Down the main hall lay the best-kept room, the library. This was the only part of the book where Ball seemed to have an agenda. Sticking out of the mud near the riverbank were pieces of rotting wood shaped like the headboards of beds--the sluices that once controlled the flow of water onto the rice fields. Please try again. Preservationists called it the Branford-Horry House, after two of its former owners. Toward the end of his life, Isaac was nearly blind from glaucoma. Arts | There also were relatively uniform laws about passing slaves from one generation to another. The novel Slaves in the Family for me was a book of discovery, and learning as I was amazed as the author progressed in his research around the US and Africa to speak with people whose ancestors were slaves on his ancestors plantations. Losses in some areas exceeded even that 61 percent. BALL FAMILY were embossed. Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The letters chronicled their lives, while the accounts detailed the In North America in the period from 1770 to 1830 the killing of a slave was equated in common law with the murder of a white person. '", Powerful. The New York Times Book ReviewGripping. The Boston GlobeBrilliant. The New YorkerA landmark book. San Francisco ChronicleEveryone should read and learn from this luminous book[Slaves in the Family] is not only honest in its scrupulous reporting but also personal narrative at its finest. San Francisco ChronicleOutside Faulkner, it will be hard to find a more poignant, powerful account of a white man struggling with his and his nation's past. The Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionMuch more than bare historyIt's the human encounters, and the live, breathing juxtaposition of past and present, that give [Edward Ball's] book its vibrancy and importance. Detroit Free PressA masterpiece . I've got Balls in my line. Through the process he found several people who are very likely related to him. "That's another of the family secrets," Dad said, smiling. plaster. This double search--at Some 150 relatives from around the state and scattered parts of the country climbed aboard a chartered boat for At times it was slow moving, but the book was at its best when Ball described conversations with people. Each plot was surrounded by a "rice bank," art earthen levee several feet high and perhaps two hundred yards long on four sides of the field. By a conservative estimate, in the year 2000 there would be at least seventy-five thousand living descendants of former Ball slaves in the United States, and by a slightly A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced. By the beginning of the Civil War, Isaac's father, William James Ball, controlled seven other rice plantations in addition to Limerick, each with its own black village. When did they leave the I think it helped that Ball skipped back and forth from history to present and I was amazed at the paper trail left by his ancestors and preserved in various archives. But it is also a large omnium-gatherum of enchanting fireside anecdotes, secrets teased out of reluctant fragments from the remote past, the real lives of blacks and whites whose stories had been lost in the disintegrating churn of time until Edward Ball's patient reconstructions. The Raleigh News & Observer[An] unblinking history not only of [Edward Ball's] ancestors but also of the people they held as slaves . WebIn Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Simply, Ball slaves were people owned by members of the Ball family whose, lives could be traced in the surviving files. Who were their loved ones? FACT CHECK: We strive for With all this, the Ball men owned most of the people, controlled most of the land, Although the author feels no guilt for what his family participated in, it is obvious that the slaves descendants still feel the pain of what their families were subjected to. Going on this voyage with him offers a fascinating glimpse into our nation's history, and teaches us that here really is no such thing as 'black' or 'white'. Between 1698 and The rooms were moldering, the air thick and bacterial. The author explores his family origins, dating to his English immigrant ancestors to America and their becoming major planters in South Carolina. The Civil War To not record it is to deny the truth and there has been too much denial. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. He has taught at Yale University and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Public Librarys Cullman Center. Site Index | Ball is quite a good writer and manages to bring to life the dry facts he found in the records. .orange-text-color {font-weight:bold; color: #FE971E;}Enjoy features only possible in digital start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more. She says that when Florence got married, her father helped her buy 40 acres of land in Hazlehurst, MS. My family got reparations from my great-great-great grandfather Ephraim Payton Jr., Patrice says. Technology | This is after the 54-year-old quit her job and paid 100,000 in reparation The family includes what appear to be a grandmother and grandfather, two women, a man, and three children including an infant. He had about a hundred and fifty slaves, and he was a mean fella.". Meeting intersects Tradd Street. Charles Rowley later went into the military, became a commissioned officer, and when the Civil Moreover, slaves born of already enslaved parents usually were treated much better than those purchased or captured from foreign groups. His Ball cousins Part of the feeling came from a thin old man wearing a blue workshirt. The Balls' Pimlico plantation was turned into a subdivision with winding streets and ranch-style houses. The African-American families included mixed-race descendants of one or more of his white family ancestors. once again before my eyes. Sadists, even psychopaths, who could not cope with their right of total dominance over another human being, might appear anywhere, as might kindly masters. How Many of the Signers of the U.S. Constitution Were Enslavers? Ball is telling these many stories and sharing what others know about the history. Thick grass swallowed the edge of the asphalt, cicadas screeched in the branches, and a skyline of pine trees scored the horizon. 