Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998
Reviewed by Amy Brown
Family gossip and legends of his ancestors' antebellum prominence as planters along the Cooper River in South Carolina surrounded Ed Ball's childhood on Sullivan's Island. Growing up in modest circumstances, this minister's son would later learn that the serene island of his youth was once the first point of contact for almost all slaves brought into the Southeast. In the 1700 and 1800s, the waters around Sullivan's Island were the burial grounds for up to half of the human "cargo" that did not survive the middle passage. Those who made it ashore were quarantined in a pestilence house on the island, where many more died. During the process of writing this book, Ball admits that "my childhood idyll has dropped its mask, and I sometimes shovel the graves in my sleep."
Yet his purpose in writing this history of his family's extensive slave holdings is not to offer an apology. He denies any sense of culpability "for the acts of others, long dead" and claims instead a sense of accountability. This meticulously researched story is the product of his drive to account for the intertwined lives of the Ball planters and the slaves who served them and whose bloodlines sometimes merge with his ancestors in the genealogical map that concludes the book.
Ball's calling to give an "account," however, does not include a call to analyze or interpret. Written for a general audience, this book offers a ton of statistics and details about the daily operations of the rice plantations but frustratingly refrains from any larger attempts to come to terms with the history of slavery. With a background in journalism, Ball seems have faith in the facts alone. Stretching out to almost 500 pages, the facts could have used some substantial editing and more narrative shaping.
Those criticisms aside, several of the individual stories Ball has unearthed shine with a spare honesty. His knowledge of the low country and the acuteness of his descriptions of contemporary life in that region of South Carolina will interest anyone who has spent time there. The portraits, sketches, daguerreotypes, and clippings from Ball history alone are worth the price of admission. And Ball's accounts of meeting with some of the descendants of people enslaved by his ancestors (some of them his own distant cousins) and sharing his research with them will be interesting to anyone concerned with interracial dialogues about American history.