Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “Another thing she said,” Mrs. Roper said with a hard face. “A day would come when a man’s life wouldn’t be valued even like a bird’s! A time when man will think more of animals than of human life!”

  “Because people are cruel,” I said.

  “They’re cruel,” Mrs. Roper replied.

  Katie Roper was born Katie Simmons, in January 1912, about a mile from Buck Hall, where her grandmother had been in slavery. The girl would have a life that blended the old days with the new. Katie’s mother was Charlotte Heyward, the second of Bright Ma’s five children, and her father Wesley Simmons, from a few miles away. Katie grew up in a four-room house, with two brothers and one sister. Later, her grandmother, Bright Ma, would move into the crowded home. The house was made of wood, whitewashed, not painted, with a porch on two sides and a tin roof. There was a fireplace where the cooking was done, a well outside for water, and an outhouse. No paved roads could be found ten miles in any direction, and the nearest neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

  “The interior was wallpapered,” said Mrs. Roper. “My parents couldn’t afford wallpaper, so we used the newspaper, and the funny papers. We got a lot of kick out of looking at the funny papers on the wall, or any book paper on there.”

  Her parents had a piece of land, she said, and planted cotton.

  “I planted plenty of cotton, and I also picked cotton,” said Mrs. Roper. “Sometimes one of the worms sting you. They got some big, hairy worms, green. They’re fire. They don’t bite you, but the hair is what stings you. I’d get a little piece of fennel and rub it in.”

  Her father, Wesley Simmons, was also a fisherman, who set traps for the carp that ran in the Cooper River. Mrs. Roper described her father as a tall, thin man who went to his cotton fields in the morning and rowed out to his fish traps in the afternoon. When the cotton was in, Wesley Simmons took it to a nearby “gin house,” where a cotton gin pulled the seeds from the boll. At the end, the cotton was baled and sold to the white “factors,” or buyers, for whatever price could be had.

  “My father always said that long ago, they had two packages to give away,” Katie Roper began. “When they called to get the packages, the white man went in and come out with his package. He opened it. He got the pen and pencil. Then the black man went in for his package. He come out, opened it. He got the shovel and the hoe.” Mrs. Roper smiled a little, flat smile.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “It’s true till it ain’t funny,” she replied.

  When she was a girl, Katie Simmons went to the local one-room schoolhouse, “a little shack there” for black children. It was open only a few months of the year. White school officials knew, and sometimes hoped, that children would be in the fields with their parents. Attendance was not required, but Katie Simmons finished the fifth grade.

  One day, in 1921, Katie came home to find that her father’s mother, her grandmother Eleanor Simmons, had died.

  “For some reason, her house caught fire with her, and she burned up in the house. That was in January,” said Mrs. Roper. “In March, you turn your ground over for planting. So we went in the fields, and we children used to go around the ground and pick up little bones, and say, ‘We found Grandma’s bones!’ ”

  Mrs. Roper laughed, showing her teeth. Then she tilted her chin down and looked up demurely beneath her eyebrows, a little embarrassed.

  No doctors visited the black folk in the country, because nobody had fee money. For medicine, the country people turned to the woods.

  “They would go out there and dig the herbs. They used to get something called snake root,” said Mrs. Roper. She paused, and peered at me with a smile. “You wouldn’t know nothing about it. Anyway, they would put moonshine on it, and give the children that for fever. And ‘life everlasting.’ That was good for fever and cold. Now, if they catch you with life everlasting, they’ll lock you up! They’ll say you got marijuana.”

  “Life everlasting would make you sweat,” Mrs. Roper’s daughter Charlotte put in. “And it got the fever out. Then people started smoking it.” Charlotte shrugged, and raised her eyebrows.

  “Another thing,” said Mrs. Roper. “Today, if you scratch your leg, you got to go to get a tetanus shot. The older people, you know what tetanus shot they get? They go to the house and see where that spider web comin’ down, and twist it on a stick and get it, and push it into that cut, and put turpentine on it. Then they put a penny on it. That’s the old country remedy.”

  When Katie Simmons was eighteen, her mother died, which meant she had to go to Charleston, move in with an uncle, and look for work.

