Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The family lived in a boxy building on a corner, an old grocery converted into a house. The woman who had written, Luzena King, greeted me at the door and led the way down a hall past a staircase. “We feel like we run a hotel,” she said, looking at the banister, “because there are five generations living here.” I had come to see Mrs. King’s mother, Emily Marie Frayer, who was in her nineties and was said to have a good memory.

  We passed through a sliding double door and entered a very large room: the former store. There were sofas and chairs, cabinets and bookshelves lined with memorabilia. Here and there were hung family pictures, including a framed chart showing the family’s lines of descent. At the end of the room stood a long, narrow dining table, and at its head, alone, sat an aged woman.

  Emily Marie Frayer was small and stooped, held both of her hands on the grip of a cane, wore a simple frock and sweater, and a kerchief around her head. Lines were deeply etched on her cheeks, like grooves, but parts of her brow were still smooth. Her eyes were moist in the way age wets the vision.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” she said, a nice understatement.

  I took my place at the dining table, facing the elderly lady. Mrs. Frayer’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren settled into corners and onto couches, turning toward us at a little distance. Among the group was a soft-spoken woman, Sonya Fordham, one of Mrs. Frayer’s granddaughters. Sonya introduced her teenage daughter, Chiemeka, whom she instructed to bring me coffee. Mrs. Frayer began speaking, and the room fell silent.

  “I was born on Hyde Park, in 1901, January 30th.” Her voice was resonant, and she lifted up her chin slightly, as though to propel the words.

  Hyde Park was bought in March 1740 by John Coming Ball, and sold 253 years later by the Gibbs family, who had intermarried with the Balls. Mrs. Frayer told me she lived there during the last seasons when rice was still a cash crop.

  “When I was a child, they used to plant rice in Hyde Park,” she said. “I used to sit in the door, and I would see them have the rice stacked way up on the cart, and the people would be up there drivin’. I used to be so frightened, think the man was going to fall off. I watched them all day, watching people haul that rice down to the barnyard. There was a big barnyard, and they stack rice in that yard, right off the river. The yard run right to the river, and from there, they carry the rice away by boat.”

  Mrs. Frayer spoke in rhythmic stops and starts, each parcel of her sentences measured out.

  “Limerick is where my parents came from,” she said, pronouncing the name “Lim-brick.”

  “My father’s grandfather was a man called Isaac Ball,” I told her.

  “Yeah, I heard a lot about him,” she answered.

  “He’s known in the family as Isaac the Confederate, because he fought in the Civil War,” I said.

  Mrs. Frayer let out a cackle, and fixed her mouth in a crooked smile.

  “That’s it, all right.”

  “Isaac was the son of a man called William James Ball,” I said, “who owned Limerick.”

  “William Ball? Oh, yes.”

  “That means that your grandparents were enslaved by William James Ball.”

  I said this to make sure, but Emily Frayer did not need me as an informant. Later she told me that her grandfather, Philip, was born on Limerick in slavery, and that his parents, Philip Sr. and Flora, had been born there as well. Then she told what happened to Philip Sr.

  “My grandfather’s father was sold from Limerick, and went to Stoney Landing,” said Mrs. Frayer, naming a place about fifteen miles west of Limerick. The name of the tract to which Philip was sold, she added later, was Kid Field. “He had a family there, and left his family in Limerick. So he had two families. And when he died, he left two sets of children.”

  The room was quiet, and to fill the silence I repeated the story about Philip Sr. in a gentler form.

  “So, on Limerick, your great-grandfather left a family,” I said, “went to Stoney Landing, and started another family.”

  “You see, he didn’t ‘left,’ ” Mrs. Frayer corrected me. “They sold him. They sold him from Limerick. They been selling you just like you sell a chicken. If a man come and want you, and they say, ‘He’s a good hand,’ then they sell him. That’s the way they been doin’. That was an awful time.”

  Oral tradition among the Balls (I had heard many times) had it that plantation masters, if so inclined, sold only entire families; but only a handful of invoices from slave sales survived. Most records of slave deals, if they had been preserved at all, seem to have disappeared from the family archives before they were deposited in public libraries.

