"EVERYONE SHOULD READ AND LEARN FROM THIS LUMINOUS BOOK...Like Alex Haley's Roots, through which African American history came into national focus...Slaves in the Family has the potential for creating a perceptual shift in the American mind...The book is not only honest in its scrupulous reporting but also personal narrative at its finest."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"BALL IS A FIRST-RATE SCHOLAR-JOURNALIST...He's also a good detective, tracking down the many descendants of Ball slaves from New York to California and back in the South and coaxing them, often with some difficulty, to tell their stories...Outside 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-Constitution
"A MASTERPIECE...REMARKABLE...It is a work about slaves in the family. 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
"A TOUR DE FORCE...The heart of this remarkable book consists of his sleuthing
--tracking down and interviewing the descendants of former Ball slaves across the country...Part oral history, this unique family saga is a catharsis and a searching inventory of racially divided American society."
--Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)
"FASCINATING READING;
THERE IS SIMPLY NOTHING QUITE LIKE IT IN PRINT."
--The Boston Sunday Globe
"There is much to admire in Ball's very willingness to challenge the generations of silence in his white family and to search out black kin whose reactions he had every reason to fear. And there is much to learn as well from a book that reminds us that slavery possesses not just a national and cultural significance but, for many Americans, a very direct and personal immediacy, even in the late 20th century. In naming the names...Ball contributes to at least partly reclaiming the humanity slavery worked to obliterate. He reminds us that slavery was not just about economics or politics or even abstract questions of morality, but most essentially about the millions of human being imprisoned within its chains."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Not since Alex Haley's Roots has there been such a pure act of recovery of the African American experience...It is a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word 'family.' "
--PAT CONROY
"If Cold Mountain was closer to a nature study than a Civil War story, this book is the real thing: a narrative with runaway slaves, night patrols, plantation lords, wastrel heirs, and a loony widow...A fascinating domestic history."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Not since William Faulkner wrote his masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 has any writer rendered a more hauntingly poignant exploration of the dark roots and bitter fruits of slavery in America."
--The Baltimore Sun
"This book, a brilliant blend of archival research and oral history, tells what [Ball] found
--a painful past relieved by the presence of vivid individuals."
--The New Yorker
"MOVING AND DISARMINGLY FRANK."
--The Christian Science Monitor
"Powerful...Edward Ball is a writer who possesses both skill and bravery...A book that is an amazing amalgamation of history, detective work, sociology and personal catharsis. It covers not only the days of slavery, but investigates the intertwined lives of blacks and whites into the 20th century. Ball's history is impeccable...Slaves in the Family deserves wide readership. It is a fine portrait of how the legacy of an evil institution still resonates in the collective memories of black and white Americans."
--The Chattanooga Times
"Fascinating...Ball is an accomplished portrait artist, delivering characters in quick, pointed strokes. His ear is perfect also, able to discern a Southern accent that is more cotton than rice. Most importantly, Slaves in the Family accomplishes something that the currently fashionable but little-yielding 'dialogues' on race cannot seem to; it underscores the complexity of blood and manners as an aspect of race in this country."
--New York Post
"An exposé of the original black/white divide in this country, as embodied in one extended family and the people they owned...By daring to zero in on his own family's trade, Ball breaks hundreds of years of silence from white people
--the only way to begin this dialogue between black and white people."
--The Village Voice
"A fascinating and important work that should be read by as many Americans as possible."
--The Washington Times
"[An] unblinking history not only of his ancestors but also of the people they held as slaves...It reminds us of our common humanity and of the ties that still bind us, no matter what the wounds of the past."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"SENSITIVE AND FORMIDABLE...THE HISTORICAL SECTIONS UTTERLY RIVET."
--Newsday
"This is a powerful personal memoir of a spiritual as much as an anthropological journey into history. One of Ball's white relatives feared that the author's probing into taboo matters would 'dig up my grandfather and hang him.' The larger meaning of the book lies not in condemnation or retribution so much as in the ways Ball recovers and respects a buried past. A stunning, dangerous book for each generation to ponder; highly recommended."
--Library Journal (starred review)
"Ball's impressive detective work and the black voices it records build a monumental and extraordinary case history of the rise and fall of America's most shameful institution. Together, their searing, soul-searching grappling with past sins strikes deep at the heart of the country's enduring racial division."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An informative, ruminative, and inspirational page-turner."
