by Edward Ball
Elias lifted his large chin, then tilted it back down.
“But kids were kids,” he picked up. “The white children, the only people they could play with were the black children. Your son of the white owner usually had a friend that was raised with him, a black friend, and they were inseparable.”
“It was lonely for the white people?” I asked.
“The slaves weren’t the people who got lonely, because they had each other,” said Elias. “The poor white people were the ones who were lonely there.”
“They had it hard,” I said.
“Yeah,” answered Elias.
“You see, the overseer was not your equal,” he continued. “He was a hireling. In most of America, you don’t have the caste and class system. But you still have it here.” Elias waved in the direction of the window. “And there are certain people you just don’t associate with,” he went on. “You definitely don’t associate with any blacks. If you did, you’ve had it. You don’t go to their homes and they sure as blazes don’t come to yours, unless they are maids.”
“What about the tradition of masters sleeping with their women slaves?” I asked.
“If the neighbors found out about it, he’s had it,” said Elias, without blinking. “It also undermined his authority. The same thing you find today. If a man is sleeping with his secretary, guess who runs the office? He’d best move on, and quick. I don’t know of any Ball folklore about the men sleeping with their slaves. There is no record of what they did, because they didn’t keep records of that. The Balls were pretty stodgy.”
Elias’s full laugh, from the belly, filled the room.
It was true, there were no records. But there was oral tradition. Families of color had stories of the white ancestor, or ancestors. Sometimes they knew who it was, sometimes not. If I was lucky, I might be able to find one such family. Surely there was, somewhere, a black clan with a bloodline that led to a Ball bedroom.
“If I went up to the area where the plantations once stood,” I said, “I would probably find people living there, black people, descended from slaves who worked on the plantations.”
“The settlement is called—I can’t remember the name of the little settlement—it’s on Hardscrabble Road or one of them,” said Elias.
I concentrated on his face, chin and jowls, as Elias’s mind rolled back over time. He seemed to be looking for a single fact among a thousand others.
“It’s still there, the Ball Negroes still live there. I was there a long time ago,” he said. “It has nice little houses scattered here and there and yonder.”
Elias said that near Comingtee plantation was the village settled by former Ball slaves. For a minute, he could not remember the name of the place, then suddenly it came to him.
“The village where the Ball Negroes lived in, it’s called Sawmill!” he shouted. “I think it’s on Hardscrabble Road. You go there and ask them where is Sawmill, they can tell you.”
A simple clue, and obvious, but only Elias, with his appetite for the story, knew it. After the Civil War, some of the freedpeople picked up, carried their belongings off the plantation, resettled together, and built a community. I decided I would look for the village of Sawmill.
Family memory flows more completely through women. It is the women who learn much of the lore and who convey it to the young. Men forget the past in all its fleshiness and select which parts best fit into their lives.
Dorothy Dame Gibbs was marinated in Ball family lore. On Thanksgiving Day 1932, she married John E. Gibbs, whose mother was Anne Simons Ball. From her mother-in-law, “Miss Annie” Ball, and from the rest of the Balls, Dorothy soaked up the past. Anne Ball’s father, John Coming Ball, once owned much land and many slaves up and down the Cooper River. By the 1930s, when Dorothy appeared, two places were left, Hyde Park and Middleburg. The old plantation society was nearly extinct, but breathing loud death rattles.
Dorothy rose into the air in front of me, first slowly, then with increasing speed. The seat of her upholstered chair levitated, lifting her up and pushing her forward.
“This is my launch pad,” she chuckled, ascending toward the ceiling. In a moment she stood on her feet, stooping forward in what was nearly a bent-over position. Dorothy, nearly ninety, leaned because her spine could no longer straighten.
