Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  “I came at the right time?”

  “You come at the right time. You’ll mend many fences. You just keep up the work, boy. Keep ’em up, because there’s a lot to be done.”

  “The fences are still down,” I said.

  “Oh boy, isn’t it though? A lot of building to be done yet,” she answered. “But you have a beginning. And if you don’t see me no more, just remember me in your prayer.”

  At the edge of the cleared ground stood the old cabin, which sagged in the middle, and was surrounded by weeds.

  “I want to look for something,” said Mrs. Frayer. “See if it can come to me. Oh, there the house back there!” We made our way to the cabin, and Mrs. Frayer pointed with her cane.

  “Yeah, I was born down in this house here.”

  “You were born in that house?”

  “Yeah, the house was high then off the ground, ’cause you had two or three steps coming down. I used to sit in the door. There used to be a mulberry tree right behind the house. It wasn’t but one chimney, and that chimney answered to the two sides of the house—one family on this side window, one family on that side. But the house seemed like it was bigger than that.”

  “Of course it looked bigger,” I said. “You were five years old.”

  “I wasn’t even five!”

  Sometime after her family moved out, the cabin was made into a chicken house. The big fireplace was as Mrs. Frayer remembered it, but now there was a dirt floor and the smell of animals, with empty chicken coops and filth piled in a corner. There was a rustle in the pine trees, and Mrs. Frayer began to cry.

  “I didn’t think I would see it,” she wept. “I won’t have to wonder now, anymore.”

  “I’m glad you allowed me to bring you here,” I said. As the old woman cried, I wept with her.

  “I’m thankin’ you to bring me, ’cause I had wanted to come a long time.” We stood together and wept, looking at the sagging cabin.

  I asked Emily Frayer why she was crying.

  “You weep sometime ’cause you’re happy, and you weep sometimes when you mourn,” she answered. “So take your choice.”

  A sound of birds came down from the pines.

  “Time bring on changes,” Mrs. Frayer said in a moment. “Time really bring on changes. You live, you see the changes.”

  Next to the house was a little bridge over a creek. “I used to play on this little bridge,” she said. I gestured to the bridge, and we made a step to walk across.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Frayer, “but only God knows what’s on the other end.”

  GENEALOGIES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to the black families who shared their stories and trust despite the legacy that brought us together: descendants of former slaves named Gadsden, Harleston, Heyward, Lucas, Martin, and Poyas. Within each family, respectively, particular thanks to Georgianna Gadsden Richardson and Barbara Jean Brown; Edwina Harleston Whitlock, Mae Whitlock Gentry, and Ray M. Fleming; Katie Simmons Roper and Charlotte Roper Dunn; Emily Marie Frayer and Sonya Jean Fordham; Thomas P. Martin and Carutha M. Williams; Fredie Mae Smalls and Carolyn Smalls Goodson. I also appreciate the goodwill of the families who shared life histories not included in this book, as well as those whose stories appear only in passing.

  The Ball family, those no longer living, deserve acknowledgment for writing down minuscule facts throughout two centuries and preserving their hoard of papers. I’m grateful to living relatives, some of whom believed that I set out to prove Voltaire’s maxim about history, namely, that it is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead. Thank you to Nathaniel Ball III for gentlemanly help, and thank you for support to Frank Jervey Ball, Isaac Rhett Ball, Jeff Ball, Dorothy Dame Gibbs, John E. Gibbs III, Jane Ball Gilchrist, Catherine Porter Tupper, and Charlotte Ball Vogelsang. I’m grateful to my mother, Janet Rowley Ball, for being the independent woman she is; and to my late father, Theodore Porter Ball, for the memorable power of his conscience.

