Writer Edward Ball opens Slaves in the Family with an anecdote: "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.'" Ball himself seemed happy enough to avoid these touchy issues until an invitation to a family reunion in South Carolina piqued his interest in his family's extensive plantation and slave-holding past. He realized that he had a very clear idea of who his white ancestors were--their names, who their children and children's children were, even portraits and photographs--but he had only a murky vision of the black people who supported their livelihood and were such an intimate part of their daily lives; he knew neither their names nor what happened to them and their descendents after they were freed following the Civil War. So he embarked on a journey to uncover the history of the Balls and the black families with whom their lives were inextricably intertwined, as well as the less tangible resonance of slavery in both sets of families. From plantation records, interviews with descendents of both the Balls and their slaves, and travels to Africa and the American South, Ball has constructed a story of the riches and squalor, violence and insurrection--the pride and shame--that make up the history and legacy of slavery in America.


From School Library Journal
YA-A compelling saga, Ball's biographical history of his family stands as a microcosm of the evolution of American racial relations. Meticulously researched, and aided by the fact that the South Carolina Ball families were compulsive record keepers, the story begins with the first Ball to arrive in Charleston in 1698. The family eventually owned more than 20 rice plantations along the Cooper River, businesses made profitable by the work of slaves. In the course of his research, the author learned that his ancestors were not only slave owners, but also that there was a highly successful slave trader company in his background. He was able to trace the offspring of slave women and Ball men (between 75,000 and 100,000 currently living) and locate a number of his own African-American distant cousins. Although records indicate that the author's forebearers were not by any means cruel or vicious owners, his remorse for these facets of his family history is clear. In the course of his research, he visited Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, to see the fortress from which his ancestors loaded terrorized men, women, and children onto slave ships. Their story represents that of many African Americans. This book helps readers to visualize, if not understand, the slave legacy still enmeshed in this country today. Despite its length, this is an important, well-written slice of history that will be of interest to young adults.Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DCCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this National Book Award-winning saga, Ball traces his family back to their first arrival on American shores and also traces the lineage of the slaves his ancestors once owned. He follows their stories through the decades as the families branched out. The Balls grew to be among the most prominent of South Carolina plantation owners; the black people suffered both slavery and the wrenching disruption of emancipation. In between his genealogical and historical explorations, the author interviews living descendants from both groups. Somehow he avoids a liberal angst in favor of a directly honest, matter-of-fact approach to both the subject and the people. The living Ball descendants are generally cautious as they approach the subject; the black families show almost no bitterness, and their stories are varied and intense. As a reader, Ball is subdued and rarely shows emotion; the narrative itself is what gives this presentation its punch. A mandatory acquisition for all audiobook collections.ADon Wismer, Cary Memorial Lib., Wayne, MECopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Los Angeles Times, Benjamin Schwarz
Ball ... has an interesting story to tell, but he is probably not the right one to tell it, because his need to apologize for his family's misdeeds keeps him from examining their history in a clear-eyed way.


