sharecroppers had managed to sue their employer—and Waring ruled for the sharecroppers. Next came the case of a black veteran of World War II who had been beaten and permanently blinded by a white policeman. Waring favored the veteran. When it seemed he could go no further, Judge Waring took the case of Elmore v. Rice.

  Since the end of Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War, all elected officials in South Carolina had been white, a situation partly secured by the “white primary.” The white primary took place before proper elections, and by law, only whites could vote in it. Primary voters chose candidates for the Democratic Party, the monopoly party in state politics, and after the candidates were tapped, they were shoed-in to power in the main election. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar primary in Texas was unconstitutional, but South Carolina refused to abandon the practice. In July 1947, in Elmore v. Rice, Judge Waring abolished the state’s white primary, allowing black people to vote for the first time since the 1880s.

  A little earlier, Judge Waring had divorced his wife of thirty-two years and married a twice-divorced woman from a Northern state. With the voting rights case on his left shoulder and his Yankee wife on the right, Judge Waring found himself shunned by his white friends.

  Three years later, the most important case of Waring’s career came along, a school desegregation suit, Briggs v. Elliott. In 1950, Waring headed a three-judge panel in the South Carolina case. Two judges upheld the doctrine that allowed separate but equal facilities for colored and white citizens, and that had stood since the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, but Waring dissented. Then, his house was attacked.

  “I was a teenager when one of those civil rights cases of his came down,” said Black John. “My friends and I were out to have a good time. We got a bunch of rocks in our pockets and went over to his house, and we stoned the building. There was also a cross burned on the grass in front of the house, a small one. I can’t say who burned the cross, but we stoned the house, and I know one of my rocks hit the front door.” John laughed hoarsely. His eyes were wet and wistful. “Judge Waring told the newspaper someone shot at his house! We were just hellions looking for fun. All we did was break some of his windows.”

  On appeal, Briggs v. Elliott was linked to another desegregation suit, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In May 1954, ruling on the combined cases, the Supreme Court mandated desegregation nationwide.

  “Finally the good judge moved to New York,” said John. “I think he died there.”

  Black John was honest, and he knew which among the stories might be important.

  The South Carolina Society began as a social club for French Huguenot men—Protestants who had come to America to get free of the Catholic Church. They met from time to time in a tavern and, as they drank, took up collections to support French immigrants poorer than themselves. English-speaking men gradually joined in and within a few years, by greater numbers, took over the meetings.

  The Society developed into a dinner club with a charitable sideline. When they came to town from their plantations, the men sat at card tables, drank Madeira, and debated politics. Between rounds they collected money to support the education of poor white boys in Charleston. The Society built its clubhouse, South Carolina Hall, at the beginning of the 1800s, and with the showy new building, the Ball men began to join. The hall initially housed a school for poor boys on the first floor and meeting rooms on the second. In its first year of operation, the boys’ school enrolled seventy-two pupils, while the Tuesday dinners were held upstairs. John Ball, owner of Kensington and Hyde Park plantations, became a member in July 1803. He was followed by his brother Elias Ball, of Limerick plantation, in December 1804. Two sons of John Ball joined in 1810, when they were in their midtwenties. Other Ball cousins and in-laws came in throughout the 1800s. By the time of the Civil War, most of the male Cooper River slave owners ate at South Carolina Hall when they were in town.

  Little changed after the Civil War. Control of the economy slipped from the hands of the planters, but the South Carolina Society remained a monument to former times. My grandfather, Nathaniel Ball, joined, as did some in my father’s generation.

  “I joined because my father belonged,” said John. “He was treasurer, and it was so important to him.”

  The Society, John seemed to say, had become a wispy remnant of the slave days. It was a bit like a man who continues to stand on the curb after a parade, hoping it might turn around and come by a second time.

  “The present order of business is the election of new members,” bellowed the steward. “The next person to be considered is Jeremiah Bennett, who was proposed by his father, Theodore Bennett. Jeremiah Bennett was endorsed for membership on April 28, 1973.”

  Black John leaned on my shoulder. “There is a waiting list for membership of twenty-five years, sometimes thirty,” he whispered. “More or less. Fathers usually sponsor their sons for membership when they’re children, so they get in before they hit forty. We have a limit on the number of people in the Society. I don’t know, it’s maybe two hundred. So the only way you ar
e going to get in is if someone dies. Fortunately, three people died in the past month.”

  The father of the applicant had apparently been deceased for some time, so an uncle stood to speak on the man’s behalf.

  “Jeremiah Bennett. As far as I know, he’s a delightful person,” said the uncle. “He graduated from the University of South Carolina, having gone to Aiken Prep. He stopped for a year in college and worked with the Chicago Board of Trade, and was a licensed broker up there for a while. He lost more money than he made, but he did the right thing and came back to South Carolina. He’s working for a mortgage brokerage firm. His father was a member of this Society for twenty-some-odd years. His brother is a member. That should do it.”

  The steward spoke from his throne. “Does anyone have anything else to say about Mr. Bennett?” Silence. “Then membership will proceed to a vote. Is the ballot box prepared?”

  The steward turned to the clerk, who nodded at a wooden box on a table in front of him. The ballot box, made from dark wood, measured the size of a bread box. On the side facing the room there appeared two small drawers, and on top was a little hole, with a wooden funnel fixed into it.

  The clerk cleared his throat and again read off the names of the members. As each name was called, a man stood to approach the clerk.

  The first voter pulled open the bottom drawer of the box, whose tray contained black and white balls the size of marbles. He withdrew a marble, brought it to the top of the box, and dropped it through the funnel into the hole, where it made a little sound—pock—as it fell.

  “One black ball is all it takes to veto membership,” said Black John under his breath.

  “When was the last time somebody dropped a black ball?” I asked.

  “No one has been blackballed for about thirty-five years,” John replied. “The last one was a guy called DeCosta, or maybe it was Goldblum. He was sponsored for membership, but he was Jewish. But we’ve changed, and we’ve got Jews now. There are maybe two. Token.”