by Edward Ball
The voting continued a few minutes, and at the end, the steward removed the upper drawer and made a show of inspecting its contents, all white balls. “Mr. Bennett,” he said, looking around the room, “has been admitted.”
The evening at South Carolina Hall continued through its paces. Nominees were announced, discussed, and admitted to the membership. A little flourish of applause followed each vote. At the end of the last ballot, Black John leaned into my shoulder.
“Wait,” he said. “There was a more recent blackball. The mayor of Charleston used to be a member. But he was at some meeting or another, and he began to talk about school integration. He was apparently for it, and everyone listened politely. Later, the mayor put up his son for membership. He was blackballed.”
It was a mild evening, a Thursday, the kind of soft Southern twilight when the winter, never severe, could be forgotten altogether. A concert was scheduled at the Dock Street Theatre, an old hall made of brown stone on a block with two churches. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, a venerable Charleston troupe, was giving one of its annual recitals. The group had been performing the same songs in the same style each spring for several dozen years, and tonight’s event was certain to have a much-handled quality. About forty men and women, among them Pinckney Ball—to give him a name consanguine with his real one—could be counted on to sing the old songs.
Pinckney Ball, in his seventies, made a lingering impression, partly because of his clothes, which made it always possible to recognize him on the street, even from a distance. His uniform consisted of a tweed jacket (seersucker in the summer), bow tie (often striped red-and-blue silk), khaki trousers, and white canvas sneakers. As a younger man, Pinckney may have used leather footwear, but at some point he traded his oxfords and loafers for tennis shoes. Pinckney was a first cousin of my father, most of whose generation was now dead, though as one of the youngest Pinckney showed no sign of slowing down. A retired scientist, he lived in restless dotage with his wife, Ann Louise, a lovable wit.
The Ball family has been part of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals from its beginnings, in the 1920s, when my grandparents were two of the founders. Cousin Pinckney has sung for some fifty years. Three things make the choir singular: the bloodline of its members, the repertoire, and the style of song. The singers are all descendants of families who once owned slaves. Second, the members perform only the songs of the slaves—spirituals. Last, choir members sing in an imitation of Gullah, the black dialect from the plantations. The dialect the Spirituals Society uses, with much care in pronunciation, is so strong that it cannot be understood by some audiences.
The space of the Dock Street Theatre forms an exact cube, with about four hundred seats at orchestra level and fifteen boxes at balcony height. Behind the raised wooden stage that Thursday hung a painted backdrop that showed a swamp, the old vista of a plantation. The members of the Spirituals Society appeared from the wings dressed in their usual costume, formal clothes from the antebellum period. Pinckney and the rest of the men wore waist-cut jackets with tails, ruffled shirts, and long ribbon ties. The suit, which Abraham Lincoln might have worn, flattered Pinckney’s tall, angular frame. The women had their hair pinned up, and each wore a pastel gown that seemed to have been made from an acre of satin. The shimmering dresses had giant hoop skirts with flounces, and many came off the shoulder in a design that exposed the pale white of the women’s necks and bosoms. With skirts that trailed the floor, the pink, yellow, or green gowns gave the women’s entrance the appearance of so many bells floating onstage. The women curtsied and settled onto little stools in front of the men, arranging their dresses around their legs like slipcovers. Here were the masters and mistresses, brought back from the dead.
Pinckney stood in the back row, among others his own height. He was bald, with a corona of white hair around the ears, white eyebrows, and a large jaw, which gave out a frequent laugh. Pinckney moved broadly for emphasis, bending from time to time at the waist, and his loud reedy voice made an unforgettable sound. It was a voice that could not settle on one note but wavered between two, dancing up and down between octaves.
