Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “How long has your family lived here?” I asked. An invasive hello, the question of a bill collector.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, “but my aunt does.” The lanky black student walked to a trailer where two women sat in the window, silhouetted against the lighted room. He pushed open the door and spoke, and the silhouettes began to flail their arms.

  “I told you, don’t you bring nobody in this yard!” came the shouting across the dirt. “Who is he?! Get him outta here!” The gentle teen came back to me, shook my hand, shrugged his shoulders.

  As I went from house to house, night approached and the clouds above the tree line burned with an orange glow. A few people wanted to talk, but none could, or would, tell their family story. Two or three times, a door slammed in my face.

  I came back to Cordesville the next day and soon found the village once called Sawmill. The name had disappeared on the lips of all but a few old people, but the settlement remained, a few modest houses, each with three or four acres, on a single road that curved through the trees. It had no stop signs and no stores. The foundations of the old sawmill lay off in the pines, and a church stood in the middle of things. At the church, the minister’s wife answered the door, a welcoming woman with a pleasing face and a brass pin on her dress that read I LOVE JESUS.

  “We haven’t been here that long,” said the woman, “but the man over there has.” She gestured across the road.

  The man across the way led me to another man, a bit older, who led me to still another, who said, “I know who you want to talk to. There’s a woman who lives on the river road. She’s old, and has a good memory, and she knows everything about this place. Her name is Georgie Richardson.”

  Georgianna Gadsden Richardson lived on a dirt road about five miles from what used to be Comingtee plantation. Her house, a little blue cottage, stood in a clearing framed by the woods. On one side of the house was a trailer, on the other another cottage in a state of collapse. The older cottage tilted to the left, was missing a wall, and had a rusting refrigerator inside. I later learned that this had been Mrs. Richardson’s first house, destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. It was a cool day, and a teenager was playing basketball in the middle of the clearing—Mrs. Richardson’s youngest relative on the scene, Marcill.

  The blue cottage, built to replace the old, had four rooms and a linoleum floor. Mrs. Richardson sat in an armchair in a tiny front room, a walker at her side, looking every month of her eighty-something years. She wore a checkered cotton dress and square glasses over clouded eyes, while the right side of her face appeared sunken in—from an operation, she said—and her mouth showed only a few teeth. The hair on her head had turned white and was falling out, though a hat covered the remainder. Her fingers were crooked and her palm a little rough.

  “Mr. Ball!” Mrs. Richardson almost shouted. “You must be the greaty of the greaty!” She laughed a sandpaper laugh. She meant that I would have to be one of the youngest in the Ball family. “The grand-chirren of the grand-chirren!” she said.

  It had been some time since Mrs. Richardson had spoken to a person named Ball, but she knew the legacy.

  “All my people from Com’ntee,” she began. She pronounced the name “Common-T,” the local black sounding of the word. “My grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, uncle, all of them from Com’ntee. They leave Com’ntee when that man bought it and drove ’em away from there. That’s why they come to Sawmill.” Mrs. Richardson was loud and friendly, and spoke a strong Gullah.

  Comingtee, the first Ball plantation, beginning in 1698, was also, two centuries later, one of the last. After the Civil War it carried on as a sharecrop farm. Many of the former slaves stayed for fifty years, living in the same cabins they had long occupied, working the same fields. In time, the rice crop dwindled to a third, then a tenth, of its old measure. Sometimes the Balls leased the plantation to entrepreneurs who wanted to try the rice business; later they ran it themselves, until it failed. By the mid-1890s, the main dwelling had fallen into disrepair and the black families coaxed subsistence from small plots. The heirs to the property could no longer afford it. In 1901, Alwyn Ball Jr., a cousin raised in New York who had made money without the benefit of slavery, bought the land and restored the main house. In 1918 the family of Alwyn Ball formed the Comingtee Corporation, with hopes of selling lumber cut from the woods. There was a sawmill a few miles away that hired black men, and trees from Comingtee began to feed it, but the forestry business didn’t last. In March 1927, after 229 years as Ball family property, Comingtee was sold to a U.S. senator from New Jersey, Joseph Frelinghuysen. The politician used the main house as a vacation home, the woods for hunting. In 1949 the land was sold to the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, which wanted the pine forests for cardboard and paper, and the duck blinds and deer stands as outdoor leisure to entertain clients. The big house was abandoned, the old slave cabins pulled down. By the time I found Sawmill, the same dirt roads crossed Comingtee, but only two buildings from the slave days remained, both in ruins.