  “He used a boat to visit his two families from one family to the other,” Mrs. Frayer explained. “One time come home, he used a boat from there, and one time he go back, he used a boat to go back.” Later, one of Mrs. Frayer’s kin told me some of the names in this other branch of the family, distant cousins descended from Kid Field.

  “He came under the cover of night?” I said.

  “That’s it,” said Mrs. Frayer, nodding. “That’s what they all do, and they bury the dead in the night. And my grandmother says, you could hear the people screaming in the night, big fire light, big torch light, buryin’ their dead.”

  “Enslaved people buried their dead at night?” I asked, leaning in.

  “They had to, because they got to work in the day,” Mrs. Frayer came back. “They ain’t got time for buryin’ no dead in the day. If you dead, you wait till night for bury.”

  She peered at me with an ironic smile. I had spoken to many people, but few people knew as much as Emily Frayer about life on the plantation. Many of her stories, she said, came from her grandmother, Ellen Lucas, who was eighteen when she was freed.

  “We were just little children sittin’ around the fire when my grandmother tell us that. That was an awful time. I’m glad I wasn’t there then.” She chuckled.

  This was the first I heard that black people had to bury after sundown. But a memoir written by one of the Ball women corroborated what Mrs. Frayer said. The memoir that Mary Gibbs Ball wrote in 1923, at eighty-six, detailed her life as a young bride on Limerick; among her memories was a description of the burial of Fortune, the blacksmith. “I remember Daddy Fortune’s funeral was at midnight,” she wrote. “It was a very solemn sight to see the funeral procession with lightwood torches, marching to the graveyard, chanting their requiem at that silent hour.”

  Mrs. Frayer laughed bitterly, then caught herself. “No, man, slavery time is no time, no joke at all.”

  “I talk to my relatives,” I said, “and, one after another, they say that the Balls were gentle masters.”

  Emily Frayer’s kin, seated around the room, erupted in laughter. When the hilarity died down, Mrs. Frayer took in a breath and began to speak slowly, like a teacher. “You see, they had a overseer, and this overseer, he do all the lickin’. So my grand-aunt, Rachel—my grandmother’s sister—she fight the driver.”

  “If a master wanted to beat one of his slaves, he would call the overseer and tell him so?” I asked.

  “No, the overseer would call him and tell him something was wrong,” Mrs. Frayer clarified. “The overseer does everything—look over the people, see them do the work on time, and when it’s time to lick, he do all the lickin’. That’s how come when he start to whip my grand-aunt, she hit him back.”

  Later I looked at the Limerick account books and found Rachel, born in 1840. She was perhaps in her teens when this happened.

  “The overseer was so mad, the maussa step in,” Mrs. Frayer went on. “She called him ‘maussa.’ The maussa said, ‘No you cannot lick her, I’ll lick Rachel myself.’ ”

  “And did the master lick Rachel?” I asked.

  “Yes, he lick ’em.”

  “What was the name of that master?”

  “The maussa was a Ball,” Mrs. Frayer finished.

  “The maussa” was William Ball. By personally beating Rachel, William
Ball may have believed he was protecting her from the more sadistic hands of his overseer.

  Mrs. Frayer chuckled, and there was murmuring around the room. Her family had plenty of inside stories about what happened and how it all worked.

  Emily Frayer was born Emily Marie Bryant in 1901, in a cabin on a bluff overlooking the rice fields at Hyde Park plantation. Hyde Park was owned at the time by John Coming Ball, a fifty-two-year-old sharecropping landlord (known as “Coming Ball” to distinguish him from others of the same name in the family tree). Coming Ball had a twenty-year-old daughter, Marie, whose name was added to that of the black child by her parents, with the approval of Mr. Ball. When Emily Marie was about five, her family moved out of the cabin and, shortly after that, to Charleston. In the city, Emily lived with one of her aunts, who occupied the servants’ quarters behind a fine house on Ladson Street. This new home was not far from White Point Gardens, the pleasant little park overlooking Charleston harbor (the same park in which Isaac the Confederate would walk most days about this time). The park was restricted to whites only, but the little girl found a certain bench on the edge where she could sit undisturbed, with her back to the trees, facing the buildings. Her skin was dark, Mrs. Frayer said, and before sending her out to the park, her mother would always tie a brown ribbon in her hair. According to custom, brown or blue, but no other colors, were acceptable shades for dark-skinned Negroes.