From AudioFile
To listeners' good fortune, author Edward Ball narrates as well as many top professionals. His delivery of this fascinating volume, although abridged, offers rewards that the printed version does not. Ball belongs to Southern gentility, a family ensconced in South Carolina since colonial times and once slave-owning plantation farmers. Driven partly by morbid fascination, he traces the descendants of his family's slaves, some of whom turn out to be kin. His account of his search and discoveries is part history, part detective story focusing on the human consequences of "the peculiar institution." All this another reader could have given us with equal clarity and aplomb, except for one thing. In his otherwise Apollonian delivery, Ball gives us the tone of voice, the expressive cadences of his interviewees, thus rendering subtleties of attitude he alone can give us authoritatively--and only in the telling, not the writing. Director Karen Fillman deserves kudos, too, for helping her reader do justice to this true tale with intimacy and taste. Y.R. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Journalist Ball conceived the idea to recount the family histories of his plantation-owning ancestors and, with more difficulty due to the paucity of records, the people they owned. This resulting microcosm of America's original sin of slavery is an innovative package of historical narrative and oral history and even modern reconciliation. In upholding their pillar in the structure of slavery, the Ball clan, whose rice-growing lands lay upriver of Charleston, weren't the cruelest of masters, or so said the family stories. This sentimental, fuzzy memory is belied by Ball's hard look at records stretching from the founding of the clan's wealth in 1698 to its end with the arrival of Union troops in 1865. In between, the author fascinatingly relates the Balls' grim involvement with slavery, such as advertising for runaways or riding the night patrol to catch them, and their dread of uprisings, as in the famous Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822. The mirror image of the Ball genealogy is that of the people they owned, and the author richly recounts the journeys and conversations he undertook to connect people named on the Ball slave lists with their living descendants. A multilevel effort to understand the past of slavery and its echo in the present, this is an informative, ruminative, and inspirational page-turner. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
A journalist's exhaustively researched, intensely personal quest confronts the legacy of slavery connecting his South Carolina family and the people they enslaved. Ball's mission, in reckoning with a past for which he feels accountable, if not responsible, is twofold: explore the story of his white slave-owning ancestors and seek out descendants of the people they bought and sold. The former Village Voice columnist displays his journalistic moxie wading through the voluminous written record (10,000 pages of family papers spanning four centuries, National Archives documents, census reports, and more) to flesh out the family character and track down slave descendants. Some were unaware of their ancestry. Others, like Emily Marie Frayer, whose parents were enslaved at Limerick, one of a dozen Ball plantations in the Charleston area, tapped a rich oral history that supplements Ball's research. Consumed with the question of how slavery shaped the identity of both black and white families, he struggles to divine his ancestors' attitude toward slaves, sifting conflicting evidence that suggests they were both kind masters and cruel taskmasters. He gets more grief from his own family than from blacks, who view his earnest apologies as largely irrelevant-- though one man credits Ball with being ``man enough'' to try. ``There is nothing I can do to give back for the pain that my family caused your family,'' he tells Frayer, during an emotional trip to her birthplace. But in trying to make amends, he links several families (through Ball family papers recording slave purchases) to their African ancestry--a rare gift that, while falling short of reparation, does establish a vital entre to their past. 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. (First serial to the New Yorker) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Slaves in the Family is the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for nonfiction and hailed by The New Yorker as "a brilliant blend of archival research and oral history." First-time author and award-winning journalist Edward Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience.

Author Edward Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors owned 25 rice plantations, worked by nearly 4,000 slaves. In Slaves in the Family, he confronts his past -- scouring family archives, parish records, telephone directories, and historical-society collections. Ball's fact-finding took him slogging not only down the back roads of Carolina's low country but also to West Africa to meet the descendants of the traders who sold slaves to the family.

Through meticulous research and by interviewing scattered relatives, Ball contacted some 100,000 African-Americans living in the U.S. today who are all descendants of Ball slaves. In intimate conversations with them, he garnered information, hard words, and devastating family stories of precisely what it means to be enslaved. He found that the family plantation owners were far from benevolent patriarchs; instead there is a dark history of exploitation, interbreeding, and extreme violence against the slaves.

Slaves in the Family is an extraordinary and poignant account of interwoven lives and one man's effort to come to terms with his disturbing family legacy and his nation's past.

SYNOPSIS

A former Village Voice columnist journeys into his family's slave-owning past, telling the story of black and white families who lived side by side for five generations.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charlotte Painter

Everyone should read and learn from this luminous book. -- San Francisco Sunday Examiner

New Yorker

Brilliant.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Poignant.

School Library Journal

A compelling saga, Ball's biographical history of his family stands as a microcosm of the evolution of American racial relations. Meticulously researched, and aided by the fact that the South Carolina Ball families were compulsive record keepers, the story begins with the first Ball to arrive in Charleston in 1698. The family eventually owned more than 20 rice plantations along the Cooper River, businesses made profitable by the work of slaves. In the course of his research, the author learned that his ancestors were not only slave owners, but also that there was a highly successful slave trader company in his background. He was able to trace the offspring of slave women and Ball men (between 75,000 and 100,000 currently living) and locate a number of his own African-American distant cousins. Although records indicate that the author's forebearers were not by any means cruel or vicious owners, his remorse for these facets of his family history is clear. In the course of his research, he visited Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, to see the fortress from which his ancestors loaded terrorized men, women, and children onto slave ships. Their story represents that of many African- Americans. This book helps readers to visualize, if not understand, the slave legacy still enmeshed in this country today. Despite its length, this is an important, well-written slice of history that will be of interest to young adults. -- Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DC

Drew Gilpin Faust

Powerful....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. -- The New York Times Book Review Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

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