  “The greaty of the greaty!” Mrs. Richardson laughed again. “The children born on the plantation, the black children, they used to call them ‘the Ball children,’ because the Balls had that place. When somebody had a baby on the plantation, they would say, ‘Who had the Ball?’ My daddy’s a Cordes, from Mepkin plantation, and my ma’s people is Ball, from Com’ntee, so I got all kind of blood.”

  I asked Mrs. Richardson how many black people lived at Comingtee when she was a child.

  “A good bit.”

  “Fifty?”

  “More than that,” she answered. “All of my people lived there. They used to work in the Com’ntee big house. Titty Mack, my aunt, she was there. And somebody else used to be cook. I wash dishes, and they do the cooking.”

  Mrs. Richardson’s memories came from the 1920s, when the old slave street was still standing.

  “It ain’t no street, it was dirt and sand,” Mrs. Richardson corrected me. “It was behind the big house. You leave the big house from the back, and go a little ways. Lemme see, Sam was at the head. You pass his house, and get to Elijah house. Then Dye house. There was Elijah, Dye, and Bristol.” Mrs. Richardson looked at the floor. “I can’t remember all of them, but plenty of them people stayed. I think there was five house on the street. The house was made of board. They ain’t have no porch, just a tree you sit under when you get hot. There was two families in the house, in two rooms, and a brick chimney in the middle. In the front of the house, there was a field where everybody get their own piece to plant.”

  In the 1800s, someone had taken a photograph of some of the Comingtee cabins. It showed a row of skinny wooden houses, each built for two families, just as Mrs. Richardson described, five to ten people a room. There were more in the woods.

  I brought out a list of names from the first census made after the Civil War, in 1870, in hopes that Mrs. Richardson would recognize some of them, people who would have been old when she was a child, but her face fell.

  “I can’t read,” she said, brushing the page.

  Mrs. Richardson’s eyes looked away, and she was silent. She closed her mouth and her smile went flat. I had embarrassed her.

  “Mrs. Richardson,” I said, “what my family did to your family, long ago, was a crime. One reason I came is to try to answer for that crime.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she replied. She made a fist. “Some people keep their hand boxed up. I don’t box ’em up.” Opening her fist, she said, “See, I keep an open hand.” Regaining her pride, she continued, “They tell me, ‘Miss Georgie, don’t mind you can’t read, because you got good experience, you got memory.’ ”

  Mrs. Richardson’s mood lightened. “I was christened in Com’ntee church. Plenty people still went to that church when I was a girl. We used to walk from Sawmill to go to Com’ntee, bare feet and carry our shoes, going to church. They had a high choir, up overhead.” She pointed at the walls of her living room, to a choir loft in her mind
. “Before you got to the church, you would start to hear ’em singing through the woods. And their feet … dum-ta-da-dum, ta-da-dum, ta-da-dum. We get there, take the brush, wipe off your feet, put on your shoes, and go inside.”

  We talked for a while about church, and I told Mrs. Richardson that the previous Sunday I had not gone.

  “The Devil put a hat on your head and shoes on your feet and a glass in your eye!” she said, scolding. “Devil’s a strong man!”

  I asked about the settling of Sawmill, the village that appeared in the shadow of Comingtee.

  “Everybody built they own house,” she said. “When they left Com’ntee, they got slab wood from the sawmill, and build they house in the moonlight. Some built a pole house, some board. My daddy had a house of board, but it ain’t had but one room.” A board house was an airtight cabin made from planks. A pole house was a log cabin whose gaps were filled with clay and straw.

  “They cut the pole, build the house, and put the straw in there and put the clay between ’em,” Mrs. Richardson went on. “They build the chimney with clay. You cut off the end of the pine sapling, cut down the sapling, and peel ’em down. You stack ’em there, and put the clay between there. But oh Lord, if it rains, you have to keep a fire all night, so it don’t fall.”

  “Why didn’t they use brick?” I asked.

  “They ain’t had none!”