A white-haired gentleman, the evening’s master of ceremonies, stepped to the front and cleared his throat. “The Society was founded with a threefold purpose,” he began in a voice both soft and commanding. “It was meant to preserve the spirituals, to teach them to the rising generation, and to provide a social club with pleasure for its members.” A bit older than most members, the choir leader leaned on an ebony cane with a rather beautiful handle made from the small antler of a deer. “We have been performing almost from the beginning, when our parents and grandparents first got together. In 1935, President Roosevelt invited the group to sing in the White House. We went, and we’ve been talking about it ever since.”
Titters rolled around the theater, where there appeared to be nearly a full house, all faces around the room white, save two.
Spirituals were sung without instruments, in a call-and-response cadence, with one line called out by a leader, the verse hailed back by the others. When the singing started, Pinckney and the line of tall men leaped slightly and began to sway. Coattails flapped as the men stamped out the first rhythms. In front of the men, the petticoats rustled as the women sat upright, clapped daintily, and cleared a few notes from their throats.
When the singers opened their mouths to call out the first lines of slave dialect, the rolling melody of a beautiful, sad song came overhead, the old spiritual, “In My Time of Dying,” whose lines tripped off the tongues of the masters and their ladies.
Een muh time ob dyin’
Don’ wan’ nobody tuh moan.
All I wan’ fuh yuh to do
Is tuh close my dyin’ eyes.
Well, well, well
So I kin die easy,
Well, well, well
Lawd, lemme die easy,
Well, well, well
Wan’ tuh die easy,
Jedus gwine mek up my dyin’ bed.
When the song dropped down, a good burst of applause rattled around the room. The next spiritual came up, “I Know I’ve Been Changed,” and the choir leaned into it, this time dancing harder, and shouting.
I know I bin chainge
I know I bin chainge
Angul een de hebun dun changed muh name.
Oh two white horses side by side,
Angul een de hebun dun changed muh name
One ob dese horse King Jedus ride,
Angul een de hebun dun changed muh name.
I know I bin chainge
I know I bin chainge
Angul een de hebun dun changed muh name.
Ten songs later, the concert ended. As the choir took its bows, my eyes drifted over the heads of the singers up to the proscenium and toward the ceiling, where there was hung a peculiar coat of arms, evidently an emblem of the theater. The painted symbol depicted a lion and a unicorn, and around the edges there appeared an inscription, Honi soit qui mal y pense—”Shamed be he who thinks evil of it.”
Some months later, the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was preparing for another performance, and I went to the rehearsal. Pinckney Ball and his wife, Ann Louise, had offered the invitation. “Come on with us,” Ann Louise had said with a wry smile. “This is your heritage.”
From around Charleston, the members of the Spirituals Society made their way to a large house overlooking the harbor. It was a delicate night, and a soft wind pulled over the waters of the port. The air had a downy texture that breathed through the crevices of the rambling wooden house and into the rooms.
Pinckney wore a dark sports jacket, silk bow tie, white shirt, tan pants, and bright, clean sneakers. It was a friendly, cluttered event, and Pinckney introduced me around. Most of the members were married couples in their middle and upper years, though a handful were younger, down to about age thirty-five. Every face was fortified by an old name from the plantation days—Grimball, Horlbeck, Hutson, Smythe,
Townsend, Waring. To prepare for rehearsal, we poured large drafts of bourbon, scotch, or vodka over small quantities of ice, talked half an hour, then repeated the process. Finally we retired to a large, high-ceilinged drawing room with sofas and chairs and bookshelves.
Each spiritual was led by a different singer. Everyone in the room knew the songs from memory, but the leader stood and sang out the first line, after which the rest came in with the end of the verse. A man in a jacket rose from his chair and let go with one of the old standards.
Well uh look’d een de grabe,
An’ de grabe so watry,
I got to lay een dat watry grabe.
Uh look’d in the grabe
I got to lay down in de watry grabe.
The song ended, we sipped our drinks, and another singer stood up. His song was a spiritual about the end of slavery called “How Long, Watchman?” And in a moment, the heirs to the plantation families sang out the old question the slaves used to cry out to each other.
My Lawd I dun jes like yuh said,
How long watchman, how long?
