by Edward Ball
Philip Lucas got out of the Army, and, with his new wife, worked as a sharecropper. According to Emily Frayer, the Ball family refused to sell the couple any land, because that would give them no reason to work for Mr. Ball. So, using savings from his Army pay, and with sacks of rice earned from sharecropping, Philip Lucas bought a field a couple of miles from Limerick from a white family who was willing to sell. Philip and Ellen Lucas eventually had eleven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. One of their daughters became the mother of Emily Frayer.
Philip and Ellen Lucas, coincidentally, each had four brothers and a sister freed from Limerick at the same time they were. Most of these siblings married and had families, and as the years passed, their children and further progeny stayed in touch. Adding up their living kin, Emily Frayer and her immediate family could name perhaps two hundred people who lived in more than ten states. It was a large number, but only a small piece of the legacy. Based on normal rates of increase, by the year 2000, descendants of the two sets of Lucas siblings from Limerick would number more than twelve hundred throughout the United States.
The Lucas clan came from an “old family” on the Cooper River with a reputation for rebellion. From plantation papers, I learned that Emily Frayer’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was Tom White, whose arrest and interrogation in connection with an alleged conspiracy to overthrow white rule I’ve described.
Brought to Comingtee from Angola in 1731, Tom acquired the name Tom White, probably to distinguish him from another field hand in Red Cap’s ledgers, Tom Black. Whether the skin of Tom White was lighter than that of Tom Black is impossible to say, however. In any case, when he was about twenty, Tom White found a partner named Julatta.
The fragmentary evidence that survives from the life of Julatta suggests that she worked around the clock to make things a bit easier for her family. One year Julatta raised some corn or rice, which she sold to Elias Ball for nine shillings. An entry in Elias’s account book shows that Julatta used the money to buy extra fabric for clothing.
Tom’s subversiveness, demonstrated by his role in the alleged uprising plot in 1748, seems to have become a trait in the family. Between 1740 and 1750, Tom and Julatta had five children, one of whom—the firstborn, Tom Jr.—grew up and took after his father. Tom Jr. became a regular runaway. Born in 1742, “above the dikes,” according to his owner—perhaps in a hut away from the main plantation settlement—Tom Jr. worked until his midtwenties as a field hand at Comingtee and Kensington. But in February 1768, Elias Ball Jr. (Second Elias) placed a notice in the Charleston newspaper advertising that Tom Jr. had fled. The advertisement was the one that described Tom, twenty-seven, as having a missing toe, and was signed, “Elias Ball, Hyde Park,” naming the plantation next to Kensington where Second Elias was evidently living for the season.
Young Tom had a sister, Bessie, who in 1780 was a thirty-year-old field hand and mother of three children, ages two to ten. Her middle child had been “born at ye dam at ye pounding mill,” suggesting that Bessie, like her runaway brother, lived away from the middle of the plantation, near the work buildings. That spring, with the country caught up in the Revolutionary War, the British Army managed to occupy much of the land around Kensington. When the royal soldiers moved in, dozens of Ball slaves, among them Bessie, decided to take their chances with the enemy. On May 10, according to a Ball notebook, Bessie “& her children, Roebuck, January, & Betty” ran off. The previous day another family had escaped; but that night Bessie took flight alone, carrying her two-year-old in her arms (or on her back). Her two boys, presumably, ran alongside, grasping at their mother’s skirts.
Bessie’s freedom didn’t last, and a short time later the slave lists show that Bessie and her children were back in the rice fields. Her owner had made a note that another escapee, Charlotte, had been “brought home”; and Tom’s sister may have also been captured on her way to British lines. Bessie’s life had only this brief moment of liberty. A few years after the end of the Revolution, the account book shows, she died giving birth to a son.
