by Edward Ball
“Was there an investigation?” I asked, then looked down at the table, a little embarrassed at my naive question.
“Nothing was investigated.” Sonya shook her head bitterly. “Next morning, black leaders came from around the state. We were made to get off the campus, and as we left, we saw the tanks coming into town. That was power. Tanks!”
Sonya laughed, and rested her brow on her palm. In my mind’s eye I saw the tanks wandering through the pleasant Carolina town.
“Three weeks later, SNCC came to me and said, ‘Go back to the school.’ We were demoralized. But we got telegrams from around the country about what had happened, and letters of support. So I got on the phone in a phone booth, and made long-distance calls to people who had written us, collect calls, and asked them to send us money. They were strangers, and they were white people. To my amazement, a lot of them sent money.
“We used the money to rent buses to go to Columbia, to invade the state legislature. We got to the capitol, and into the senate chambers, and into the balcony. We wanted the governor and legislature to admit that they had murdered our fellow students. We started reading our grievances, but we were arrested, and they carried us to jail. It was the first time I’d ever been in jail. After we got out on bond, we decided to go back again, and this time to make it bigger.
“The second time we went to Columbia,” she said, “I had never seen so many white police officers, and I haven’t seen so many since. Imagine one thousand highway patrolmen, and they’re all six foot five, with big billy clubs, and rifles, standing shoulder to shoulder, around the State House. There were cops on top of the buildings! Our own group had nine or twelve busloads, and there were black students from around the South. Some of them had guns, because we didn’t know what was going to happen. The students from State had arrived, but they got frightened. The president of the college came out, and told the students to leave. Then the police started to move. We backed down, and a lot of the buses turned around, and we gave the city back to the police.”
“Did you go back again?” I asked.
“We lost,” answered Sonya sadly, then let out a giggle to cover it. “If you try to reach out too far, either you will destroy yourself or you will be destroyed. People will kill. The movement never got its momentum. Our grievances were never addressed. In April, Dr. King died, but there wasn’t a lot of commotion on our campus, because we had been through so much already. That was more or less the end.”
A sarcastic edge entered Sonya’s voice.
“I never wanted to sing ‘We shall overcome, someday.’ I always wanted to say ‘We shall overcome—today.’ Today is the day we become first-class citizens, not tomorrow.”
Sonya laughed sadly, and looked down again, embarrassed. “The day before my graduation, my mother came up to Orangeburg from Charleston. And that night she made me straighten my hair. That was very important to her, that I look like the other students.”
I told Sonya about Tom White, the Angolan accused of plotting a slave uprising. She was silent for a while. Then she said, “Sometimes, in the movement, I felt like I was speaking in tongues. I would give a speech, and it was as though someone was speaking through me, like I was possessed. Maybe in a family, the dead are able to communicate through the living.”
“In my family’s lore,” I said to Emily Frayer, sitting in her living room, “the story is maintained that the slave owners did not sleep with the slaves. Is there anything that would lead you to believe that women on the Ball plantations were forced to sleep with their masters?”
Mrs. Frayer’s family, seated around the room, let go a group sigh. Half a minute passed, and the elderly lady began slowly to speak.
“Yes, I heard them say that,” she said. “I heard them say that a long time ago, they had children by the slaves. I don’t know if it’s the master, but I think it was the master’s children.”
Mrs. Frayer had gotten it from her grandparents that the young sons of the big house, boys in their teens and twenties, had sex with black women when they could.
“Yes, it was common all right,” said Mrs. Frayer. “Now and then you hear somebody say something. I remember one lady—her name was Abby—who had a son. This was in Hyde Park, so I know him. That boy, he was a Ball.”
“You knew a man on Hyde Park—” I began.
“No, I knew a lady used to live on Hyde Park,” Mrs. Frayer corrected. “Abby. She had a son. This boy, he didn’t go to school there, because when he was a little boy, they sent him to an orphanage, in Moncks Corner. They called him Sonny. That’s his little raisin’ name. His real name was Moses. And he was raised up in this orphanage, so he could get his schoolin’.”