De rich man lib an’ de po’ man dead.
How long watchman, how long?
How long?
How long?
How long watchman, how long?
We went through the repertoire. We sang songs about death. We sang songs about disappointment. We sang songs of relief, songs about laying down burdens, and songs about wandering. We did not sing any songs of love. The spirituals were the songs of sorrow, and there were no songs from the plantations about love.
During a break, a balding man in a tweed jacket stood up, a bit irritated.
“Look here, ya’ll, in ‘Uh Look Down Duh Road,’ we have a problem,” he said. “I’m singing, ‘Uh look in de grabe, an duh grabe so watry, uh got to lay in dat watry grave.’ Not lie in duh grabe, but lay.”
The room nodded and murmured, and another man stood up.
“In my song, it’s not ‘way beyond the moon,’ ” he put in. “Listen, it’s ‘way beyan’ de moon.’ ” He sat down.
A woman in middle age, wearing pants, said, “All right, how about this? It’s not ‘hold the light.’ It’s ‘hole ‘he light.’ ”
The message seemed clear: the Gullah stood in danger of being whitened, and its blackness had to be protected with vigilance.
The last song of the rehearsal went up, “Leave You in the Hand,” and Pinckney came over and put his arm around my shoulder. We started out slowly, singing together.
“I’m a gonna lebe yuh een duh han’!” Pinckney sang in his reedy voice. “I’m a gonna lebe yuh een duh han’ ob duh kine sabior!”
I sang along with Pinckney. “I’m a gonna lebe yuh een duh han’ ob duh kine sabior!”
“Come on!” Pinckney shouted. “Open your mouth and sing! Louder!”
The refrain came around, and Pinckney grabbed my hand. We danced together, shouting out the old song. “I’m a gonna lebe yuh een duh han’ ob duh kine sabior!”
My father’s father, Nathaniel Ingraham Ball, spent his childhood on The Bluff, the former rice plantation turned into a sharecrop farm by his father, Isaac the Confederate. Grandfather Nat grew up among the “colored folk,” listening to their work songs and religious music from a distance. I imagine Grandfather Nat heard more spirituals during his childhood than anything else—white folk music, hymns, the classical repertoire. But before he was grown, he heard no more, because the rice business collapsed and the planters and their families moved to Charleston to start again.
Grandfather Nat married Susan Porter, whose family, in addition to its clergymen, were former rice planters with roots in nearby Georgetown. The two lived in Charleston among friends of a similar background, whites raised on plantations, nostalgic for their childhood and the vanished world of the landlords. In 1922, a group of these adults who had lost a similar youth began to get together to drink, remember, and sing black spirituals. They wrote down the verses they could recall in a way that caught some of the Gullah dialect. The drinking club formed itself into the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals and was swiftly invited by a church, St. Philip’s, to sing at an annual fund-raiser. The choir’s first performance took place at a venerable old house; the admission charge was twenty-five cents. My grandparents became perennial members of the Spirituals Society, until Grandfather Nat died in 1962.
When the choir went public, in the 1920s, another group sprang up, the Plantation Melody Singers, ten white women with a similar love of black music. Among the women were two sisters, Mary Ball and Lydia C. Ball, cousins of Grandfather Nat. Both unmarried, both in their fifties, Lydia and Mary had been raised on Limerick plantation and decided to use their acquaintance with black people on the river to collect their repertoire. Each rice farm was a settlement or village in its own right, whose musical heritage differed slightly from that of the others, so Lydia and Mary went from one field to another, asking the colored folk to sing their different songs. At Quenby plantation, the sisters heard and wrote down the Ball slaves’ version of “Mary and Martha.” From Middleburg, next to Quenby, came “Roll Jordan, Roll” and “Shout Jubilee.” From Limerick, which the Balls owned for 130 years, came versions of “Christ Comin’ ” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” After writing down what they heard, the sisters typed up a songbook. In 1925, the Plantation Melody Singers performed ten concerts for white audiences. They kept singing until the mid-1930s, when they disbanded.