By the third generation, the family likely had a reputation as the plantation zealots. But Bessie’s children seem to have lost the will openly to defy the Balls. Bessie’s daughter Betty, the two-year-old carried off by her mother, grew up at Kensington and married a man named Joe Bailey, a house servant. As the wife of Joe Bailey, a butler or valet, Betty would have spent most of her days inside the big house, among her masters during their most vulnerable hours. With this arrangement, the Balls may have forgiven, or forgotten, the legacy she carried.
In the early 1800s, Kensington was the property of John Ball, the sharp businessman who lived high and grew fat by his midthirties. After five children, John had buried one wife, Jane, and, in 1806, started a second family with his new bride, Martha Caroline (Buzzard Wing). The new Mrs. Ball reorganized the staff of house servants, getting rid of some and bringing in new faces. In the shake-up, Betty and Joe Bailey were sent away from Kensington, to Limerick plantation, to work for John Ball’s brother, Third Elias.
At Limerick, on January 9, 1810, Betty and Joe Bailey had their first child, Flora. When Third Elias died, Betty’s family then came under the ownership of Isaac Ball. A few years later, Betty had a son, then another daughter. Fifteen years passed; in 1825, when Isaac died, the family of Betty and Joe Bailey was split up. Betty’s two-year-old daughter, Lucretia, along with an eight-year-old son, were deeded to Jane Ball, who was only two years old but nonetheless the owner of Quenby plantation. In time, Lucretia and her brother were moved away from their kin to work for Jane Ball at Quenby.
This development left the aging Betty and Joe Bailey alone at Limerick with their daughter Flora, who grew up working in the main house as a servant to the widowed mistress there, Eliza Ball, and her three children. In the 1830s, Flora, in the fourth generation in the family, began a relationship with another hand at Limerick, Philip, and thus became mother of the child who would be known to his descendants as Philip Lucas, veteran of the Civil War.
In his own way Philip Lucas carried on the legacy of Tom the Angolan. For a black man to join the Union Army at the moment of freedom was a plain act of defiance. It meant that Philip wanted to do his part to end white rule.
“I was a history major,” Sonya Fordham began. “And I learned to analyze things. But still, we black people were not supposed to ask the question ‘What about us?’ ”
Sonya Fordham, a granddaughter of Emily Frayer, lived in a little wooden cottage in Charleston, with two rooms upstairs, two down, and a tiny porch. Sonya was in her late forties, wore glasses, and had a pleasing, broad face. She had a mild manner, and a light laugh that carried a touch of sadness. Whereas her grandmother was small but outspoken, Sonya Fordham, tall and strong, had a soft voice.
“When I was a child,” said Sonya, “I didn’t know any white children. There were none in the neighborhood, none in the school. In fact, I didn’t meet any white people until I went to graduate school. The only white person I knew was my doctor.”
I saw Sonya Fordham for dinner from time to time, and she often dressed for these occasions. One night she wore a black suit with high heels and a jacket with leopard-skin cuffs and lapels. Sonya was a divorced mother. In 1980, while living in Washington, D.C., she had married a Nigerian, Sylvester Egwu, and moved to Nigeria. Four years later, when the marriage broke up, she moved back to Charleston with her daughter, Chiemeka. The girl was a teenager when we met, and in high school—poised and tall, with a lovely smile.
Chiemeka had been chosen as a beauty queen in a local parade, and Sonya showed me a photograph of her daughter riding in a convertible, holding a bouquet of flowers, surrounded by young men. While raising Chiemeka alone, Sonya had enrolled in the law school at Georgia State University. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo nearly destroyed the house where her grandmother lived. Sonya left law school, not to return, and went to work to help pay for repairs.
At one dinner Sonya told me about her youth. “I w
as a shy student,” she said, “a bookworm, with just a few friends.” Sonya explained that she had come through the public education system in Charleston, graduating from high school in 1964, after which she enrolled at South Carolina State College on a scholarship from the City of Charleston, South Carolina State, a conservative, historically black school in the town of Orangeburg, founded in 1896 and based on the doctrine of separate but equal education. The “white” institution, the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, was better funded but did not welcome black students.
