In my childhood, our family lived in various small towns and cities in the South. I want to feel and know my great,great grandmother and her heritage and reading this book is a good first step in that pursuit. This book made me realize that many whites, including myself, have another part of their family history in the US that is buried and needs to be discovered. The wealth created by the slave system was destroyed, and the latter-day Balls had no inheritance from it. Some readers have felt the book was superficial or self-indulgent on the part of the writer. The first piece of paper I remember my father presenting to me regarding the family was an obituary from the Charleston News and Courier. 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. Historians call them the "Ball Family Papers," more than ten thousand pages housed in four libraries. Using an equation that made allowances for rates of marriage within the community, for average numbers of children, long-term migration out of the South, and the increase in life span, it was On one side stood the ancestors, vivid, serene, proud; on the other their slaves, anonymous, taboo, half Harrell described the case of Mae Louise Walls Miller, who didn't get her freedom until 1963, when she was about 14. Editorial | It was run-down and neglected, but I could use the house until This property has been passed down, and it has remained in my family for over four generations The land that weve inherited has kept my family together through generations, which is not typical for a lot of Black American families. The plantation heritage was not "ours," like a piece of A few miles up the river lay two old Ball tracts, Kensington My great-grandma, Granny had stories. the Civil War. Everyone, however far away, was Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. 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. At the other extreme, in the American South material conditions were sufficiently favourable to provide comparative comfort for both masters and slaves. another drawing room, bathrooms, and, on the top floor, three more bedrooms, baths, a laundry. (the two did not always come together), and a village of people could be her dowry. The verses consist of love lyrics to his wife, meditations on old things--one about a country church, another about rusting Confederate guns--and elegies about the Civil War, whose outcome caused him much sadness. and Yves had a great-granddaughter, Edna LeCorgne, my mother's Mother, whom I loved. Rather than make art, slave owners collected things. '", Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download, ] is not only honest in its scrupulous reporting but also personal narrative at its finest. , ' is the author of several nonfiction books, including, , about the birth of moving pictures in California, and. In his later years. More determining than the law were the conditions of the society itself. 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. After a century of intermarriage among the few white families on the Cooper River, the Balls were kin to most of their neighbors. So there are a lot of details that you have to wade through. There was a problem loading your book clubs. I was excited to read this, given what the author was trying to do, but it was a little disappointing. 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. , Publisher A second colonnade on the piazza supported a pediment, which gave the face of the building the look of a furrowed brow. Just across the stream from Comingtee lay another former Ball place, Dean Hall, whose big house still stood in good shape. According to the 1860 U.S. Census returns, those same fifty-nine counties and three cities had contained 65,720 male slaves in a comparable age range. Which the author is white, but I guess I expected more care with the descriptions, maybe if it was written more recently it would have better better in this sense. Maybe Charles believed that if he had remained in the United States he would have been persecuted for As the bride was passed like a package from the domain of her parents to that of the Balls, her identity disappeared into that of her husband. Slavery traders tried to cheat Africans with impure Cornish copper, says study. Patrice says The rooms were moldering, the air thick and bacterial. Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 23 years ago. In the old days, a Ball household began simply enough, with a wedding. As the double-decker headed for another bend, it lurched and teetered on one of Near the house where he lived, at the : He attempts to cover a very long time span--going back to 1660--which is both what makes it valuable to students of history and what makes it less accessible to those not already enthralled with the subject. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we dont use a simple average. OK well, here I am again with a whole list of books waiting on reviews. Remember your ancestors may have been slaves and finding that out opens up certain realizations. It Wambaw Elias knew he had no future in the United States and decided to cash in his assets. It's taken me a little under a month to finish. human. , Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 24, 2017), Publication date So, he is following these descendants. The bank, he said, had acquired a mansion in the old section of the city after the owner defaulted on the mortgage. The purpose of the event, as announced by its septuagenarian organizers, was to convey the plantation story to the younger generations. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Click on the + button and choose the Add M3U URL option. When the Revolutionary War reached the South, Wambaw Elias, instead of joining the American rebels, went to the British commander in Charleston, Cousins: Connected through slavery, a Black woman and a White woman discover their pastand each other. Across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, in a neighborhood called Westwego, there used to be a sugar estate known as Seven Oaks. Use tab to navigate through the menu items. The pages are veiny, with age spots, the black ink coursing down them like hair. The tone of the old joke was replaced by some nervousness. One of my favorite parts was an aside--"The Curse of the Buzzard Wing", about the spendthrift second wife of one of the Balls and her equally troublesome progeny. When I was twelve, Dad died and was buried near Charleston. Services | Today, some 100,000 Americans have among their ancestors one or more people once enslaved by the Ball family. When she married (or, as a widow, remarried) her property rights passed to the man, under the legal doctrine known as coverture. I know my father was proud of his heritage but at the same time, I suspect, had questions about it. Ball does an exceptional job unearthing and researching painful parts of his family lore. Sports | I learned much about so many things that it is too much to write about. A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced. to live in the year 1698. This article about a non-fiction book on U.S. history is a stub. 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. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club thats right for you for free. We retraced our route past the empty tracts where the Balls used to rule and the flora grew in reverse, thinning The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave owners are forever linked. Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2022, Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2021. Please try again. Societies elsewhere, however, such as the North American Yurok, Tlingit, and other neighbouring Indians, as well as in the American South, explicitly stated that slaves could have no honour, personal status, or prestige. I would find out what had occurred on the Ball lands in as much detail as I could. My new Charleston home had no resemblance to my former New York apartment. plantations, and where had their descendants gone? I have a few of his manuscripts. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. I was totally impressed by what the author did. The owner, moreover, was held equally or even more responsible for the slaves actions, ranging from homicide to theft, than was the slave himself, for the society desired that the former control his property and there was no assurance that sanctions, especially money fines, could be enforced against slaves. Brazil was a sugar-producing nation where slavery would not be abolished until 1888. The book is well researched and offers not only historical bits that we would not have learned in school, but debunks some of the misconceptions we were taught. Ball's reports of his meetings with these African families are some of the most moving passages in the book. Throughout my spartan, God-fearing upbringing, I sensed A few societies, such as late Assyria and Muscovy, allowed slaves to testify in court, but most did not. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. In South America, Charles Rowley evidently once again acquired human property before he died in July 1869, tit age sixty-three, in the province 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. The Ball family hails from South CarolinaCharleston and thereabouts. out over the water and murmured at our broken heritage. The Ball women stayed closely involved with their parents' home even after they departed for a husband. and left behind most of the records. : of the Ball Family of South Carolina and the Comingtee Plantation. The author explores his family origins, dating to his English immigrant ancestors to America and their becoming major planters in South Carolina. My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves. (The War Between the States is Losses in some areas exceeded even that 61 percent. 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. Various small towns and cities in the American South material conditions were sufficiently favourable to provide comparative for... 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