Lydia and Mary’s group and the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals did the same thing, more or less, with one conspicuous difference. For its concerts, the Spirituals Society dressed in tuxedos and gowns, whereas the Melody Singers dressed themselves, as best as they were able, as slaves. A photograph taken about 1925 shows Lydia Ball wearing the clothing of a black cook. She has a bandanna tied around her head and is wearing a long calico skirt, an apron frock, and a long necklace of beads. She looks a bit uncomfortable, as though she hasn’t quite got it right.
Credible or not, the imitation of slaves by the women’s choir made a hit with white audiences. After one concert at a church, Lydia’s singers were written up in the Charleston News and Courier by a reviewer who praised the realism of the charade:
The entertainment given recently at the Holy Communion Parish hall by the “Plantation Melody Singers” was of exceptional merit. … The manner in which the entertainment was conducted was admirable. The dialect, attire, attitudes, expressions, and the actions of the singers were typical of that rapidly disappearing, respectful, superstitious, indolent, but ever faithful and good-natured race, the “old fashioned” plantation negroes. … The president of this unique group is Miss Lydia C. Ball.
Drinking hour resumed after rehearsal, and we broke into clumps of conversation. The president of the Spirituals Society was a tall, slender man his late forties, a banker at a local savings and loan.
“Obviously, we’re an anachronism,” he said good-naturedly. “A lot of people don’t really feel it’s politically correct for us to sing the spirituals, and we’ve gotten criticism.”
“The spirituals are the gift of the plantation to music,” I said.
“There was a woman who came to a performance recently,” the banker went on, “bought a ticket and sat down. We came out onto the stage, and she saw that we were white. We have a pamphlet about the group that we hand out, with no picture, and she must have gotten one of those. Suddenly the woman got up, walked out of the theater, and demanded her money back. We weren’t what she expected.”
The banker laughed an understanding laugh.
“Almost all of us were raised by blacks,” said an older man in a tweed jacket. “We have a lot in common with the blacks. We’re actually more the same than different. We come from the same Protestant background, for instance. The ideals we have are the same ideals.” He was eager in his argument, and looked into my eyes for encouragement.
A gentle lady in her seventies, wearing a print dress and a barrette in her w
hite hair, came over, cocked her head back, and spoke with a delicate diction.
“I’m a member of this group because of your grandfather,” she said. Her eyes were wide and full of remembrance. “I was six years old, and the Society was giving a concert, I think at the Dock Street Theatre. The decorations on the stage were imitation pine trees, because we always had pine trees as stage decor. I climbed up in one of them, and sat there, perched and looking down at the stage. Suddenly, my pine tree fell over, and I landed on your grandfather’s lap. And he picked me up and pushed me to the front of the stage. From that night, I’ve been singing.”
“We are trying to find more young people to join,” said a young woman dressed in yellow. “The membership is too old. Would you like to join? You qualify!”
“I joined,” said Pinckney, leaning on my shoulder, “because in the Episcopal church, you couldn’t sing out. My God, nobody made enough noise! Here you can sing out, because hell, nobody’s going to stop you! It’s kind of fun to be an Episcopalian and still get to holler!”
The woman in yellow pressed forward and said, “It may be hypocritical for us to sing the songs, dressed like we are onstage, but it’s fun. How did you like it?”
“It’s too bad there are no more slaves,” I said, smiling, “so we could compare styles. I think the slaves couldn’t have done it better themselves.”
18
A RECKONING
I wrote an item for a weekly black newspaper in Charleston, the Chronicle, in which I explained that I was a member of a clan who had once owned plantations near the city. In a few days I received a letter from a woman about her family. “My grandmother’s mother was enslaved on Limerick plantation,” she wrote. “So was her father, whose name was Philip Lucas. He fought in the Civil War. … We would like to see and talk to you. My mother is named for Marie Ball, of Logan Street.” The closing of the letter read “Hopefully.”