“Who was his father?” I asked.
“He was a Ball, but I didn’t know which one.” Mrs. Frayer added that Moses was about the same age as she. “I don’t know who was his father. I asked him one time. I said, ‘Look here, what name you carry?’ He said, ‘You know, I carry Dent here, but when I go away, I carry my own name. My name is Moses Dent here, but when I go off, I’m Moses Ball.’ ”
One of Mrs. Frayer’s kin added, “He went to Boston.”
“Yes, he went to Boston when he was quite a boy,” Mrs. Frayer nodded. “He used to visit home, but after his mother died, he didn’t come back. I don’t think he’s alive, and I don’t know if he has children or not.”
“If I went to Boston,” I said, “and looked for black folks called Ball, I might find Moses Ball’s family.”
“I hope you will,” answered Mrs. Frayer, “and if you do, tell them hello for me.”
Before blood tests, before genetic matching, the identity of a father rested on the report of the mother. Mrs. Frayer had gotten the story from Abby, the child’s mother, and, a lifetime later, repeated the tale. On other subjects, Mrs. Frayer’s hearsay had been very precise. Her tale of the end of slavery at Limerick plantation was, word for word, nearly the same as the description written down by Mary Ball.
In probate law, when courts seek to establish family relations, three forms of evidence are admitted: documentary records, “real” evidence, and hearsay. Documentary evidence includes accounts produced by governing authorities—wills, marriage certificates, and death records. Real evidence includes artifacts that corroborate the structure of a family, such as photographs, heirlooms, or inscriptions on tombstones. Hearsay evidence consists of what others reported before any controversy around heredity arose. The standard of proof for blood relations among the long-dead does not rest on one or another type of evidence but on the preponderance.
For Moses Dent Ball, real evidence did not exist. If he moved out of state as a young man, no artifacts relevant to his parents could reasonably be found. As for documentary evidence, paper records of his birth did not exist either. South Carolina did not require the registration of births until 1905, after Moses was born; before that year, many children went unrecorded.
Other records related to the life of Moses Dent Ball did survive, however. According to the federal census of 1880, three black families named Dent were living in the vicinity of the Balls’ Hyde Park plantation. In one of the households lived Abby Dent, fifteen years old. To judge from court papers, the Ball family also had dealings with Abby’s family. In 1881, Abby’s father, Marcus Dent, a sixty-one-year-old farm worker, died, after which the probate judge in the county appointed Abby’s mother, Amy Dent, executor of her husband’s small estate. Among the signatures of witnesses in the matter were three men, all members of the Ball family. What’s more, from the Ball plantation books, it appeared that Marcus Dent, Abby’s father, had been a slave on Hyde Park. A boy called Marcus was born there in May 1822, to parents named Peter and Beda. Abby’s father, according to the probate file, was a man of the same name and age, living on the same piece of land.
In 1910, in the federal census, Moses Ball, age ten, lived in the town of Moncks Corner, west of Hyde Park, with several other children and a guardian. This would have been the orphanage wher
e the mulatto child of Abby Dent and the unknown Mr. Ball was sent to school.
Mrs. Frayer said that Moses Ball had moved to Massachusetts as a young man. Moses is not listed in the 1920 South Carolina census, and the Massachusetts census for the same year shows a Moses Ball, age nineteen, living in the village of Watertown, outside Boston. The census enumerator wrote that this Moses Ball gave his birthplace as South Carolina.
I went to Massachusetts.
Watertown is an old industrial district five miles from central Boston and a mile west of Cambridge. Its main road, Arsenal Street, is named for a military depot that opened in the 1820s. During the Civil War, the Watertown Arsenal made cannons and ammunition for Union troops. After 1900 Watertown became a transit point for cattle sent by rail from Chicago, and experienced an economic boom. A slaughterhouse was put up in the neighboring town of Brighton, and packinghouses opened to process the beef. Another boom came during World War I, when weapons production was increased, and the number of employees at the Arsenal rose to sixteen hundred. About the same time, the town got a rubber plant, operated by the Hood Company. In 1919, that plant employed eighty-seven hundred people, who made galoshes.