  For initial support, thanks to Sharon Green and David Isay of National Public Radio, which helped to launch this project; and, for early encouragement, to members of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. I’m grateful to Lucy D. Rosenfeld for constructing provisional genealogies of families in slavery to the Balls, and to Lucinda Rosenfeld for her help and support. Researcher Cherisse R. Jones assisted in the first stage of work, and W. Marvin Dulaney of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston gave key help when I asked. I appreciate those people, white and black, who contributed photographs to the book, as well as artwork from private collections. Rich-Steele Pro Labs of Charleston did careful reproductions of many borrowed and fragile images. Thanks to Ruth Holmes Whitehead of the Nova Scotia Museum for help in telling the stories of escaped slaves. At the archives that hold the Ball family papers, I’m grateful to the librarians and staff, especially Stephen Hoffius and Alex Moore; and the institutions that preserve these manuscripts themselves deserve recognition. Thanks to Jane Gilchrist for sharing her private collection of papers and photographs. Near the end of my travels, in Sierra Leone, Joseph Opala gave important help and guidance. I’m grateful to archaeologist Leland G. Ferguson of the University of South Carolina for his research on the Cooper River plantations; and to Tim Belshaw of Columbia, South Carolina, who made the maps.

  I give affectionate thanks to Elizabeth Guckenberger for her sense of humor and devotion, and to Josephine Humphreys, for many encouragements. Jessica B. Cohen, a gifted investigator, contributed greatly, helping to bring the project from a middle wilderness to conclusion. Jessica Cohen also filled out and constructed two principal genealogies, those of Angola Amy and Priscilla, and executed the artwork that illustrates them. The book would not have been as rich or full of human detail without her help.

  Last, and also first, I’m grateful to Jonathan Galassi and Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Without their patient, detached, unquestioning support, I would not have so easily found my way.

  SOURCES

  The statement of events in this book grew from both manuscript sources and oral history. I tried to keep the textual strands of remembrance separate from spoken recollection, so that assertions might be tied to one or the other. When quoting documents, I preserved original spellings with the exception of proper names, some of which I updated. Transcripts of interviews have been selected from a larger group and edited. At times I made an effort to convey white or black dialect, but not fastidiously, since even when politely asked, print fails to communicate sound.

  The records kept by the Ball family in the period 1700 to 1900 provided material for the spine of the narrative. Most of those papers have been microfilmed, and they are housed as follows:

  Ball Family Papers, 1645–1920, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston.

  Ball Family Papers, 1696–1896, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

  John Ball and Keating Simons Ball Books, 1779–1911, and William J. Ball books, 1804–90, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

  John Ball Sr. and John Ball Jr. Papers, 1773–1892, Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

  This is the right place to make a plea to the families of former slave owners as well as any other collectors who continue to keep records from the plantation period. Because the lives of slaves were chronicled by their owners, not by government scribes, such private letters and papers contain the family histories of millions. They should be donated to public hands—archives, historical societies, museums, universities.

  The writings of many historians have helped me to fix chronology and interpret events, but with a three-hundred-year narrative span, a list of titles would be mainly esoteric. I have cited some writers in the notes, and other authorities (if still living) may recognize themselves in my text. I am grateful to the deceased for their scholarship and to the living for sympathy with the principle of conse
rvation of space. Among those historians still writing, for their work pertinent to South Carolina, I looked frequently to Alpha Bah, Ira Berlin, Peter A. Coclanis, David B. Davis, Leland G. Ferguson, Eric Foner, William W. Freehling, Christopher Fyfe, Eugene D. Genovese, Jack P. Greene, Graham R. Hodges, Norrece T. Jones, Winthrop D. Jordan, Charles W. Joyner, Daniel C. Littlefield, Philip D. Morgan, Bernard E. Powers Jr., Theodore Rosengarten, Margaret Washington, Robert M. Weir, and Peter H. Wood.

  The most novel aspect of the documentary research was that on families in slavery. To build a family history, I began with oral tradition from the keepers of memory in a given family—corroborated by birth, marriage, and death records housed in county collections, as well as census returns, wills, and probate documents at state archives. I confirmed a lineage back to the years immediately after the Civil War. To link a family in freedom to a family in slavery, I turned often to papers at the National Archives and Records Administration, in Washington, D.C., including the following: (1) records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau), especially labor (sharecrop) contracts for the years 1866–70, which contain an early use of surnames by black Americans and connect individuals to plantations, (2) registers of depositors in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company (banking records of recently freed blacks that sometimes refer to former masters), and (3) military service records and pension claims for black veterans of the Civil War, who signed up with the Union once they were freed, which contain biographical information and (sometimes) references to birthplaces and plantations. The link to a plantation was confirmed by slave lists in the Ball files. Family trees for people in slavery were constructed from these same lists, which recorded births, deaths, and household arrangements. In state archives, wills and estate inventories, tax records, and deeds from slave sales sometimes filled gaps. Biographical facts about individual slaves came from correspondence kept by whites, and sometimes from oral history within black families. I identified the name and place of origin of two African women who founded families in America, and met some of their descendants, thanks only to the unusual completeness of records kept by slave owners named Ball.