3 Oct 2022. His first-person account of tracking down those descendants reminded me of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Through painstaking research and wonderful storytelling Ball tracks down his ancestors, both white and black, and tells the story of slavery in this country from the point of view of one prominent family. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold. We have been in each other's lives. In his later years. OK well, here I am again with a whole list of books waiting on reviews. the plantations shadowed my dreams. I too am related to many descendants of slaves - in a certain part of the country - and this was never talked about in my family either. Sorry, there was a problem loading this page. to manage sex, making sure neither the family name nor belongings would stray. , X-Ray Absolutely fascinating!! It wasn't merely that Dad was a clergyman, though certainly that set us apart; but "our people" had once controlled a slave dynasty. had manners, others none; some had money and status, some neither. e. The 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur in the Cherokee Nation, in what was then Indian Territory. and two tables, which became the only furniture in the building. "I mean, he picked the wrong side in the Revolution." Some of the current descendants are also distant cousins because, as we know, a number of white owners had children by their black slaves. This is an important book. The book is both a "personal" account of the Ball family ownership of slaves and a well-researched and thoughtful history of slavery in the United States. Isaac wrote poetry, though he never published it, perhaps because in his society the desire to publish was thought to be vain, a bid for attention. , Language : WebSLAVES IN THE FAMILY. ISBN: 0-374-26582-8, Home | Some of the South's plantations were now I (a white woman) found out that my great grandfather was the son of a black woman & white slave owner) that had worked and her family had worked on a plantation for decades. It helped make me more aware of how intertwined the African-American and White-American communities really are. Get help and learn more about the design. Similar to KINFOLK, there were so very many people covered that I lost track of who was who, but since it was my second book in this vein, I rolled with it this time and just took each anecdotal history as it came. , Sticky notes A granddaughter of the master of Seven Oaks, Marie Constance Zeringue, married a man named Yves Caesar LeCorgne. They were usually just "the slaves," sometimes from the Civil War era and white in later pictures. It's taken me a little under a month to finish. would be a mistake to say that I felt guilt for the past. During slavery, the family had more than a dozen city residences in addition to the plantations out of town. WebBritish slave owners family makes public apology in Grenada. Even though this is history and documentary, it read very suspensefully and kept me interested throughout. Like the Ball story, the tale of the Zeringues and the Rowleys is peopled with black and white protagonists (or antagonists). used as second homes by wealthy families, but many had been swept away. Needing to know more, he began researching and trying to find the descendants of the slaves his family had owned. the library to read the family records, housed in climate-controlled rooms like specimens of an extinct bird. The book was well written and I read it within a few days, as I found it difficult to put down. It seems like families that can trace their ancestry back to a specific plantation or person are more stable and generally more church-y and so more likely to be forgiving or at least moving past it. By the time of the photograph, the plantation had long passed out of the family and stood abandoned and decrepit. and in-laws owned more land and people. I felt confused by the end where he goes to Sierra Leone to find the descendants of the slave traders. He was tall, lean, carefully dressed, and had thin brown hair that he lost as he aged. For the most part. Ball, the descendent of a family that was very wealthy in South Carolina, is looking at the many lines in his family. For half an hour my brother and I sat simmering on the hot vinyl seats of the car, swatting mosquitoes. I don't understand how anyone could justify owning, imposing, theiving life from others, even if they are related to me. It must have been difficult, especially when he wasn't well received. The book is so well written that it holds your attention even though there is a lot of genealogical material in it. sight. Among the Ball family members, who overflow with legend, memory became WebAt a time when slavery was still a concept rather than a legal institution, blacks from New Amsterdam to the Chesapeake Bay used the courts to ensure the well-being of family In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. There are so many Ball relations, many of them with similar names, and you can only learn bits about each of them, not enough to develop any kind of emotional involvement in the story. A few miles up the river lay two old Ball tracts, Kensington From time to time in his stories, Dad mentioned the people our family used to own. Whether a slave was needed for cooking, for childcare or as a concubine, during the late Roman republic at least, supply was high and trade was brisk. I remember the suffocating heat that seemed to radiate up from the ground Even the mere fact of this can be distressing in itself. 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