Despite her years and her stoop, Dorothy still had a grip on life. Beneath her white hair, she had a pair of bright, tolerant, amused eyes that looked at me expectantly, as though she hoped I might drop a devious remark. The motorized elevator chair helped Dorothy to get up and down. The upholstered seat stood aloft in the air where she had left it, like a hand waving. She went into the kitchen, produced an elegant cup and saucer, and presented me with a cup of coffee. Then she made her way back to her chair. She eased her behind onto the cushion and allowed the device to lower her slowly into the chair.
“Sometimes my chair frightens people,” she said, her eyes laughing.
We sat in the corner of a small living room in her apartment at a retirement home. The apartment’s rooms overflowed with furniture and pictures, photo albums and memorabilia, distilled from a large house in Charleston where Dorothy had lived for some sixty-five years. At one end of the living room, a window looked out onto a patio and lawn. White- and blue-haired women moved silently across the grass.
Dorothy reminded me how we were related.
“Your great-grandfather, Isaac Ball, was a cousin of Maria Louisa Gibbs, who was the mother of John Coming Ball, the father of Anne Simons Ball, my mother-in-law,” Dorothy said.
It was the familiar haiku of Charleston genealogy. Dorothy traced the gnarled pattern of marriage and begetting in a single adept sentence. Dorothy’s white hair fell just under her ears, and her blue-patterned dress ended below the knee. The lines on her face were deep and welcoming, and her mouth hung slightly ajar, ready to laugh at the right remark.
“John Coming Ball was the owner of Middleburg,” Dorothy began, referring to her husband’s forebear. “He was an orphan—his father died in 1852, when the boy was about four, leaving a widow and the one child. So he had some patrimony, some money.”
The story started like others I knew. An inheritance of a plantation and slaves that went to a four-year-old.
“He was a minor during the War Between the States, he was sixteen or something,” Dorothy continued. “He could have enlisted, but he was the only son of a widowed mother, so he was not allowed to go. He had executors or trustees taking care of his money. Well, he came through the war with some money. After it was over, John Coming Ball took this and bought Middleburg. By that time, he was twenty-four. Then he bought all the plantations on one side of the Cooper River all the way down to Cainhoy. That was The Blessing, Cedar Hill, and Halidon Hill. In some ways, his money was a disadvantage, because nobody else had it, and some people resented it. A lot of people plain didn’t like him.”
Dorothy giggled. She gave me a collaborating look. I knew something about John Coming Ball, reputed to be sour and purse-proud. He was said to have preferred a one-horse rig, with a gleaming white buggy, and to carry a riding crop. From up in the buggy chair, he could easily talk over the heads of the sharecroppers who walked alongside.
“Middleburg was actually always in the family, by different names—first by the Simons family, then the Lucas family, and finally the Balls. Most of the rice planters up the Cooper River were intermarried and first cousins ad infinitum. There were Balls, Porchers, Stoneys, Heywards, Hugers, and Bryans, and they were all related.”
Dorothy sat perfectly still. She did not have many hand gestures, apparently because all of her energies went into her eyes and mouth. She began to tell me more about John Coming Ball, how he lost a house because it was paid for with Confederate money, and how he once gave plantations to his two daughters as Christmas presents. I liked this kind of storytelling, but I wanted to get over to the black side of the business.
“There was a man,” I began, “whom I found in the planta
tion records, named Scipio.” The Roman name Scipio appeared often among Ball slaves. It was first given to male children by their owners, later adopted by black parents.
“Yes, I knew a Scipio at Middleburg,” Dorothy came back. “The Scipio I knew was grown when I came along. Maybe your Scipio was him.”
I was struck by the turn of conversation. Dorothy was the rare white who knew stories about individual colored people.
“They would give Latin names to these people,” she continued. “Most of the white people’s education revolved around the classics, Latin and Greek. The Latin words were familiar, and those were the names they would give these people, because they ran out of names like James, and John, and Isaac. All of the classical names. Catullus … Julius … Caesar … Caesar was very common.”