  NOTES

  1: PLANTATION MEMORIES

  close to four thousand black people: Estimate based on slave lists in: Ball Family Papers, 1645–1920, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston; Ball Family Papers, 1696–1896, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; John Ball and Keating Simons Ball Books, 1779–1911, William J. Ball Books, 1804–90, microfilm 1820-B, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and John Ball Sr. and John Ball Jr. Papers, 1773–1892, Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Ball papers in all collections are hereafter cited BP, and archives by abbreviation: South Carolina Historical Society = SCHS; South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina = USC; Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina = UNC; and Special Collections Library, Duke University = Duke.

  thirty-four slaves: Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790—South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1908), 40.

  “Ball Family Papers”: See note 1 and Sources.

  at least 842 people were freed: In 1865, The Blessing, Cedar Hill, Cherry Hill, Halidon Hill, and Limerick were owned by William James Ball (1821–91); Comingtee belonged to his cousin, Keating Simons Ball (1818–91). Hyde Park was the property of Maria Louisa Gibbs Ball, widow of John Ball (1825–52), and Quenby was owned by Jane Ball Shoolbred (1823–1905). Pawley and Buck Hall belonged to Elias Horry Deas, widower of Ann Ball Deas (1815–59); Dean Hall belonged Elias Nonus Ball (1834–72); Kensington and St. James belonged to the Ball family between 1747 and 1846; and Pimlico was Ball property from 1802 until 1844. Number of slaves on the plantations in 1865: Plantation book, 1804–90, BP-UNC; Record Book of Comingtee plantation, 1850–59, BP-Duke; and South Carolina Census, 1860, Slave Schedules, Charleston District, which list Ball family slave owners and the number of people they owned.

  at least seventy-five thousand living descendants: I’m grateful to Allen Hutcheson of Charleston for this calculation.

  Given 850 freed slaves, 1865, Berkeley County, SC:

  1865 U.S. black population = approximately 4,000,000

  1995 U.S. black population = 33,117,000

  Dn + 1 = Dn (f) – IDn(f)

  D = number of descendants of Ball slaves

  _____

  n = generation

  (n = 0 – 5)

  130 years 1865–1995

  25 years for a generation (mean age of mother at births)

  1865–1995 is 5.2 generations

  _____

  f = average number of successful births

  (f = 3) derived as an average for African Americans based on whole population increase (ignoring the effects of black immigration to the United States)

  Using 25-year generations, the population increases 8 times in five generations, meaning:

  a replacement of 150 percent in each generation

  3 children per couple (or r = 1.62)

  I = rate of “inbreeding,” i.e., marriage and partnering with other descendants of Ball slaves

  _____

  (I = 0.25)

  Each instance of inbreeding removes f descendants

  I = number of instances per generation

  = ½ of people per generation who in-marry (expressed as a percentage)

  An assumption based on relative stability of villages of freed slaves, 1865–1900: approximately half of the people in each generation, for the first three generations, marry or partner with other descendants.

  _____

  (D0 = 400)

  Of 850, D0 is the number still liable to have the full complement of children.