  “My first job was minding babies, looking after the kids for a family. They were Greeks. I also washed, and I cleaned their house. You know what my salary was? A dollar and a quarter a week.”

  Mrs. Roper looked to the floor, trying to retrieve events, or perhaps trying to shake off their memory.

  “After a year, I got a job at Roper Hospital,” she said, naming a local place that, by coincidence, carried the name of Katie Simmons’s future husband. “That was a slave job.”

  “Did you call it a slave job when you did it?” I asked. Mrs. Roper had a slightly fierce expression, and for the first time a bitter sound came with her hard, strong voice.

  “What else would you call it?” she said. “I talk plain. I cleaned and waxed the floors, twelve hours a day. You had to get up on the ladder and wash the walls down to the ground. For the floor, on your knees, you put the wax down with the cheesecloth, smear it down. These knees were as black as your pants.” Mrs. Roper grabbed her knees. She rocked in her chair and brought up an arm.

  “The woman over me, her name was Mae Huzzie—and she was a hussy. She would go in her room, lay down in her bed and sleep, come back. Then she would go tippin’ around to see if you loaf. That’s what she called it, ‘loaf.’ You see, back in those days, you ain’t nothin’ but a trash!”

  Mrs. Roper fell quiet, and the anger fled her face. Then she spoke up, milder than before, and resigned. “It’s past. It’s gone by. But I would just like to tell some of them a piece of my mind, and let them know how I feel.”

  Katie Simmons met Ned Roper, her husband-to-be, at an outdoor dance in 1934. Ned Roper came from a family that had some land near Charleston. They courted for three years, married, and took a two-room apartment. It was the Depression, and Ned Roper got a job in road construction for the Works Progress Administration. Mrs. Roper’s husband was also an unrivaled cook, and when World War II began Ned Roper joined the Navy and became a chef. He worked on troop ships in the Pacific, cooking for hundreds of men.

  “He went to Shanghai, all those places,” Mrs. Roper remembered. “He said the food that they didn’t want on the ship, they was gonna put it in the garbage. He said some of the poor people in China, they swam on the side of the ship, and he dropped it over the edge so they could get it.”

  Back home, Katie Roper gave up washing floors and became a midwife.

  “I had my delivery bag, a little briefcase,” she said, the slight smile returning. “I had my silver nitrate. The silver nitrate you put in the baby’s eye when they come into the world, because they might contract something from the birth canal. I had my gauze for the umbilical cord after you cut it and tape it down. If you look in the vagina, you can tell the reactions. If it’s a breach, the first thing the baby does is move the bowels.”

  She birthed hundreds of children, all of them under the unwritten law of race separation.

  “All my babies were black babies I delivered,” she said. “If a white mother had wanted a black midwife, they had plenty of opportunity to get it, but they didn’t want it.”

  Ned Roper came home from the war, and the couple moved back to the country, to his parents’ farm near Charleston. They gave up cooking and midwifery to become farmers, working sunup to sundown, planting sweet potatoes, butter beans, com, green beans. At first they used a horse, but that was too hard, so the couple got their own tractor.
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  “If you have good credit, you can get anything,” said Mrs. Roper.

  After eleven years of marriage, Katie Roper began to have children. There were five, beginning with Charlotte in 1948. The growing family put up a vegetable stand on the road in front of their house, “just a big table with a shed over the top,” and sold produce. Eventually they got contracts to sell to grocery stores, and later they trucked to supermarkets. The children grew, married, worked.

  “My husband died on a tractor,” Mrs. Roper said. “A massive heart attack, on September 18, 1978, between three o’clock and three-thirty. He went in the fields, and I went into the barn. I looked up and saw him on the tractor, but he was slumped over. I called his name, and he didn’t answer.”

  Mrs. Roper moved in with her daughters, Charlotte and Delores. The women gave Katie Roper grandchildren, and the family moved into a new cycle.

  When Mrs. Roper finished, I looked at her teenage grandson, Michael, sitting quietly on the sofa. Michael wore a short Afro and horn-rimmed glasses. He was handsome and friendly. When I asked, he said that he was applying to colleges and had plans to become an engineer. Then he fell silent again, polite, waiting, watchful.