Dorothy described plantation life as well as she might have outlined her mother’s face. Scipio was a slave whom I had seen in the records of Comingtee plantation, the Ball homestead, and now Dorothy told me about a Scipio she had known when she was a young woman. As I absorbed this fact, another unusual reality broke in my mind. In her youth, Dorothy would have known people who had been former Ball slaves.
“There’s a story about Scipio,” Dorothy continued. “Sometimes visitors from the North came to see the Balls, and they would be very critical of the situation, of slavery. Well, when that happened, the Ball master is said to have called one of the little Negro boys up to the house, Scipio. Mr. Ball would say to the visitor from New England, ‘No, we treat them well, and we even educate them.’
“Mr. Ball would call up Scipio, and make him recite—I think it was Horace—in Latin,” Dorothy said. “Just as a joke. Of course, Scipio didn’t have the slightest idea what he was saying. Maybe he was reciting Carpe Diem, I don’t know. So the little boy would recite Carpe Diem word for word, much to the astonishment of the person from New England, who would say, ‘I didn’t know you did that.’ ” Dorothy giggled, and her eyes darted. She had told the story many times, and it still made her laugh.
“Scipio would learn Horace by rote?” I asked.
“Yes, he didn’t have any more idea of what he was talking about than I would know if I had recited Sanskrit,” she said. “Of course, they really didn’t get any education. It was a joke to Mr. Ball.”
I smiled and shook my head from side to side, did my best to put a brightness in my eyes to match her own.
“One thing that bothers me is the way Northerners are so critical of the South—of its customs and manners and speech, and everything else,” she continued. “Mostly they think a lot of misconceptions about us. They think we’re lazy, we’re slow, and we’re unfair to the Negroes. On the contrary, we lean over backwards where the Negroes are concerned. I never had a hundred dollars in my life that some Negro didn’t get in jail and I had to get him out. And yet the Northerners love us so. They think we are interesting and charming. The Southern girls are belles of the ball when they go North.”
Dorothy had been something of a belle in her youth, though she took an unusual path for her generation. Dorothy Dame attended the College of Charleston, from which she graduated in 1926. Soon she got a job as a junior reporter, writing for the Charleston News and Courier.
“I was the first woman reporter the newspaper ever had,” she said. “I covered culture—like arts and museums, and schools and education. I also covered some sports, like basketball. We went to work at noon, and stayed until the paper went to bed at midnight or one o’clock in the morning.”
That Dorothy was a reporter in the 1920s, and wrote about basketball, set her slightly apart from other Charleston ladies. And her instinct for getting the story had spilled over to the plantation past.
“There was quite a difference in the Negroes who were imported as slaves,” Dorothy told me. “There was a country from which slaves were brought where the people were physically attractive, and they had no body odor. And they were more intelligent. And they were selected as house servants. I don’t know—is it Angola? I’ve forgotten.
“The servants that my mother had were from that group of people,” she continued. “They were very intelligent, and, as I said, they had no body odor, which was very peculiar. These people were fairly light-skinned, not with a mixture of white blood, but naturally light. I knew that the buyers of Africans, in the eighteenth century, preferred some cultures of origin over others, I did not know that these preferences lived on in my own lifetime.”
The phone rang, and Dorothy answered it. In a moment she put it down and returned to the subject.
“The other group,” she continued, “they were real coal-black, and usually bullet-headed. They were round-headed, and hard-headed, too. They had tremendous, big strong bodies that suited them for work in the field. There is a Negro who comes to see me, who is six foot two, and weighs about three hundred pounds. He is like that, a great big ham of a man. I swear he could put a hundred-pound sack of rice on each shoulder and dance, And he’s got hands that would cover my two. Anyhow, the ones who worked in the field had a terrible, strong, pungent body odor. You could hardly stay in the room with them.”
Dorothy seemed to have a sensual memory of the plantations, everything clear, right down to racial categories. In a moment, her eyes became a little distant.
“Of course, it can work in reverse,” she said. “I never realized that until I went to Japan. I was in public here and there, and I noticed that the Japanese would move away from us. I think they found that we had a body odor that was offensive to them.”