“My brother went there, to USC,” Sonya remembered, “and had a lot of problems. They kicked in the door of his room.”
The early 1960s, high years of black assertion, brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the racial caste system remained. Most black students at South Carolina State, Sonya said, were cautious and uninterested in “the movement.” In her own family, protest was off-limits, because her mother worked as a teacher in the public schools and black teachers had been known to lose their jobs if they or someone in their family got too involved in politics.
“In 1965,” I said, “the neighborhood of Watts burned in Los Angeles. Did you hear anything about that?”
Sonya pursed her lips, a little embarrassed. “We were very sheltered,” she said. “We didn’t know anything. For instance, I knew nothing about Malcolm X when he was alive. Can you believe that?”
At college, however, some course offerings opened Sonya’s eyes, and she learned for the first time about the literature of white superiority.
“I remember that one teacher in the history department at State, a white man, came from Syracuse, New York,” said Sonya. “Ruben Weston was his name. He made us study Rudyard Kipling and the idea of the ‘white man’s burden,’ as an example of what had been written. It opened a door in my mind.” Sonya Fordham spoke gently, with a light smile punctuating her story. She showed no rancor.
In October 1966, the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland, California. The following summer Detroit, as well as Newark, New Jersey, burned in riots in black neighborhoods.
“I was quiet,” said Sonya, “but in 1967, I joined the movement. I became one of the student leaders.” In South Carolina black protest was rare, and Sonya was one of only a handful of activists on campus.
“During the 1950s,” she said, “the presidents of South Carolina State were very light-skinned, and pro-white. They were whiter than you. The NAACP was not even allowed on State’s campus. We decided we had had enough of this. In the fall of 1967, a group of eight of us came together and formed something we called the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee. We wanted to get rid of the president, B. C. Turner, and bring in another one. We started by going to the president’s yard and lying down on the grass, which was posted ‘Don’t step on the grass.’ Stepping on the grass was enough to get you kicked out of school at that time. Then we called for a school boycott.”
Sonya told her story shyly, with a light smile. It seemed a long time ago, and she gave the impression that she did not know what it had amounted to.
“Somehow we got rid of Turner,” she continued, “and a new president came into the office, the first in the school’s history who was actually dark-skinned. We kept agitating, and got our first black history class. It wasn’t perfect, because it was being taught by a white gay man! But still, it was there. We next got interested in community development. We explored Orangeburg, which we had not done, and started going to the black businesses instead of patronizing the white, which we had been doing. We wanted to begin to develop black consciousness. The Vietnam War was going on, and we knew black guys were getting killed. So we made a picture of Uncle Sam that said, ‘Uncle Sam wants you, Nigger.’ We picketed Dow Chemical when they came to campus to recruit—they made the napalm that was dropped in Vietnam. We found documentation that proved the inequities of funding for black colleges in South Carolina, as compared to white, and we publicized that. It was wanting to be knowledgeable about your community, and about yourself! We put out a newsletter. But after all that, we were still really on the margins. Most people wouldn’t pick up the newsletter. I grew an Afro, and all of a sudden I became an outcast on campus.”
“How many women on campus had an Afro?” I asked.
“First there were two, then the other woman left school, and that left me.”
I tried to picture Sonya, who now had processed hair, with an Afro, but couldn’t.
“In the midst of all this, an activist, Cleve Sellers, came down from Howard University, in Washington. He was originally from South Carolina. He was a member of SNCC.” Sonya pronounced SNCC, the acronym for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as “Snick,” its old nickname.
“At the end of 1967, when Cleve was there, the idea of integrating a local bowling alley came up. I wasn’t much for it, because by then we were starting to think that black people should not be about integration but about developing our communities. But some of the group wanted to integrate, so we did some planning. We went home for Christmas, then came back. In January 1968, we met with the administration, talked about the bowling alley, talked about more classes in black history. There was a lot going on. Martin Luther King had just mentioned the need for people to get more involved with Vietnam, and so we were researching it. We were in a meeting, our own group, waiting for Cleve to come around with a film about Vietnam, when someone ran in and said, ‘Cleve has been arrested at the bowling alley!’ He had been arrested for trying get in the front door. Then somebody said, ‘Let’s go down there.’
