Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “Can you remember what it felt like the first time you walked into that room?”

  “I was scared to death,” said Mrs. Williams. “I was an aggressive person to a point, but had never had to face that type of aggression before. I had one man in my area—I worked as a typist for ten men—one man refused to talk to me. He refused to let me come near his desk. He got a small table and put it behind his desk and told me, ‘Hey, when you have something for me, put it on there.’ One day, my boss had a lot of papers for a booklet to be put together. It had about a hundred pages. He had a long table, and we set up the pages together. And a man across the room yelled out, real loud to us, so that everyone could hear, ‘Hey, Langley, you sure have stooped low!’ It was rough.”

  “You persevered,” I said.

  “I needed a job,” she said flatly. “It got better as more came in, and the others decided we weren’t going anywhere, so we might as well get along.”

  Mrs. Williams tried to end her story about white behavior on a more flattering note.

  “When I retired, in 1984,” she said, “the office was just like what a group of people working together should be. We came a long way.”

  “I would never sign a letter ‘obediently,’ ” said Thomas Martin. He held one of his grandfather’s letters in hand. “It would have to be someone I admire or someone like a parent.” He put the letter aside.

  “My father was a roofer,” he began. “He always encouraged me to go to school, because he didn’t want me to do that work. Still, in summers I worked as his helper.”

  Mr. Martin confided that he was a poor roofer. “I was afraid of heights,” he said, a little embarrassed. “I climbed the ladder one day, up to the third floor. I looked down, and gripped the ladder and couldn’t turn loose. My father had to come get me.”

  Mr. Martin said that his father worked for a construction company, H. A. DeCosta Co., run by a black man, Herbert DeCosta. At the time, Nathaniel Ball, my grandfather, was also in the construction business. His firm, N. I. Ball & Son, found itself in frequent competition with the DeCosta company. Their workmen were acquainted with one another—and Grandfather Nat would likely have known Mr. Martin’s father.

  “Daddy wasn’t a religious person, despite his father being a minister,” Mr. Martin continued. “But one year, Daddy was convinced by one of the men at the DeCosta company to join St. Mark’s Church.”

  St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1865, was one of the churches of Charleston’s African American elite. Most of its parishioners had light skin, because many of them were descended from slaves who had white fathers. The families of such people were often given their freedom before the Civil War and eventually made up a separate social caste in Charleston. In the slave days, some attended white churches, but after Emancipation—partly from choice, partly because the white churches no longer wanted them—the mulatto elite founded a new church, St. Mark’s.

  “Most of the people who go to St. Mark’s are light-skinned Negroes,” Mr. Martin went on. “After a time, my father stopped going to St. Mark’s. I asked why, and he said that church was not for him. He said, ‘Your comb has to go straight through your hair, and I don’t have that kind of hair.’ He felt ostracized, and he never went to church again.”

  The roofer P. Henry Martin Jr. died April 19, 1957.

  “There is a legend in our family about his death,” said Mr. Martin. “When Daddy became ill, I was sent for. He told me that he was dying, and that he would die on my birthday. I was born on Good Friday, and he died on Good Friday 1957.”

  Mr. Martin was born April 14, 1933, and christened Thomas P. Martin.

  “I had a visit from a cousin in Chicago recently, and she said, ‘Now you look like your father, Uncle Tom.’ Everyone called my father Uncle Tom.

  “I went to school at Immaculate Conception, on Coming Street, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. It was black, then. In the late 1960s, it became integrated.” Mr. Martin said, in an aside, that he himself was Catholic.

  “I attended Tuskegee Institute—which is now Tuskegee University—with the help of the United Negro College Fund. I graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in education. I did some graduate work at Temple University, in Philadelphia. And I got my master’s degree in education from South Carolina State.

  “While in high school, I met my future wife. Her maiden name was Rosalind Duncan.”

  Later, I met Rosalind Martin. Her quietness matched that of her husband. When I asked her what she did, Mrs. Martin told me that she sang in the church choir and taught Bible classes. Mrs. Martin had just had a birthday, and there were gifts lying around the living room. The most visible was a sweatshirt with a logo from the local military college, the Citadel. Mrs. Martin explained that her daughter’s boyfriend was enrolled there.