  The Heyward clan, descendants of Bright Ma—at least, those who knew about each other—numbered more than 150. The Ball family of whom I was aware amounted to about the same. Bright Ma’s progeny lived in nine states. By one count, there was one household in Connecticut, one in Florida, and one in Maryland. There were also two households in Massachusetts, two in New Jersey, seventeen in New York, two in North Carolina, twenty-six in South Carolina, and two in Virginia.

  In the weeks and months after I first spoke with Katie Roper, I visited Heyward families in three states. I drove miles to have dinners and make small talk and large with various kin. After several trips, I returned to Charleston, and to the tall pines of Mrs. Roper’s yard. I sat with the elderly lady and her daughters, as we had sat before. We knew each other better, and fell into plain talk.

  “How do the white people feel about what you’re doing?” Mrs. Roper said.

  I replied that some liked it, some did not.

  “You don’t have to tell me. I know how the world’s made up,” she said. “But remember the Twenty-seventh Psalm. ‘Who do I fear? Of who am I afraid? When my enemies came for me, they stumbled and fell!’ ”

  We sat outdoors this time, and there was a cool wind. Mrs. Roper wore a blue cardigan sweater and pants. As we went over the past, we talked about the worst things, and tried to make sense of them. The story that haunted us was the sickly memory of the beating of Tenah and Adonis, the two most distant Heyward ancestors, for killing a sheep. We dwelled on the details—how the overseer had whipped the couple, who were in their fifties, and how their neighbor, Daniel, had refused to say who had made off with the sheep.

  “Yes, it was rough,” said Mrs. Roper. “But then, what could you do?”

  “It was worse than rough,” I said.

  “They ate the meat because they were hungry,” said Charlotte, Mrs. Roper’s daughter with the booming voice. “Why should you beat someone because they are hungry?”

  “You didn’t need to go that severe,” said Mrs. Roper, nodding.

  “Just hearing that was upsetting to me,” said Charlotte. “I can understand now why Bright Ma jumped in the water.”

  Delores, Mrs. Roper’s quiet daughter, spoke up. “There were a lot of African Americans who decided that this was not the life for them, and that they would rather die,” she said. “You can become so overwhelmed that you feel hopeless. You lose all faith, and the next thing to do is just give up.”

  Charlotte said her feelings about her family had changed.

  “When I saw the document with the X, with Bright Ma’s signature, I felt I had brushed up against something,” she said. Charlotte made a wave motion with her body, bumping the chair. “I felt I’d hit the past. It was not a chilling feeling. It was more a feeling of awe, a kind of presence. Praise the Lord. Let it be. Amen.”

  5

  A FAMILY BUSINESS

  Before I reached my teens, our family lived in a house on the beach at Sullivan’s Island, a narrow sandbar near the mouth of Charleston harbor. The island took its English name from a sea captain who lived out among the dunes in the late 1600s. Sullivan’s Island was a quiet oceanside village, with neither a traffic light nor even a restaurant. Year-round residents like ourselves lived in creaky cottages on the ocean, or along the handful of streets off the water. The loudest sound during the day came from the crashing waves, and at night from the frogs that sang in the gullies. My family’s small, five-room house among the dunes had a screened porch facing the Atlantic. In the morning, I used to watch the shrimp boats chug into the waves. Their diesel engines made a gargling sound, and the waves shook the webs of tackle and nets hanging over their decks.

  On old maps, Sullivan’s Island looks like a skinny check mark on the Atlantic coast. A bit of sand begins inside the shelter of the port, dribbles down a few hundred yards, then turns up and northeast, continuing narrowly for about two miles. Between the island and the mainland lies a distance of less than a mile. The island has changed a bit in shape since the time of Elias “Red Cap” Ball, the immigrant from England and first rice planter in the family. But in his lifetime, as later, most of the landside channel was filled by a muddy marsh, with the exception of a quiet inlet known as the Cove. Ships once docked in the Cove, where they were sheltered from the ocean.