  Emily Bryant went to a primary school for black children, called Shaw, then to what was known as the Charleston Colored Industrial School (later renamed J. E. Burke High School), graduating in 1918. At the time, black students were allowed four years of elementary education, followed by three years of vocational education at Charleston Colored, with all classes run by whites, until the ban on black teachers was lifted in 1920. Soon Emily Bryant met her future husband, Eugene Frayer. They married in 1921, and had their first son, Eugene Jr. In 1924 Emily’s husband persuaded her that better times could be found up North, and the young family, with two children by now, moved to New York. They stayed in the Bronx with relatives who had already come up from South Carolina, then found their own rooms elsewhere. In New York, Eugene Frayer got work as a longshoreman, and Emily Frayer had her third child, Helen. But one night, when Mrs. Frayer was alone with the girl, Helen fell badly ill and died before she could be taken to the hospital. Emily Frayer persuaded her husband to move back to the South, and the couple came home to Charleston.

  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Mrs. Frayer worked as a cook for white families in Charleston. She changed jobs often, she said, because she did not care for the condescending treatment she received from the white women, and talked back to her employers. Mrs. Frayer remembered one typical lady of the house who measured out each serving of unprepared food to make sure there were no leftovers that her cook might wish to take home.

  During World War II she started a small catering business. Charleston had become a center of operations for the military, and the Navy Yard on the Cooper River hired hundreds of black men to new jobs. Black workers, however, were not allowed to eat at the restaurants and canteens of the base, so the men turned to food vendors for their lunch. Each morning Mrs. Frayer and several other women cooked great quantities of beans, collard greens, ham, fried chicken, and cornbread, which they brought by bus to the gates of the military base and set up on outdoor tables. The business thrived for years, and with the profits Mrs. Frayer and her family, who now included three adult children, bought a house in Charleston.

  The children married, started their own families, moved out. Mrs. Frayer’s husband died in 1991. By then she was long retired, and living with the family of her daughter, Luzena King, in Charleston.

  “I heard you say she stole the hams from the house,” said Mrs. King, referring to her grandmother, Emily Frayer’s mother. Turning to the room, she added, “Her mother told me that they would steal the hams from the big house at Limerick, and they would cook them at night, and have a good time—because the next day, they had to go to work.”

  “They had a big breakfast, I heard,” said someone else in the room, “but they did not have any lunch. They had to work all day long, and in late evening they had their supper, because if a slave was fed, that slave would fall asleep.”

  “I was looking in some records from Limerick,” I said, adding my part, “and there was the occasion, twice a year, when the master would hand out cloth to the slaves.”

  “Yeah, they sure is,” said Mrs. Frayer, holding her cane with two hands. “They sure used to distribute the cloth, twice a year. When they gettin’ married, they got cloth, too.”

  “Tell him about Uncle Francis, when he was bad,” a voice coaxed. “What did they do with Uncle Francis when he drank so much?”

  “Uncle Francis.” Mrs. Frayer cleared the memory, thinking back on her great-uncle. “He was a drunkard, and he was a stable man. He went to see about the horses, and he was so drunk, he couldn’t mind ’em. So the maussa just put him in this dark hole—there was a little hole—and he lock ’em up.”

  Every plantation had a jail, where the owner would lock up troublesome workers, usually on Saturday, the big night off.

  “And my grandmother, Elsie, would go see Uncle Francis where the door was shut. He would say, ‘Elsie, go home. You’re going to be punished for this.’ And all she could do was look through the hole in the door, and cry.”

  The elderly lady laughed, tickled at the predicament of the drunk Francis. Then a silence settled in the room, and through a window I heard the whoosh of a passing car. From behind me, very softly, came the voice of one of Mrs. Frayer’s grandchildren. “Tell him about waiting for Sherman.”