I arrived in Watertown on a sunny Saturday to find the moldering aftermath of this former prosperity. The brick factories from the early 1900s stood shuttered or decaying, and the wood-frame houses lining the streets, the old workers’ districts, looked run-down. The arsenal itself, a piecemeal compound of brick buildings, was locked up. A painted sign near the front gate faintly promised ARMY RESEARCH CENTER.
The 1920 census recorded Moses Ball’s address as 42 Arsenal Street. He rented a room that year from a black laundress named Frannie Lucas, and worked in one of the packinghouses. In the Watertown library, I found a residential directory from the period which confirmed that a man named Moses Ball had boarded with Frannie Lucas. According to the census, Arsenal Street, in Moses’s time, was a neighborhood of white immigrants. North of Moses’s house on Arsenal Street lived several nurses and machinists, from Wales and Scotland. South along the same street lived a couple of painters and roofers, as well as a seamstress or two, born, among other places, in Ireland and Sweden. The only people of color on the street were Moses Ball and Frannie Lucas. It occurred to me that Moses, if he had a white father, might have been fair-skinned. Although the census called him black, he might have moved easily among whites.
I went to his old address, 42 Arsenal, at the corner of Taylor Street. The house was gone, replaced by a tire dealer. Across the street stood a furniture store and another tire shop.
In Boston, at the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics, I found the record of Moses Ball’s marriage—on May 11, 1921, to twenty-eight-year-old Carrie Redmond, from Holyoke, Massachusetts. On the marriage license, Carrie Redmond gave her occupation as “beauty culturist,” and added that she had been born in Montclair, New Jersey. Moses Ball gave his job as “steelworker.” By then he had probably gotten work at the arsenal, whose open-hearth foundry was still in operation.
When the marriage clerk asked Moses Ball about his parents, he gave his mother’s name as Abby—the Abby Dent of Hyde Park. As for his father, Moses stated that he lived in Charleston and was named James Ball. The name of his father might have been a sensitive subject at home in South Carolina, but in Boston, a thousand miles away, Moses Ball had little reason to lie or invent a name. There was a James Austin Ball in the South Carolina clan. At the time of Moses’s birth, he was twenty-five, and unmarried. His father, Isaac Ball, and his uncle, Elias, ran sharecrop plantations on the Cooper River. The evidence that this was Moses’s father is slim and circumstantial, yet plausible.
After two or three years, Moses and Carrie Ball disappeared from public records. By 1923 they were no longer listed in residential directories for Watertown or Boston. In the Massachusetts birth records, I found numerous children named Ball, all described as white, but no black children recorded as born to a Moses or Carrie Ball. I then looked through death records and newspaper obituaries for a fifty-year period but found no mention of the couple.
Emily Frayer remembered seeing Moses Ball about 1940, at a funeral in Charleston, when he was still living in Massachusetts. The couple did not move back to South Carolina, she said. Moses and Carrie Ball may have simply left Boston. But when I told one of Mrs. Frayer’s family members that Moses Ball had vanished, she speculated that he had “crossed over,” that is, begun to pass for white. It is possible, of course, that both Moses and Carrie Ball were light-skinned. If they did pass, this would explain why they disappear from official records that might identify them as “colored.”
It occurred to me that Moses Ball, like many husbands, died before his wife, and that she may well have returned to her birthplace in New Jersey. In Social Security records, I found a Carrie Ball, age eighty-four, who died in New Jersey, a few miles from the town where Moses’s wife was born. Her birthdate showed her to be the right age to have been married to Moses Ball of Hyde Park. I retrieved her death certificate from the New Jersey State Department of Health. It reported that Carrie Ball was a former production worker in a pencil factory, retired, with no children, and white.