In Dorothy’s telling, white folks and black were like two tribes, living side by side, Or rather, there was one tribe on our side and several different ones on the other.
“During slavery, it was a community of interest,” Dorothy continued. “One couldn’t get along without the other. The Negroes couldn’t live without the support of the white people. The white people couldn’t live without the labor of the Negroes.”
“As though there were two hands, left and right, and one could not work without the other,” I said.
“The Negroes considered themselves part of the community,” Dorothy answered. “They considered the Balls their family. They would have been insulted to be told their interests were not those of the Ball family.”
It was lunchtime. I intended to leave, but Dorothy asked me to eat with her. After a moment with the motorized chair, we made our way to the dining room of the retirement home.
The room resembled a large bistro, with starched tablecloths and uniformed waitresses. There were about seventy-five tables, surrounded by dark wooden chairs with green-and-white-striped upholstery. We sat down, then ordered lunch from a black waitress.
“Just like white people, slaves could be very different,” said Dorothy. “Some were very responsible, and some were no more responsible than birds in a tree. Some were born not very bright. A Negro woman might be a seamstress if she was smart and of the tribe that was suitable for housework. Then there would be a woman who would be a specialist in certain kinds of cooking. There were nurses, with some women skilled in medical things. Over all of them was the mistress, Mrs. Ball. The mistress usually had to know how to do everything—how to weave in the days that they wove, to sew, and be able to teach the young ones the same. She knew the right way to take care of furniture, and silver, and brass.”
Dorothy’s mother-in-law, Miss Annie Ball, was evidently just such a woman.
“The women worked hard, the white women,” Dorothy continued. “Sometimes they would be in bed, and they would check the names of the slaves off, counting them out the window as they were going to the field. Mrs. Ball was still lying in bed. Then she would get up, and she would go to her work.”
“How did the Ball family treat their slaves?” I asked.
“I think most of the slave owners were responsible, good people,” she answered. “There were horrible things that happened, but I think they are more the exception than the rule. In our family that I know of, I think the slaves wer
e well treated, well cared for. I think the Balls would have been very upset if there were any beatings of Negroes on their plantations.”
This may have been what Dorothy had been told, but numerous records in the Ball family papers showed otherwise. When a Ball master was away, his overseer often wrote him letters to report on life at the farm. One overseer at Comingtee plantation in the 1830s, Thomas Finklea, did not hesitate to let Mr. Ball know when he whipped a worker, or had him “flogd,” as he put it. Other records showed payments the Balls made to the Charleston Work House. The Work House, a brick prison that once stood at the edge of town, on the southwest corner of Magazine and Logan streets, was a city-owned building where a civil servant administered floggings for a fee. The Work House was used by slave owners who wished to punish their workers when in Charleston. The contract beatings ensured that the master did not dirty his trousers with blood. Like most of their friends, the Balls took advantage of the service and left notes to that effect in their account books. But Dorothy had no way of knowing this.
“I know that time and time again the Balls refused to separate families,” she continued. “The only time they would want to sell Negroes, slaves, was when there was a death in the family and the estate would have to be settled in some way. But according to wills and according to stories I’ve heard, they were always very careful, even at a loss to themselves, to keep families together, and not to take children away. That was simply the disposition of the clan, the Ball clan.”
In the archives of the State of South Carolina, in the city of Columbia, there were receipts for slave purchases made by the Balls, but there were also receipts for slaves sold by the family. These were fewer in number than the purchases, but they existed nevertheless, showing that people were in fact sold away from home, one at a time. It did not happen often, not every week or even every year, but it happened.
“My impression is that a good deal of consideration was given to the personal needs of the slaves as people,” Dorothy said. “That was because the Balls were all fairly kindly people. Maybe they were ideal, or maybe I just heard the good things, I don’t know. That’s perfectly possible, you know. You know, families very seldom admit wrongdoing.”