  None of the houses with clay chimneys survived, but there were photographs. The clay looked soft, with the ends of sticks poking out.

  “If it rained, then the chimney ran down the chute with the water,” I said.

  “That’s right! My daddy kept the fire all night when it rained, so it wouldn’t fall,” she finished. “Mostly this time of the year, you could smell the wood burning. That green oak smells so good. Oak’s the one that holds the heat. The pine makes the ashes, but that oak burns all night. Throw it on that fire, you got a heater.”

  Mrs. Richardson laughed. Her voice was rising, and she was getting excited. She paused, let her tongue out a bit from her mouth, laying it on her lips, then pointed a finger at the window.

  “The windows, you made ’em out of board, and put ’em in, on hinge. Glass windows was for people who rich! For make a bed, you take a crocus sack, a big sack you get feed in.” (A crocus sack was a big burlap bag that held animal feed, or potatoes.) “You finish the feed, and you get the sack. To make a mattress, you had four sack on the bottom, four on the top. You get a big needle and thread ’em together to make the mattress. Then you go in the woods and you rake pine straw, put it in the mattress, and stuff ’em down, pack it down, then sew ’em up. For a pillow, you take some old clothes you don’t want, wash ’em clean, put ’em in a sack. You sleep good.”

  Mrs. Richardson smiled and laughed a raspy laugh. She was rocking back and forth. Suddenly she stopped, and her face tightened.

  “Oh, what them old-time people been through!” she shouted. “Hard times! Hard slavery! But it’s going to be all right. When Gabriel blow the trumpet, then the dead in Christ got to rise!”

  In the weeks and months that followed I saw more of Georgie Richardson and her family. On my first return visit, I noticed that the wreck of a house next to her cottage had been pulled down and carted away. Mrs. Richardson’s husband, Robert, had long been dead, but she had more kin who lived in the trailer that stood a few yards from the blue cottage—Barbara Jean Richardson, her husband Leroy, and Barbara Jean’s three children. Barbara Jean was a stout woman in her late thirties who went to work at 5:00 A.M. as a cleaner for the local power company, and finished the day at 1:30 in the afternoon. Her husband worked for the Department of Roads and Bridges in Berkeley County, cleaning out ditches and hauling dirt and sand to construction sites. Barbara Jean called Mrs. Richardson “Mother,” and the elderly woman had raised her, but she was actually Mrs. Richardson’s grandniece, born to a nephew. Barbara Jean’s three children were Marcill, Steven, and Shanice. Marcill, the basketball player in the dirt yard, was finishing high school, Steven a bit younger, and Shanice not yet ten. In addition to Barbara Jean and her clan, Mrs. Richardson had family not only all around South Carolina but in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, and farther.

  Plantation records showed that Mrs. Richardson was the great-great-grandniece of one of the prominent figures on Comingtee, Maum Mary Ann, the last mammy of the slave days. In the family memoir, there is a description of Maum Mary Ann written by Anne Deas, whose mother, Ann Ball, had grown up on Comingtee: “ ‘Maum Mary Ann’ was the housekeeper at Comingtee. [She] had the keys of storeroom and pantry, ‘gave out’ the meals, made the bread, and supervised the house generally.” She had “clean white palms and a cheerful face,” according to Anne Deas, who added, “I never saw her without a large white apron and a bright-colored ‘head-handkerchief.’ ”

  Maum Mary Ann became Mary Ann Royal after the Civil War. She died just one year after freedom, in the spring of 1866, at eighty. Her last owner, Keating Ball, wrote a eulogy for her in one of his account books:

  Mother Mary Ann Royal, a faithful servant true Christian, who died on 31st March and surrendered her spirit to her Creator, in peace, charity and goodwill to all the world, including her former Owners, to whose family she always returned, with marked gratitude all kindness ever received, and They and their descendants always received her as one of the Family and a sincere Friend, even when a slave and after her being declared Free under the War Act.

  There is a photograph of Maum Mary Ann in her last days. The picture shows a shrunken, heavily aged woman seated in a wooden chair. She has one eye fixed on the camera, and her other, a walleye, turned away from it. The old woman seems as though she is merely tolerating the presence of the photographer. And she looks exhausted.