On a crisp morning in early February, I set off with some of the descendants of Philip and Ellen Lucas for Hyde Park plantation. Emily Frayer was born there in 1901 in a cabin which her great-aunt, Rachel, occupied as a tenant. Rachel later moved off Hyde Park, and after that none of the Lucas clan lived there. Hyde Park had recently been sold by relatives of the Balls, making it the last plantation to go out of the family. Mrs. Frayer said she had not been home to Hyde Park in more than eighty years, and wanted to see it one last time before she died.
Outside the entrance gate stood a church. In the cemetery was the grave of Philip Lucas, Mrs. Frayer’s grandfather, beneath a tombstone with the outline of two upheld swords chiseled on its face. Because Philip Lucas had been a Union soldier at the end of the Civil War, his family had requested the swords, so as not to forget.
We drove along a long dusty lane until we came to the main house, a two-story cottage with a porch. It stood on a bluff with a splendid vista, facing down a rolling lawn toward the Cooper River. The porch hung out from the front like a great wooden chair. From the house, you could see the old rice fields, or what was left of them, and beyond that, making a narrow yet sluggish path through the marshes, the river.
The earliest house at Hyde Park burned down around the time of the American Revolution. A few years later, since none of the Balls wanted to live there, the family put up a small “marooning cottage,” which the Ball ladies could use to maroon—that is, to get away from home to socialize—and men might use while hunting. Built in 1799, the wooden cottage rested on brick pilings and had a sloping tin roof. Fifty yards beyond the house stood a narrow cabin, shaped like a railroad car, with two doors and a pair of windows. It was dilapidated beyond repair and sat in a hollow surrounded by brush.
Along with Emily Frayer had come her daughter, two of her grandchildren, and a family friend. We walked toward the two houses, Mrs. Frayer leading with her cane. She was tiny and stooped, but she navigated as though walking through her own living room.
“The road used to run past the barnyard,” she said, “then over a little bridge on a creek, down toward the river and the fields.”
Mrs. Frayer hardly looked at the main house. I offered to take her inside, and she waved me off. She looked down at the ground, then up across the lawn, at the narrow cabin in the distance. I asked how she came to be born here.
“You see, my grand-aunt come back to live here, because her home burned down,” she answered. “And she asked Mas’ Coming to come back, if she could get a place to stay. And he tell her, ‘Yeah, come on back.’ ” “Mas’ Coming” was Coming Ball, and the great-aunt was Rachel Lucas, the Limerick field hand who had fought the overseer, only to be personally whipped by William Ball.
We moved with slow purpose across the brow of the hill.
“I’ve
had the chance to think a lot about what the Ball family did,” I told Emily Frayer. “There is nothing I can do to give back for the pain that my family caused your family.”
“No, nothing,” she said. “So don’t think nothing of that, because that is past and gone. This is a new day, and we must try to live up to the new day. And we see the light. Sometime it’s short, and sometime it’s long. But thank God, we got this far.”
“I don’t know if I can speak for the Ball family,” I went on. “I have many relatives, and some of them would not like for me to speak on their behalf. But I’m sorry for what my family did to your family.”
“Oh, man,” said Mrs. Frayer. “You been on God’s mantelpiece that time. That’s out of your jurisdiction altogether.”
“It’s out of my jurisdiction, because it wasn’t in my lifetime that people were in slavery.”
“That’s what I said, you was on the mantelpiece,” Mrs. Frayer replied. “It wasn’t in this time at all. So you must don’t feel bad.”
“Forgiveness has to be asked,” I told her.
“Yes, we forgive,” she answered. “It didn’t hurt me, now, but the people before me, and they all gone.”
“We’re not responsible for what our ancestors did or did not do,” I said, “but we’re accountable for it.”
“That’s right, we are not responsible,” answered Mrs. Frayer. “He’s a merciful God, and he pardon all of us for what we done. He pardon you for what you think, and what you don’t think—for what you know, and what you don’t know.
“There’s a lot to be thankful for. Because you didn’t have to wait until now to come,” she said. “You could have come a long time ago, but you come in due time. You. When you come, you come in due time. You can explain yourself, and you can think. But a lot gone. They didn’t even think about that.”