  “My first job was as a teacher at Burke High School, in Charleston,” Mr. Martin said. “I worked on the dramatic guild and on the school paper there. I moved from there to the guidance office, then to assistant principal. I was there for thirty-something years before I retired. Burke High School is all I know.”

  Mr. Martin told me that he had two children, a son who was lately in the Navy, and a daughter, Thomalind, who was getting a degree in speech pathology at one of the state schools.

  At that moment Thomalind came into the room. She was a gentle and pretty young woman with self-effacing manners. In her shyness, she seemed to share the reserve of much of the family. Thomalind said that when she finishes her master’s degree, she might work at a clinic. Or she might, like her father and great-grandfather, teach.

  Although P. Henry Martin was born on Limerick plantation, his grandson Thomas Martin had never heard about it, let alone seen it. When I proposed that we visit Limerick, Mr. Martin agreed that it was a homecoming he wanted to make.

  The remains of Limerick stand at the headwaters of the east branch of the Cooper River, north of Charleston. Its history goes back well before the Balls bought it. In April 1709 a man named Michael Mahon took possession of the tract. According to the deed, Mahon, who was from Ireland, got that part “now Call’d or Known by ye Name of ye Midle Setlement or Lymerick Plantation containing three thousand five hundred acres of Land,” apparently named after the city of Mahon’s birth. Mahon owned people who worked on the land for him, but after four years he sold the land (and perhaps the people) to Daniel Huger, a French Huguenot, and emigrated to Barbados. In about 1720 Huger built a large wooden house at Limerick; the building would stand for some 225 years and eventually become the home to generations of the Ball clan. Huger acquired more land and slaves, and made Limerick into a rice plantation. With his death in 1754, the patrimony passed to his oldest son, Daniel. Ten years later, in March 1764, Daniel Huger Jr. sold Limerick to Elias Ball, oldest son of the first Ball immigrant to South Carolina.

  At Limerick’s peak production, in the early 1800s, there were ten rice fields lining the river, and 283 people who worked them. Twenty-three buildings stood on the property, including slave quarters, barns, chicken houses, stables, and the Ball mansion.

  After the Civil War, Limerick continued in business as a sharecrop farm with about thirty workers. The rice hands could not be made to work as they had in the past, and the white people reaped shrinking profits. In 1890, William Ball, the proprietor of Limerick, sold a piece of the land to a phosphate mining company. William James died in 1891, and in 1895, his kin lost the rest when a creditor called in a loan.

  In the early 1900s, Limerick was sold many more times. One by one, buildings deteriorated and were pulled down. By the 1940s, the slave cabins that stood between the main dwelling and the rice fields were gone. The big house itself was a ramshackle pile, though still home to several families. In 1945 the mansion was completely consumed by fire. Ball family tradition has it that one of the tenants, after being told to move out, set the blaze. Thirty-three years later, in 1978, bulldozers tore up the remains of the foundation of the house to make way for a railroad spur.
The track, laid over the site of the old house, belonged to the East Cooper and Berkeley Railroad and was meant to serve a plant owned by the Amoco Chemical Corporation, a few miles away on the Cooper River.

  On a rainy day in June, Mr. Martin and I drove up to Limerick. Late in the afternoon, the weather cleared, and a hot sun raked across the pines and swamps. The only sign of the former plantation was an allée of live oaks that marched in a line from the two-lane public road toward the site of the old mansion. At the end, where the big house once stood, a railroad track crossed the path.

  The allée of oaks was said to have been requested by Julia Cart Ball, who moved to Limerick in 1842 after her marriage to its owner, William Ball. A team of men would have been called away from the rice fields to do Julia’s bidding. It was Julia Ball who, some years later, named Thomas Martin’s grandfather and held him in her arms as he was christened.

  Mr. Martin was quiet and watchful as we strolled beneath the oaks. Until this moment he had shown few emotions about the past. On the subject of slavery, he seemed to prefer a respectful, almost intellectual detachment.