  Maum Mary Ann’s husband was known as Captain Daniel, the pilot of the Comingtee schooner that went to and from Charleston carrying cargo and white people. Though this was a privileged job, sometimes Daniel ran up against plantation rule. One fall, in 1833, Daniel evidently drove the boat up into the marshes. He was whipped for it, and his crew members were beaten with switches. The overseer at Comingtee, Thomas Finklea, wrote his boss, John Ball, to tell the story. “Daniel let the sloop [run a]ground,” Finklea said, adding that another boatman, Jack, did not take as many loads of rice as he had been ordered. “i had them both flogd & stade at the ferry until the sloop got under way,” Finklea went on. “I had the bote men switched and [Daniel] thought hard of it.”

  Maum Mary Ann’s brother, Surrey, had five children who survived to adulthood and who took the surname Pinckney after freedom. (According to Keating Ball, Surrey died in 1862, at ninety.) One of Surrey’s children, Celia, born in March 1833, married a Comingtee field hand named Stephen, who used the name Green after the Civil War. Georgie Richardson was a great-grandchild of Celia and Stephen Green.

  Captain Daniel Royal, Maum Mary Ann’s husband, held the job of schooner pilot until the last decade of slavery. The assignment ran in families, so Captain Daniel’s nephew and namesake, Daniel Pinckney, born in 1840, took over the job from his uncle.

  “I heard about Dan Pinckney,” said Georgie Richardson, who came along just about the time the boat pilot died. “He used to go to Charleston in his towboat to bring food. Them Pinckneys left some children, too.” She named the children, and placed their families within a few miles of us.

  I asked Mrs. Richardson about her own life. She was born Georgianna Gadsden on May 3, 1910, in Sawmill, to Thomas Gadsden, of Mepkin plantation, and Celia Gadsden, of Comingtee. Her mother, born Celia Blake, was sometimes called Diane. Her father was a field hand in the last years of rice planting.

  “My daddy said he used to go to the rice field at five in the morning, and they would hoot for one another,” said Mrs. Richardson. “Hoot, because you don’t know who all is going, so they would hoot to let ’em know they on the way. And they would hoot back to let ’em know they heard. They go down there to Mepkin, and down to Comingtee. I have a reaper in the hous
e now that my daddy used to cut rice with.”

  Georgie Gadsden was feeble as a girl. “I was the sickliest child. They told me I was the sickliest they ever had, and they had my box already made,” she said, laughing.

  The box was readied for the wrong person. When she was five, Georgie witnessed the death of her mother, Celia Gadsden, in childbirth, an event that became her earliest memory.

  “The day my mother died,” said Mrs. Richardson, “I was a child, and we went in the woods to pick those little blue huckleberries. I had my little pan. I picked the pan full, so I went back in the room, and Da was in the bed.” “Da” was Georgie’s mother. “And my aunt was there, my daddy’s sister, Titty. So I went back in the room where Da was, and they didn’t see me. They had the door shut, and I opened the door, and they had Da covered with a sheet over her face. I didn’t know she was dead. I pulled the sheet and I saw the blood on her face, so I went to wipe the blood from her face, and Titty came running in the room. She said, ‘Come on out of there!’ And I said, ‘I wanted to give Da some huckleberries! Look at her bleeding!’ And Titty pulled me, and I had to pull from her to get to Da. And they had the little baby wrapped up in a blanket. Titty said, ‘Ah, Lord, these children see a hard time when they mother is gone.’

  “Pa went to get some boards to make her box,” Mrs. Richardson went on. “They got the pine, and a man came with his saw and his nail and things, and he made a box that evening before the sun went down. Pa got moss, and put the moss in the box, and I saw Titty take a sheet and tear the sheet. I was a child! I wondered what did they tear that sheet for? They put it all around the box on the moss. They washed her off. People used to put turpentine on the body then, to keep it from smell. Then they must have put clothes on her, and took her and put her inside the box. Pa hitched up the wagon. He had an old mule, named Minnie. Some other men was there with him, and the four of ’em lift up the box and put it in the wagon and went to Com’ntee that evening. They put her underneath the tree, a big oak tree, for the night. And they buried her the next day. I wasn’t there when they funeralized the body. I was small, they left me home.” Mrs. Richardson slowed her story and looked to the wall. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”