T A B L E++T A L K

Private schools: Great for your kids but bad for society. Discuss in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Wise women
By Jonathan Broder
Three women cross the Israeli-Palestinian divide
(02/26/98)

Drama Queen Candidates
Back-stabbing, ankle-biting sluts ... and the women who loved them
(02/25/98)

Wild Thing
By Polly Shulman
Love and justice: Two teenage novels
(02/24/98)

Baby hunger
A cynical hipster finds herself dragged inexorably down the dark tunnel of maternal longing by a goofy-faced toddler
(02/23/98)

Dreams of Bill
Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only woman in America getting hot and bothered about the President
(02/20/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BY MARYANNE VOLLERS | There is a saying among Southern blacks that goes like this: White folks up North don't care how high you get as long as you don't get too close; white folks down South don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too high. In "Slaves in the Family," Edward Ball reveals just how intimate the relationship between Southern whites and blacks can get. In this epic family history, he shows how the "peculiar institution" of the past has linked the progeny of slaves and slave holders through time and blood and memory.

Ball is descended from a dynasty of Charleston, S.C., rice planters who, from 1698 until the end of the Civil War, owned thousands of African- and American-born slaves. Although the family's great fortune ended with the abolition of slavery, the legacy of plantation days lingered in each generation. Ball, son of an Episcopalian minister and great-grandson of a character known as Isaac the Confederate, grew up hearing romantic, vaguely troubling stories of his antebellum ancestors.

"There are five things we don't talk about in the Ball family," Ball's father used to joke. "Religion, sex, death, money and the Negroes." But Ball knew this was not entirely a jest. Before he died, the minister gave his young son a leather-bound copy of the Ball family history, written at the turn of the century by a cousin. "One day you'll want to know all about this," he told him.

Years went by. Ball graduated from an Ivy League college and moved to New York City. He worked as a freelance art critic and wrote a column about architecture for the Village Voice. The family history book remained on his shelf. Still, he writes, "The plantation past was etched in my unconscious." It was finally jarred to the surface with the arrival of an invitation to a Ball family reunion in the summer of 1993. Ball decided he would return to Charleston, to "face the plantations" and find out what they meant to him.

The author joined 150 relatives for a chartered cruise up the muddy Cooper River. It was here the Ball family once owned thousands of acres of rice fields and grand estates with names like Comingtee and Kensington and Halidon Hill. All that remained were swamps and tract housing and a few festering ruins. Ball turned his attention to the living relics around him, descendants of the vanquished gentry. He found them a diverse bunch: "Some of the family had manners, others none; some had money and status, some neither," he writes. "But inwardly the plantations lived on."

While Ball knew a great deal about the history of his white forebears, he knew almost nothing about the slaves who lived among them for six generations. Their presence, he recalls, was "like a puff of black smoke on the wrinkled horizon of the past." He decided to find out who they were and what became of them, "to make the story whole."

The writer moved into a crumbling ancestral house in Charleston. Armed with the old family history, slave records and library archives, he started to dig into the past. Early in his effort, he was warned by an older relative, "To do this is to condemn your ancestors! You're going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!" The warning was prophetic.

Ball is not a neutral narrator. A preacher's voice sometimes rings in his evocative, beautifully crafted prose. His message is that slavery was an abomination and no one who benefited from it -- directly or indirectly -- is without the stain of guilt. To those who would protest -- "I never owned slaves, what's it got to do with me?" is another refrain you hear down South -- Ball provides a simple response: To live with the advantages of white skin in America is to benefit from the old slave system. At the same time, he knows that what's past is past.

"Rather than feel responsible," Ball writes, "I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it." In answering that call, Ball is seeking a form of redemption -- and his writing becomes an act of contrition.

The story of the Ball plantations begins in the 17th century, with the arrival of the author's English ancestors in America. In 1698, a semiliterate 22-year-old farm boy named Elias Ball inherited half of the Comingtee plantation from a distant relative and booked passage to the colony. This founding patriarch, known in future generations as Red Cap because of the headgear he wore to cover his baldness, found himself master of 20 or so African and Native American slaves. He expanded the family business in every way. Old Red Cap acquired new lands and sired five white children who lived to adulthood. He also, the author discovered, had a relationship with his house slave, Dolly, that resulted in at least two mulatto offspring. The white children inherited a vast fortune. His black son, Edward, although eventually freed, lived his life in hard labor in the Balls' stables, tanning hides and tending horses. (The other child died young.) Not unexpectedly, in the course of his research, Ball found enough miscegenation to fill a Faulkner novel.

N E X T+P A G E: Myths exploded