Slaves in the Family
by Edward Ball
Summary
Edward Ball grew up on the family joke, never talk about the slaves, and Slaves in the Family is the book he wrote by breaking the rule. The Balls were rice planters on the Cooper River above Charleston for a hundred and sixty seven years, among the grandest dynasties of the South Carolina low country, and their unusually complete plantation records preserved what most slaveholding families destroyed: the names, purchases, births, and punishments of close to four thousand enslaved people. Ball worked through all of it, and then did the thing that makes the book singular, tracking down the descendants, Black and white, and sitting with them, tape recorder running, to ask what the plantations had left in living memory. The result braids three strands: the family history, told without the moonlight, from the founding slaver Elias Ball through the rice fortune to emancipation and decline; the reconstructed lives of the enslaved families, followed across generations and, after freedom, across the country; and the present tense encounters, wary, generous, sometimes electric, including with cousins descended from his ancestors' unacknowledged children by enslaved women. Ball refuses both absolution and theatrical guilt, offering instead accounting, the plain accumulation of what was done and who carried it, and the meetings model a national conversation that mostly has not happened. The book won the 1998 National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a bestseller, and it opened the door through which a generation of family reckonings with slavery, in memoirs, universities, and churches, has since walked.
Historical Context & Significance
The book appeared in 1998, as America began its argument over apologies and reparations for slavery, and Ball's method, one family auditing itself in public, gave the abstract debate a working example; the 1998 National Book Award amplified it into a national event, covered as news in Charleston itself. The Ball family papers he used are among the richest plantation archives anywhere, which is why the enslaved could be traced at all, a bitter irony the book acknowledges. Descendant research of the kind he pioneered has since become an institution, from university slavery commissions to the genealogy of Black families broken on exactly such records, and Ball himself continued the audit in later books, tracing his family's DNA in The Genetic Strand and a Klansman ancestor in Life of a Klansman.