Edward Ball Chronicles His Family\'s Slave-Owning History

Edward Ball chronicles his family's slave-owning history in the compelling historical narrative Slaves in the Family. Ball traces the lineages of his white relatives and their slaves and where possible recreates life as it was on the Ball plantations in South Carolina. Descendents of the Englishman Elias Ball bought and sold enough slaves to populate a city. By no means singular in their treatment of the Africans, the Balls prove nevertheless to be a prime example of a Southern plantation dependent on the blood, sweat, and tears of families and individuals ripped from their homeland and bought and sold as commodity. Cruelty was meted out equally among black males and females, but it is worthwhile to contrast the unique experiences of enslaved women on the Southern plantations. If nothing else, motherhood and childrearing set the women apart. They watched their newborns emerge into a world of shackles, often completely losing them to the slave traders.

Black men and women were flogged, whipped, beaten, punished like animals. All slaves were the physical property of their white owners, who bought, sold, and traded them like livestock. At the markets they were exhibited alongside cattle and goats, on display. When sold or traded, the owners often failed to report whether or not the slave was male or female (Ball, p. 99). Because they were inhuman, the distinction of gender mattered not to the slave trader. Both women and men were employed as field workers and domestics. Both the men and women "cleared acres among the tupelo gum trees," to grow the Ball's key crop: rice (Ball, p. 103). However, the specific duties carried out by males and females differed: men were delegated tasks of hard labor like ditch digging for plantation irrigation. Women seeded the ground with rice, in the tradition of their African forebears. Enslaved women often worked as domestic attendants, "minding babies," and performing household chores like cleaning, sewing, cooking, and laundering clothes, although white women usually preferred not to have a black midwife deliver their children (Ball, p. 84-5).

Women, both white and black, become the preservers of family history: "family memory flows more completely through women," (Ball, p. 50). The rich oral tradition of mothers and grandmothers preserves the subjective experiences of women and men. Preservers of lore, the women are keepers of a past perhaps too painful to share with the younger generations. In fact, the retelling of tales of captivity slowed down after the Civil War (Ball, p. 81). Still, it is mostly women that Edward Ball interviews to glean information for his genealogy. Because it was against the law for slaves to read or write, oral traditions provide the only narrative history of the Ball slaves. Facts, figures, and dates still did include important black matriarchs like Priscilla and Angola Amy, two of the only black names recorded for posterity. Much of Edward Bell's work depends on the written and oral remains of women's lives. The first Bell slave identified by name is a woman, Bella.

Women were not only the main preservers of their family's memoirs; they also provide unequalled insight into plantation life. Women's lives always differ qualitatively from men's. Women's experiences are subjectively different from their male counterparts', even when both sexes are treated like animals. Even if some men worked as domestics and some women as field workers, their personal perceptions and feelings about the world varied. As mothers, women viewed the world through maternal eyes and serve a singular purpose in preserving their own bloodlines. The identification of daughter with mother with grandmother transcends most other relationships. Often the fathers of black children born in captivity were unknown slave hands, who may have fathered numerous children with different women. The slave women, who usually became mothers in their teens, were left to care for and raise two families: theirs and their master's. As primary caregivers, the women can offer a perspective into plantation life that no male can give. When bought from slave markets in Africa or the New World, the women were eyed as childbearing machines; their sex makes them uniquely profitable because of their ability to produce the valued commodity of more slaves. Angola Amy and Priscilla proved to be some of the biggest moneymakers for the Ball family. When Edward Bell interviews Carutha Williams speaks of her ancestors and asks why the Sierra Leone markets sold young children, Williams responds matter-of-factly, "Girls, because they could soon procreate, and boys, because they could work," (Ball, p. 213).

The commonality of white slave owners sleeping with or raping their female slaves prompted Edward Bell to investigate his mixed bloodlines. His conversations with Edwina Whitlock, the great-granddaughter of Kate Wilson and William Harleston, reveal the extent to which this occurred. William Harleston, however, was unique in that he and his former slave Kate lived as common-law husband and wife. Kate mothered eight mulatto children and inherited land from her husband. This was an uncommon experience for a black woman in the 1850s, however. Usually white plantation owners who forced themselves on their female slaves did so in secret, for they were usually cheating on their wives. Even if they weren't, mixed relations were scorned. Remarkably, white women who were caught sleeping with a black man were arrested and jailed. Dorothy Dame Gibbs provides Edward Bell with her chilling opinion on miscegenation: "to me it is so repugnant -- so awful -- that I just can't accept it," (Ball, p. 58). She speaks of black males as "tomcats," and "adulterators," (Ball, p. 57). Black women, as the property of the white men, were obliged to sleep with their masters. "It is undeniable that white men on the plantations forced and persuaded black women to have sex with them," (Ball, p. 106). Women were basically "chattels," (p. 59).

But black women and men were both chattel, and black women were treated poorly not only by their white owners but also by black men. Georgie Richardson attests to this unfortunate fact on page 166: "My brother said I couldn't carry that girl, because a man could throw it in my face," (p. 166). Georgie Richardson was forced by her black brethren to give up her baby "so that the man she married wouldn't use the baby against her," (p. 166). Unfortunately, women received the short end of the stick by both slaves and masters. When black families were split up in the interests of profit, it was undoubtedly the women who suffered most.