  To the white South, General William Tecumseh Sherman was the most feared and hated of the Yankees. To Emily Frayer’s family, the small, ruthless general was a hero, their liberator.

  “Tell him about waiting for Sherman,” said the voice again. Mrs. Frayer lowered her eyes, then looked up and leveled her gaze. Suddenly it was February 1865, on the lawn at Limerick, in the last hour of slavery.

  “My grandmother,” she began, “she said she was standing in the door.” The Limerick papers showed that some of Mrs. Frayer’s family had been house servants, and thus “the door” was that of the Ball house.

  “They knew freedom was coming,” said someone in the room.

  “She was standing in the door, and the Yankees come through, and take her hat off. My grandmother said she had a skullcap on, and he took it off her head, and throw ’em up. The Yankee said, ‘You’re free as a bird in the air!’ She said she drop on her knee, and said, ‘Thank God!’ And ‘Thank you, Maussa!’ to the Yankee.”

  There were giggles around the room, and a sigh of relief. Mrs. Frayer laughed at the memory.

  “I declare we little children done cry from all we hear!” Emily Frayer stared ahead. “My grandmother said, ‘They tell ’em to find everybody who been hiding, and tell ’em, you’re free!’ ”

  The Ball family version of “waiting for Sherman” was nearly the same as Mrs. Frayer’s, only reversed as in a mirror.

  “We felt hopeless [and] looked forward with dread,” Mary Ball wrote in her memoir, recalling the defeat of the Confederacy. “When Sherman came marching through Georgia … burning houses and waging war on helpless women and children, we felt weak.”

  When the Federal soldiers reached Limerick, a cavalryman in a blue uniform rode up to the mansion at the head of his company, dismounted, and let himself in. Mary Ball remembered the first words out of his mouth.

  “I want all the colored people to come up to the house! I want to tell them they’re free.”

  Mary described how the black village had gathered—field hands, cooks, boatmen, hostlers, nurses, carpenters, mothers, leatherworkers, children, old people—and the Yankee had stood in front.

  “I don’t remember if the whole plantation were there,” Mary Ball wrote, “but a good many came, and he said, ‘You are free! Free as a bird, you don’t have to wo
rk any more.’ Women dropped a curtsey and said, ‘Tenke Maussa.’ ”

  According to plantation papers, Philip Lucas, Emily Frayer’s grandfather, was born on Limerick on December 11, 1843, the fourth child of Philip and Flora, a couple in their early thirties. The younger Philip was twenty-one when the Yankees arrived. After the surrender, the Union army sent out recruiters to enlist black soldiers to help with the occupation of South Carolina. Philip signed on as a private in the U.S. Colored Infantry, 128th Regiment, Company D.

  In the course of things, Philip took a surname, Coaxum. But according to Mrs. Frayer, too many other freed blacks nearby were adopting the same name, so Philip decided to choose another. There was a well-known white woman in Charleston lore named Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who, as an unmarried woman in the mid-1700s, ran her family’s rice and indigo plantation, Wappoo, not far from Limerick. Eliza Lucas, according to the story, was said to have taught some of her slaves to read. Paying homage to her memory, and to this rare act, Philip added the name Lucas to his own.

  Eighteen months after emancipation, on September 20, 1866, Philip Lucas walked into the Freedmen’s Bank on Broad Street, in downtown Charleston. The bank had been established as a place where black soldiers and other freedpeople could deposit their new wages. When Lucas stepped forward, a clerk turned to a fresh page in a ledger and wrote the words “Depositor #277” on an account application that would eventually be filed, with thousands of others, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. To open a savings account, Lucas had to respond to a series of questions. He told the clerk that he was born in St. John’s Parish, north of Charleston, where his parents, Philip and Flora, still lived; that he was single, and a soldier; and that the name of his last owner was William Ball. The bank clerk wrote the information down, and Lucas signed with an X next to his name. Three years later, during another visit Lucas made to the bank, a different clerk wrote a note in the same ledger: “Aug 9/’69, says he is now married, wife name Ellen.” Ellen Lucas, whom Philip had known since childhood, was the daughter of Benjamin Irving and Myrtilla, both slaves at Limerick.