  “This is hallowed ground,” Mr. Martin said suddenly. “I feel like I’m walking in the footsteps of Jesus.”

  A pale orange light came from the west and threw long shadows of the tree trunks across the path. In the distance were the low silhouettes of two brick houses, built in the 1980s by the latter-day owners of the plantation.

  “Some of my friends would resent this, our being here together,” said Mr. Martin, looking around carefully. “Some of my in-laws, in fact, resent it.”

  For the first time, Mr. Martin allowed himself to ruminate. “The letters you showed me from my grandfather to your great-grandfather—I don’t recognize his treatment during slavery as, say, the kind of slavery that television would have shown. There is nothing about his having been beaten. I have to wonder what kind of people the Ball family were.”

  I agreed that the letters seemed to contradict the usual stories about the plantation system.

  “I know very little about slavery,” he said, “because we weren’t taught very much about slavery, about our ancestors. The only thing we were able to do was imagine.”

  We approached the railroad tracks, crossed them, and walked past the two brick houses toward a pond. An empty lawn to the right was all that was left of the old slave street. On it once stood twelve cabins, each housing up to twenty people.

  “When I was in my twenties, I had a different impression about slavery,” Mr. Martin continued. “I was not forgiving. I was unable to do what I wanted, and I blamed it on slavery, or rather, on white people. My philosophy has changed since I was a young man. Terrible things happened to our ancestors, but we’ve got to make something of ourselves.”

  I asked Mr. Martin whether he thought there was anger among black people.

  “Yes. How many people would do what we are doing now? The first thing they would ask is, ‘How much am I going to get out of it?’ I don’t think that we will ever get anywhere, blacks and whites, until we’re able to sit down together.”

  The pond was round and still. The oak allée once made a grand avenue in front of the mansion, while behind it the pond gave a pleasing view from the back porch. Algae like green smoke now choked half the lagoon, and a cluster of lily pads filled up the middle part, with long shoots rising from the water into the air. A rowboat was tied at the edge of the pond. We climbed into it and paddled out into the water lilies.

  The Ball papers contain the record of the girl named Priscilla who was brought from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756. The descendants of Priscilla could be identified in the slave lists, and among them, it turned out, was P. Henry Martin. One afternoon early in March, I went to visit the Martin family to bring the news about their African forebear.

  Carutha Williams, the clerk in the Navy Yard integration case, was there, as were her cousin Thomas Martin and Mr. Martin’s wife, Rosalind. The Martins’ daughter Thomalind also showed up, along with Mr. Martin’s sister, Rosina Martin. Rosina, about sixty, wore pants and a button shirt, and had her brother’s quiet nature. We sat in the living room, among the family’s diplomas and tropical fish.

  “Sometimes it’s possible to put together family trees for people in slavery,” I said, “and what I have is an ancestry for the Martin family that goes back to a girl named Priscilla, who came to Charleston in the year 1756, from the Sierra Leone River, in West Africa.” I brought out a family tree mapping the lineage. “I don’t have any evidence of her African name, only the name Priscilla. After she arrived, on a ship called the Hare, she was sold, on June 30, 1756, to a man called Elias Ball II, who brought her to Comingtee plantation, where she established a family that continued to live in slavery to the Balls for a hundred and ten years. Seven generations after Priscilla comes you, Mr. Martin. She was a child when she was taken, ten years old—the records of Elias Ball say as much.”

  There was silence, and the Martins looked at one another, trying to decide how to react. The first one to speak was Mr. Martin’s sister, Rosina.

  “Why would they sell children?”

  More exchanges of glances around the room.

  “Yes, why would they sell children?” I repeated, because I did not have an answer. It wasn’t clear whether Rosina referred to the white slave-handlers, like Henry Laurens, or black slave-sellers, who had put Priscilla on the market in Sierra Leone.

  Matter-of-factly, Carutha Williams said, “Girls, because they could soon procreate, and boys, because they could work.”

  “It was an evil business,” I added, “but the thinking was that young people would live longer.”

  The Martins knew how rare it was for Americans to be able to identify African forebears. “Very few people can do this,” said Mr. Martin.

