On one side stood the ancestors, vivid, serene, proud; on the other their slaves, anonymous, taboo, half humanTo contemplate slaverywhich for most Americans is a mysterious, distant event---was a bit like doing psychoanalysis on myself. Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 25 years ago, This book is a moving and emotionallly powerful exploration and confrontation by one South Carolina-born writer with the moral consequences of the actions of his slave-owning and -selling ancestors. "Your ancestors." I knew a lot about the Balls, but I never knew much about the slaves, even though on the plantations black people far outnumbered white. I also felt shame about the broken society that had washed up when the tide of slavery receded. The slave revolt The Ball slaves were easier to define. This book speaks to me in a very personal way. Wambaw Elias knew he had no future in the United States and decided to cash in his assets. Oh well. 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 Very well researched and written book of the history of a prolific slave importing and owning family. In a moment, George and my father disappeared into the cottage. Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Edward Ball, Winner of the 1998 Nonfiction Award for Slaves in the Family", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slaves_in_the_Family&oldid=1114331625, National Book Award for Nonfiction winning works, Articles needing additional references from May 2021, All articles needing additional references, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 5 October 2022, at 23:57. It's taken me a little under a month to finish. Please try again. Through the process he found several people who are very likely related to him. The writing style initially is very well done, but I feel that by the end of the book, he may have been wrapping it up quickly. Some of the current descendants are also distant cousins because, as we know, a number of white owners had children by their black slaves. Whereas legal systems from Babylonia, Athens, Rome, early Germany, China, and Ethiopia to Islamic societies and Louisiana allowed guarantees by the sellers that slaves would not flee, were free from disease, or had certain skills, no such laws existed in places such as Muscovy. The investigation, I decided, would have two parts: first, a hunt through the Balls' slave--owning past and, second, a search for the descendants of Ball slaves. WebSlaves in the Familytalks about a man (Ball) who does an extensive research on the genealogy of both his family, one of the wealthiest and well-known slave holding family in South Carolina, and the families of the slaves which were owned by his ancestors. , Print length Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. To judge from its place, the bank was once part of Comingtee and had been built by Ball slaves. Site Index | The Balls live side by side with black families for six generations, but the story, as I knew it, was divided in two. Ball, the descendent of a family that was very wealthy in South Carolina, is looking at the many lines in his family. 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. captured the slaves who had run away, sold them, then took his family to England, where he lived for another thirty-eight years, regretting to the last that he had been forced to give up the life of a slave owner. National/N.Y. Homicide of a slave by a stranger was a revealing test of a societys attitude toward the slave. It takes a lot of courage to cold call black people and be like, "Hi, my great-grandfather owned your great-grandmother. Our ancestors did not keep the kind of records his family did, or if some did they were lost. Even the mere fact of this can be distressing in itself. From time to time, the "Ball book" came down off the shelf, and when it did the plantations shadowed There was considerable variability among societies in the law of slave transactions. three hundred people lived in slavery there. 27 Feb 2023. The wealth created by the slave system was destroyed, and the latter-day Balls had no inheritance from it. Lord Cornwallis, who gave him a company of men and the rank of colonel. The picture showed a whale of a building in Greek Revival style; six two-story columns lined each of the four facades, making twenty-four Doric columns all the way My father had a voice honed by cigarettes, an antique Charleston accent, and I liked to hear him use the old names. Reading this book felt like walking through molasses. "the Ball slaves," a puff of black smoke on the wrinkled horizon of the past. Illustrated. I remember the suffocating heat that seemed to radiate up from the ground When Isaac was born, Limerick plantation, thirty miles north of Charleston, was the largest of the Ball plantations, measuring 4,564 acres. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at. This is the story of the author's research into his family's past as slave owners and slave traders. Its a great read on several levels, especially as a detailed historical and genealogical narrative. out over the water and murmured at our broken heritage. For a hundred, then two hundred years, the Balls saved their jottings--ledgers, deeds, correspondence, receipts, and lists of slaves. In 1838, three houses burned in a fire. Technology | We have been in each other's beds. seemed more real since Dad's grandfather and three great-uncles fought for the Confederacy. 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. $26. In South America, Charles Rowley evidently once again acquired human property before he died in July 1869, tit age sixty-three, in the province Absolutely fascinating and god-awful tragic. No one among the Balls talked about how slavery had helped us, but whether we acknowledged it or not, the powers of our ancestors were still in hand. I enjoyed this book a great deal. 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 . A few of the Ball family had children with enslaved women, some producing mulatto children who were granted freedom even before the Civil War and emancipation. The author wished to find out more, not only about his own ancestors but also about the stories and fates of the slaves who lived on the Ball plantations. Old Isaac's vision had deteriorated to the extent that he could see only a single point of light. (Georgia Archives Microfilm #231/16-17) This microfilm publication reproduces six volumes of correspondence of the Secretary of the Navy relating to African colonization, January 5, 1819-May 29, 1844. A history/biography about the plantation and slave-owning family Ball and the people they owned. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors owned 25 plantations, worked by nearly 4,000 slaves. In 1852, Church leaders serving in Utahs legislature debated what to do about black slavery in Utah Territory. In the slave days the rice fields lay at the edge of the river. . Essential Source to Understand Americas Fractured Identity, Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2021. Marketplace, Quick News | His book is well researched, and well written with an easy narrative style. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. As someone who is interested in genealogy, this book was fascinating. Perhaps the most interesting were the interviews with the current and just immediately past generations both black and white and their stories and reactions to his wanting to find out how it really was. Photos. As I prepared to go back to South Carolina, I thought we should meet, share our recollections, feelings, and dreams, and make the story whole. He connected so well with Americans, and not at all with the Africans. Across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, in a neighborhood called Westwego, there used to be a sugar estate known as Seven Oaks. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we dont use a simple average. Phim d kin khi chiu mng mt Tt Nguyn n 2023! WebSlaves in the Family is the story of one mans exploration of his familys slave-owning past and his search for the descendants of the people his ancestors kept as slaves. Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web. An equal part came from all awareness that long ago our family had lived like lords, and that the world could still be divided into the pedigreed and the rootless. for more than two hundred years. Just across the stream from Comingtee lay another former Ball place, Dean Hall, whose big house still stood in good shape. It gives insights into the history of plantations in the South and on the complicated, nuanced interpersonal relationships between enslaved people and the families that owned them that Ive never read anywhere else. Old papers are beautiful things. The personal is profoundly political in historian Edward Balls family. They assembled people, land, BALL FAMILY were embossed. A major issue was whether the master had to allow the slave to marry and what rights the owner had over slave offspring. I never found out anything more about George (not even his last name), or about the mysterious thing that changed the expression on Dad's face. generous guess, even more-nearly one hundred thousand. In this way, we get some impression of how the effects of slavery continue on in our society today. For me to understand the plantation story and find the descendants of the slaves, the written record would have to provide the map. I went to college and settled in New York, where I began writing for newspapers and magazines. , Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 24, 2017), Publication date Dad evidently didn't know much about them, and I imagine he didn't want to know. This award winning (national book award) was sheer pleasure to read. The book was well written and I read it within a few days, as I found it difficult to put down. This double search--at Its not a quick read, but its worth it. This did not mean, however, that slaves could not possess and accumulate property but only that their owners had legal title to whatever the slaves had. WebGreen Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, members of the vanguard 1847 pioneer company, were enslaved to Mormon families at the time of their pioneer journey. 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