“It was a Monday night. When we got to the bowling alley, there were about a thousand students who showed up. Most of them were not in the mood to fight, but we were. I had rocks in my pocket.” Sonya’s story slowed down, and the details became more vivid. She seemed to remember events of February 1968 with an hourly precision.
“A fire truck pulled up next to us. Next thing I knew, I heard a gunshot. I don’t know who shot, but it was probably the police shooting over our heads. We scattered, and ran back to campus. We threw our rocks through some store windows on the way back.”
“Did you break them?” I asked.
Sonya nodded. “That was just rage.”
Her smiling stopped, and her pleasant manner fled, replaced by a reporter’s flat gaze.
“The next night, Tuesday, there was some shooting on the campus,” she said.
“Who was shooting?”
“We heard it was white people, but I didn’t see it. They were shooting at some students, but nobody was hit.” Sonya nodded her head in a way that meant this incident required no explanation. “A lot of the white people in Orangeburg really didn’t like us.
“The administration canceled classes, but we stayed on campus. The next night, Wednesday, I was walking on the campus, alone, and all of a sudden there was a shot. I fell to the ground, and saw a car racing through the campus. There were some black guys who chased the car down, and caught it. They dragged the white guys out of the car, and beat them up.”
Sonya then remembered another night when she came near face-to-face fighting. “Another time, I was on the road in North Carolina, in a car full of black kids, at night, and the car broke down. A car full of white men pulled up behind us and just sat there, for five minutes—the longest five minutes I can remember. We could not figure out why they did not attack us. Then they slowly drove off.”
“The mood was reckless on campus by this time,” I said.
“We knew something was going to happen,” Sonya answered. “By Thursday the National Guard came in, hundreds of them. They were white, they had on green uniforms, and carried rifles. Some of the students were out on the lawn on a knoll in front of the campus, facing the National Guard, just watching them. I tried to get the students to leave, because as a black person, you do not stand in front of a white person with a gun. That’s just crazy. But a lot of them stayed.
“Anyway, we had some meetings.” So
nya looked down, and tried to decide whether she would tell me her next thought. “We decided we were going to blow up something, a building off campus.”
“Did anyone know how to blow something up?” I asked.
“I didn’t.” She laughed.
“Did anyone take concrete steps to prepare a bomb?”
“All I can say is, there was never a bomb that blew up,” Sonya went on. “Nothing happened.” Sonya’s comrades in the movement either decided against planting a bomb in an empty building or did not have time to do so.
“Later we found out that somebody at some of our meetings was an informant,” she continued.
“Is it possible that the National Guard knew something from this informant?”
Sonya nodded, chagrined. “That night, people were still on the knoll, and the National Guard was there. Around six-thirty, I went back to the dorm. About an hour later, the National Guard opened fire. There were about a hundred people on the knoll at the time. It lasted about ten seconds. I wasn’t there. From the dorm we heard the shooting, and someone came in and told us what had happened. We got real quiet, and sat in the hall of our dorm, just facing each other, away from the windows. We just knew we were all going to get killed! We were afraid, and crying.”
The shooting, on February 8, 1968, became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
“What were the students doing on the knoll when the National Guard started firing?” I asked.
Sonya was leaning forward. “Just standing there!” she broke out. “There were forty-eight people hit. Three people were killed. None of these people were in the movement.
“An hour later I went over to the infirmary, but they wouldn’t let me in. One guy who was killed, Smitty, his death was the most suspicious, because he was hit in the leg with a bullet. Photographs of Smitty, after he was shot, show that he was sitting up, conscious. Then they put him in the van and took him to the hospital. He was said to have died on the way, but we think he was killed in custody. We always thought that Smitty probably resisted arrest, and they just beat him to death.”