  The Martins stayed quiet another minute about the news, studying each other and the family tree.

  “We have a Priscilla living now,” said Mrs. Williams, “who is P. H. Martin’s great-granddaughter.” Rosina read off a few names of her ancestors in slavery, comparing them to living family members.

  “On the west coast of Africa, there were a number of prisons where people were held before the ships arrived,” I went on. “The place where Priscilla was jailed in Sierra Leone is called Bunce Island. On that place, in the Sierra Leone River, there are the remains of the prison from which Priscilla was taken and where she had her last glimpse of her homeland.”

  “The prison is still there today?” asked Mr. Martin.

  “The ruins,” I answered.

  “It blows your mind,” Carutha Williams said mildly.

  I told the Martins I intended to go to West Africa to visit Bunce Island, because the Balls evidently took a number of people from there.

  Mrs. Williams said, “Well, I’m old now, but if I was younger, I would go with you to Africa.”

  Thinking about Priscilla, the Martin family began to smile at one another in a bewildered way. Suddenly there was a wave of laughter around the room, and everyone was talking at once. It was the first time I had heard Thomas Martin laugh since we met.

  11

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  It was called the War for America in Great Britain, although in the Southern colonies it might well have been called the War with the Slaves. The American Revolution came to the doors of the plantations, and when it drifted off, perhaps one in three black people were gone with it—most to the Caribbean, some to Canada. The Balls tried to hold on to their human property and, to do so, took sides with both armies. Cousin fought cousin, brother fought brother, and the Ball slaves faced a stark choice, whether to hunker down in their cabins or flee to the British Army as it passed through the country. Many took their chances with King George III, and some got free in the bargain; but more stayed home, unable to leave their children, or afraid of the outcome if caught trying to escape.

  During the fight for the United States, seven years in the making, sometimes a black hero stood up against heavy
odds. One man, Boston King, fled from his home on the Balls’ Tranquil Hill, made his way to Nova Scotia, and eventually boarded a ship bound for Africa, returning in the end to the coast from which his father had come. The records of Tranquil Hill have not survived, though I imagine Boston King was not the only person to flee. But he was absolutely unique in another respect: as far as I can determine, he was the only person among the thousands of Ball slaves who ever published the story of his life. The story of Boston King—the Ball slave who reversed the black diaspora—is the tale of a true rebel.

  At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the Ball family was spread out on seven plantations in the “low country,” the watery flatland of South Carolina that hugs the ocean, and the clan had entered its third generation in America. Second Elias Ball, master of Kensington, turned sixty-seven in 1776, an age that made him family patriarch. (Elias’s richer, younger brother, John Coming Ball of Hyde Park, was already dead.) But power moved away from Second Elias and down toward the young, who numbered about ten adults and lived here and there across thirty miles. In the northwest corner of the Ball domain, Tranquil Hill was the home of Second Elias’s niece Ann Ball Waring. In the direction of Charleston, to the south, lay Old Goose Creek, sometimes called Yeamans Hall, home of another niece, Elizabeth Ball Smith. In the middle stood worn family ground—Comingtee, Hyde Park, Kensington, and Limerick—while to the northeast lay Wambaw plantation, property of one of Second Elias’s nephews. The Ball holdings amounted to thousands of acres and perhaps five hundred black people.

  In numbers, the white presence in North America was slight. English colonists covered the East Coast, but their property lines reached only a few hundred miles inland. To the west lay Native people, vast land, and the thin settlements of the French and Spanish. At the northern limit of English habitation stood Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia, the last a peninsula taken from France. Georgia and north Florida formed the southern border, Florida having been recently won from Spain. In 1750, one out of five people in British North America was a black slave, or three hundred thousand in a population of 1.5 million. Forced labor was the law of the realm, but there was already a “slave line” dividing the colonies. New England property holders owned fewer acres and smaller numbers of people than their counterparts in the South, to the extent that by the 1760s nine out of ten blacks lived in the five Southern colonies—Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Of these, South Carolina was the bulwark of plantation slavery. There, in 1770, six out of ten people—more than 75,000 in a population of nearly 125,000—were working in the rice fields.