  In 1707, the legislature of South Carolina passed a law that called for the construction of a brick building on the Cove. The structure had dimensions of sixteen by thirty feet and was known as the lazaretto, or alternatively, the “pest house.” The term “lazaretto” comes from Italian and means leper’s house or plague hospital, a place where the diseased poor, especially foreigners, could be forced to stay. “Pest house” arose in the spare imagination of the English colonists. The pest house was to provide a quarantine place where pestilence from the sea—diseases found among ship passengers—might be allowed to run its course.

  According to law, all ships carrying slaves were required to make a first landing on Sullivan’s Island and deposit their human cargo at the pest house. Here, the Africans would wait for at least ten days, and up to three weeks, until they had been glanced at by a health inspector. If the new Americans were still alive at the end of the quarantine, they would be released to their captors and sold at auction in Charleston, five miles away.

  During the youth of Red Cap, the city of Charleston became the Jerusalem of American slavery, its capital and center of faith. In the time of the heaviest traffic from Africa to North America, South Carolina was the most likely point of entry for ships. A reliable estimate has it that between the years 1700 and 1775, more than forty percent of the Africans arriving in the mainland colonies of Britain came through Charleston. Most first touched land on Sullivan’s Island. The dead were thrown overboard. Those who had survived the Middle Passage—the second leg of the triangular travel for British ships, which sailed from England to West Africa, Africa to America, and finally back to England—stayed under guard in the pest house. People who died during the quarantine were evidently buried in mass graves.

  “There are few Ships that come here from Africa but, have had many of the Cargoes thrown overboard,” wrote Alexander Garden, the port physician of Charleston who met slave galleys at Sullivan’s Island for many years. “Some [have lost] one-fourth, some one-third, some lost half; and I have seen some that have lost two-thirds of their slaves. I have often gone to visit those Vessels on their first Arrival, in order to make a report of their State of health to the Governor and Council, but I have never yet been on board one, that did not smell most offensive and noisome, what for Filth, putrid Air, and putrid Dysenteries … it is a wonder any escape with Life.”

  One summer after Elias Ball’s plantations were up and running, corpses began to wash ashore. A ship captain had evidently waited until makin
g port to discard bodies from the hold of his vessel. Thrown overboard, the children and men and women rolled face down onto the land, to decay in the June heat. The governor of the colony complained in the South Carolina Gazette “that a large number of dead negroes, whose bodies have been thrown into the river, are drove upon the marsh opposite to Charles Town, and the noisome smell [is] arising from their putrefaction.” The governor offered a reward of £100 to any person who would identify the culprit. He was to be punished not for his crime against life but because the corpses posed a health hazard to the white citizens.

  The pest house was taken down at the end of the 1700s, but it stands firm in my mind. My childhood idyll has dropped its mask, and I sometimes shovel the graves in my sleep. The ships left from sandy coasts in Africa and aimed for my fragrant beach. Two coasts, like two cupped hands, one on each side of the ocean. The dead washed ashore, and their dark hair made curls in the water. Death was a master who came from England.

  In a pamphlet published in London at the beginning of the 1700s, a writer describing South Carolina told English immigrants about the workers they could buy for their land. For 1,000 to 1,500 acres, the author recommended “15 negro men [and] 15 Indian women” for field work, in addition to three Native women to cook, and three black women to milk cows, mind hogs, and do washing. In 1698, when Elias Ball arrived in South Carolina from Devon, there were perhaps twenty Africans and Native people living in slavery on the 740-acre Comingtee farm. No business records of the place survive from before the year 1720, so I cannot tell the names of these first people.

  Among the early slaves, the Native women washed, made clothes, cooked, minded the hogs, and did much of the planting and tilling. The mainly black men were occupied in cutting trees from the forest and extracting wood by-products such as tar and pitch. Elias’s land had roughly one square mile of pine and other trees. Black sawyers cut the trunks, split the logs, and then floated the wood downriver to Charleston for export. Logs and rails from the Cooper River farms went to Bermuda, which had a large shipbuilding industry, and to Barbados, already deforested by clear-cutting. On the Barbadian sugar farms, wood from South Carolina fueled fires that boiled the sugar cane. The slaves’ labor brought revenue for their owner and prepared land for future planting.