  D0 = 400

  D1 = 400 (3) – 0.25 × 400 (3) = 900

  D2 = 2,025

  D3 = 6,075

  D4 = 13,669

  D5 = 30,755

  D6 = 69,198

  In 1995, 69,168 descendants; in the year 2000, at least 75,000. In effect, some of generations 4, 5, and 6 would be alive in the year 2000. After 1920, the incidence of inmarriage decreases, due to migration of blacks to the North; a reasonable assumption is that inmarriage would decline sharply with the dissolution of earlier rural communities. If this single variable is decreased by one-half (from I = 0.25 to I = 0.125), the number of descendants increases by 33 percent (to 35,881 in generation 5, and 94,188 in generation 6), to approximately 100,000 in the year 2000.

  his will filled four pages: Will of Elias Ball, 31 Aug 1750, BP-SCHS.

  2: MASTERS FROM ENGLAND

  Elias Ball … was born: Nan S. Ball, Ball Family of Stoke-in-Teignhead, Devon, England, pamphlet (Charleston, S.C.: 1944).

  John Ball, the “mad priest of Kent”: R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970), 369–77; Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking, 1973), 213–22.

  Uncle John … sailor: Langdon Cheves, ed., The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina Prior to the Year 1676 (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1897), 231 n.

  “a deep Chestnut Colour”: Thomas Ashe, “Carolina, or a Description of the Present State of that Country … 1682,” in Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708, Alexander S. Salley Jr., ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1911), 156.

  women practiced abortion: Robert Ferguson, “The Present State of Carolina with Advice to the Settlers” (1682), and J. F. D. Smyth, “A Tour of the United States of America … with a Description of the Indian Nations” (1784), quoted in Gene Waddell, Indians of the South Carolina Lowcountry 1562–1751 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1980), 8–9.

  Fundamental Constitutions: A copy of the Fundamental Constitutions: Abstracts of Grants and Commissions of Lords Proprietors, 1692–1718, 1733–1736, 1775–1820, part 2
, 41–46, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C. (hereafter, SCDAH).

  a kidnap-and-sale system: John Wesley, A.M., Thoughts on Slavery, pamphlet (London, 1774), 4–10.

  “does thereby put himself into a State of War”: John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (London: J. Whiston, 1772), Second Treatise, chap. 3, section 17.

  first Carolina slave raid: Murder: Gov. Joseph West to Anthony Lord Ashley, 3 Sep 1671, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 336; “Warr”: Grand Council Journal, 27 Sep 1671, Journal of the Grand Council of South Carolina, 25 August 1671–24 June 1680, A. S. Salley, ed. (Columbia, S.C.: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1907); “transport the said Indians”: Grand Council Journal, 2 Oct 1671; wall around village: Anthony Lord Ashley to John Yeamans, 18 Sep 1671, Shaftesbury Papers, 343.

  An inventory of the contents of the dwelling: Inventory of goods belonging to Mr. John Harleston, 1631, and Elizabeth Harleston to David Edwards, power of attorney, 1 Aug 1659, BP-SCHS.

  John Coming … returned with … indentured servants: John Coming, warrant, 22 Nov 1672, in Warrants for Land in South Carolina 1672–1711, A. S. Salley, ed. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 1973).

  “one and twenty lashes upon his naked back”: Grand Council Journal, 4 Jun 1672.

  a name, Charlestown: Grand Council Journal, 1 Jun 1680, a hearing “before the Grand Council at Kiawah sometimes called Charlestowne.”

  John Coming … turned in some warrants for land: Henry A. M. Smith, Rivers and Regions of Early South Carolina (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1988), 27–31; “Granted to Capt John Coming one Town lott No 49 by Governor Joseph West 1680 March the fifth,” Lands granted to Elias Ball the first, BP-SCHS.

  Coming’s T: Between 1672 and his death in 1695, John Coming was given five land grants: 17 Oct 1672, 375 acres on Oyster Point; 27 Nov 1672, 810 acres; 30 Nov 1678, 740 acres [Coming’s T]; 10 Nov 1680, “one towne lott”; 30 Apr 1681, 210 acres (Salley, Warrants for Land). A 1682 map (“A New Map of the Country of Carolina,” by Joel Gascoyne) shows a promontory where Goose Creek meets the Cooper River, labeled “Commins” (Coming’s) land. This tract, perhaps the 810 acres taken up in November 1672, seems to have been sold before Coming’s death. Another 150–200 acres was ceded back to the colony in 1672 to endow the Anglican church.