`Slaves In The Family' -- Edward Ball Taps Into The Pain And Shame Of His Personal Connection To Slavery

If you are white, you may feel sympathy, relief and a degree of wisdom after reading "Slaves in the Family."

If you are black, you may feel at times repulsed, saddened and ultimately vindicated by Edward Ball's family memoir, meticulously detailing the lives of white and black people caught in the history of his family's vast South Carolina plantations.

Why should perspectives differ by race or skin color?

It's not race per se, but the societal memory skin color carries that shapes the response. The hushed legacy of slavery, Ball discovered, shackles people white and black to a time in which they did not live but cannot escape without acknowledging how it tore, singed and continues to fray the fabric of the nation.

In his research for "Slaves in the Family" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30), Ball traced how the scars branded by those centuries pass through generations in the psyche of black and white Americans. Ball, who spoke to 80 people at Elliott Bay Book Company Tuesday, acknowledges the nation-dividing damage his family's legacy has wrought. But instead of compounding guilt, this knowledge set him free.

"I am proud of what my family accomplished," Ball said. "We are an early American family who fought in the American Revolution and Civil War. Being proud of that is part of the complex legacy. It's not a matter of making heroes into villains or villains into heroes. What I'm trying to do is illuminate the complexity of our

connectedness. What we have to try to do is get the stories together to make a shared history. This book is my attempt to say this is what my family did. This is what it means. This is my way of making restitution."

The family legacy included:

-- 25 rice plantations worked by nearly 4,000 people the Ball family enslaved from 1698 to 1863.

-- An estimated 100,000 African Americans alive today whose family history was inextricably altered by enslavement on Ball plantations.

-- Two Ball in-laws who, for a decade, were the biggest slave dealers in North America.

-- African Americans Ball discovered distantly related by blood.

As he set out to identify and contact descendants of his family's plantation slaves, Ball expected anger. Instead, initial bewilderment quickly became a willingness to reach out, exchange family stories and fill in the blanks society's collective denial has erased. He has remained friends with many, such as Carolyn Smalls Goodson, who told him she felt the shared connection during their first meeting.

"The black folks are usually stunned that I've shown up in their lives," Ball said. "Sometimes they are suspicious. Once they get over the shock, we sit down and start to tell stories about each other."

For three years, the former Village Voice columnist befriended, researched and listened to the white and black people linked historically by the Ball plantations. He learned something most white Americans do not know: Life is different through the eyes of black vs. white people.

He also realized nobody can escape a legacy of fear, suspicion and disparity until we as a society agree to unlock the memory, acknowledge the damage and move ahead with a shared history - not two separate and unequal accounts. No matter how we try to forget, time will not erase the discomfort many whites and blacks feel around each other: not the descendants of enslaved people, slave owners or anyone who lives in and adopts a culture tainted by the three-century legacy.

In his family's tale, he writes about how the Ball slaves rebuilt the rice empire, weakened by effort and money siphoned to fight in the American Revolution. One can't help but wonder what would have happened if those African descendants had put that backbreaking, empire-building toil into their own lives and collateral. Where would we and their descendants be now?

"I think that what the plantations did was create an economic caste system that survives to this day," Ball said. "The tragic part is that this caste system is 300 years old now and it has not gone away despite 30 years of effort since the civil-rights era. It is going to take a lot more work to combat this legacy."

Ball ends the book on Bunce Island, a former Sierra Leone slave fort, talking to descendants of African slave traders.

Among his 100 or so white relatives, about half were disappointed that he chose to tell the family tale, worried he would vilify them. But the book research became a historical baptism that freed Ball to feel pride in his complex family history. He fondly describes the antebellum South while honestly detailing what happened to slave families in their own and subsequent generations.

Drawing from personal letters and diaries spanning his family's 300 years in South Carolina, Ball extracts extraordinary historical details. He writes about how the American Revolution split the family, some defending their British ancestry, others joining the rebels. He knows the troop movements of his great-grandfather Isaac Ball during the Civil War, struggling to gain Southern sovereignty and retain his way of life.

Ball discovered written accounts of the events that occurred the last day of slavery at Limerick plantation, one of eight controlled by his great-great-grandfather William Ball at the start of the Civil War.

Among the Northern troops who arrived at the plantation on Feb. 26, 1865, was an all-black unit led by Col. James Beecher, half-brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who more than a decade earlier had published "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Beecher, who was invited to dine with them, would not allow the house servant to wait on him because she was a free woman now. That evening as they slept, Ball's ancestors heard shouts among the freed slaves to burn the house - as had occurred on other emancipated plantations - but they did not, probably because Beecher slept in the house that night.

The house was not vandalized by the troops, save some dishes purposely broken. The women in the house had already buried the silver and tucked jewelry in bags under extra layers of petticoats they wore to thwart rape attempts by soldiers that had occurred on other freed plantations. The accounts show no one was harmed, although freed slaves and troops searched the house for food.

Ball juxtaposes his ancestor's written recollections with the oral history of Emily Marie Frayer, whose grandfather was born a slave on Limerick plantation. Both accounts corroborate the other, his ancestor's scrawled with trepidation, Frayer telling Ball her grandmother's stories with jubilation:

"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!' "

In the first few chapters you may want to blame Ball for his family's slave-owning past, despite admiring him for taking such a starkly honest, accountable and yet unapologetic view of it. Or, depending on your perspective, you may find yourself sighing with relief. He writes what many feel: Slavery ended more than 100 years ago. You had nothing to do with it. Slavery is not your fault.

He says this, however, edged with the responsibility of living in a society where the legacy of this crime against humanity persists to this day. He did not fully comprehend this before. Ball says he believes this now.

Mary Elizabeth Cronin's e-mail address is: mcro-new@seatimes.com

----------------------------- Generations of owners, slaves -----------------------------

Elias "Red Cap" Ball (1676-1751), son of peasants in Devon, England, immigrated to South Carolina in 1698 and founded the Ball plantation dynasty.

William James Ball (1821-91), great-great-grandfather of Edward Ball, controlled several rice plantations in South Carolina, including Limerick, the home of Carolyn Smalls Goodson's ancestors.

Nat "Daddy Nat" Watson (1845-1922), former slave of Jane Ball Shoolbred of Quenby plantation, accompanied Ball sons during their tours of duty with the Confederate Army.

"What I'm trying to do," says Edward Ball, author of "Slaves in the Family," "is illuminate the complexity of our connectedness."