--Booklist (starred review)
"[Slaves in the Family is] much more than bare history...It's the human encounters, and the live, breathing juxtaposition of past and present, that give [Ball's] book its vibrancy and importance."
--Detroit Free Press
"Remarkable, candid...Utterly compelling...A powerfully valuable testament."
--The State (Columbia, SC)
"Illuminating."
--New York Daily News
"Part historical narrative and part personal odyssey, this extraordinarily accessible and creative narrative should be read by anyone with an interest in African-American or southern history."
--The Post and Courier
"A remarkable look at how slavery lives on in our nation's memory and experience, and, perhaps, an important step toward racial harmony."
--In Review (Nashville)
"A pageantry of passions and struggles, Slaves in the Family is an unprecedented chronicle that is part history, and part the author's incredible journey towards the revelation and reconstruction of the genealogies of the slaves in his family's plantation. And ultimately the startling discovery of the slaves in 'his' family."
--African Sun Times
About the Author
Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, graduated from Brown University, and was a columnist for The Village Voice. This is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves.
"There are five things we don't talk about in the Ball family," he would say. "Religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes."
"What does that leave to talk about?" my mother asked once.
"That's another of the family secrets," Dad said, smiling.
My father, Theodore Porter Ball, came from the venerable city of Charleston, South Carolina, the son of an old plantation clan. The Ball family's plantations were among the oldest and longest standing in the American South, and there were more than twenty of them along the Cooper River, North of Charleston. Between 1698 and 1865, the 167 years the family was in the slave business, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery to the Balls or bought by them. The crop they raised was rice, whose color and standard gave it the name Carolina Gold. After the Civil War, some of the Ball places stayed in business as sharecrop farms with paid black labor until about 1900, when the rice market finally failed in the face of competition from Louisiana and Asia.
When I was twelve, Dad died and was buried near Charleston. Sometime during his last year, he brought together my brother, Theodore Jr., and me to give each of us a copy of the published history of the family. The book had a wordy title, Recollections of the Ball Family of South Carolina and the Comingtee Plantation. A distant cousin, long dead, had written the manuscript, and the book was printed in 1909 on rag paper, with a tan binding and green cloth boards. On the spine the words BALL FAMILY were embossed. The pages smelled like wet leaves.
"One day you'll want to know about all this," Dad said, waving his hand vaguely, his lips pursed. "Your ancestors." The tone of the old joke was replaced by some nervousness.
I know my father was proud of his heritage but at the same time, I suspect, had questions about it. The story of his slave-owning family, part of the weave of his childhood, was a mystery he could only partly decipher. With the gift of the book, Dad seemed to be saying that the plantations were a piece of unfinished business. In that moment, the story of the Ball clan was locked in the depths of my mind, to be pried loose one day.
When I was a child, Dad used to tell stories about our ancestors, the rice planters. I got a personal glimpse of the American revolution, because the Balls had played a role in it--some of us fought for the British, some for independence. the Civil War seemed more real since Dad's grandfather and three great-uncles fought for the Confederacy. From time to time in his stories, Dad mentioned the people our family used to own. They were usually just "the slaves," sometimes "the Ball slaves," a puff of black smoke on the wrinkled horizon of the past. Dad evidently didn't know much about them, and I imagine he didn't want to know.
"Did I ever tell you about Wambaw Elias Ball?" he might say. "His plantation was on Wambaw Creek. He had about a hundred and fifty slaves, and he was a mean fella."
My father had a voice honed by cigarettes, an antique Charleston accent, and I liked to hear him use the old names.
"Wambaw Elias was a Tory," Dad began. "I mean, he picked the wrong side in the Revolution." When the Revolutionary War reached the South, Wambaw Elias, instead of joining the American rebels, went to the British commander in Charleston, Lord Cornwallis, who gave him a company of men and the rank of colonel. Wambaw Elias fought the patriots and burned their houses until such time as the British lost and his victims called for revenge. The Americans went for Wambaw Elias's human property, dragging off some fifty slaves from Wambaw plantation, while other black workers managed to escape into the woods. Wambaw Elias knew he had no future in the United States and decided to cash in his assets. Eventually he 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.
In the Ball family, the tale of Wambaw Elias and his slaves passed as a children's story.
