Interviews
On Wednesday, February 3rd, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Edward Ball to discuss SLAVES IN THE FAMILY.
Moderator: Thanks for joining us this evening, Edward Ball. It is an honor for us to be chatting with one of the 1998 National Book Award winners. How are you this evening?
Edward Ball: I am very well, thanks. Pleasure to be here.
Ellen Wood from Portland, ME: What was the original inspiration behind SLAVES IN THE FAMILY? How did the book evolve once you started writing?
Edward Ball: I was raised in the South but settled in New York and became a journalist. The stories I heard as a child from my father about the Ball plantations rattled in my mind even as I had become a Yankee. One year I received an invitation to a Ball family reunion to be held in Charleston, and I attended. That was the beginning of my book. It took three years to write it, and at the start I thought it would be mostly about the descendants of the Ball slaves and Ball plantation owners, but it evolved into a book that is half history -- in other words, about the black and white people on the plantations -- and half journalism, about the living legacy of the slave days.
Rex from Elizabeth City: How many of your black relatives were you able to locate? After the book was published, did more contact you?
Edward Ball: I heard from half a dozen families while doing research that their ancestors included some of my ancestors, but I confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt using written records, photographic evidence, and circumstantial evidence that two of the families were distant cousins. The others might be but I wasn't able to find enough evidence to stand up in a court, so to speak. Each of the families I found, of course, might have 25 to 75 people in it, and of them I met just a handful. It is small step, but it has been worthwhile. A few more have contacted me since the book was published.
Berry Marshall from Baltimore, MD: I also share your heritage, since my paternal great-grandparents were slave owners in Charleston. Your beautiful book gets to the essence of slavery and what it did to both the enslaved and their owners in a way that many of Colonial Williamsburg's reenactments of 18th-century Virginia slavery do. Are you aware of these programs? And if so, what do you think of them?
Edward Ball: I have seen some of the "living history" portrayals of enslaved people at Williamsburg, and depending on the actor, I think that they are strong and worthwhile. Of course, there is the danger that history becomes another Disney entertainment, but for large numbers of people, reenactments are the most compelling image they have of what the plantation society was like.
Claire Peters from Mississippi: You had to be somewhat of a detective to write SLAVES IN THE FAMILY. What was the most reliable way of tracking down Ball descendants?
Edward Ball: I started with oral tradition from black families, and I verified their connection to the Ball plantations by linking the surnames of their ancestors during Reconstruction to families who had not yet gotten surnames on the Ball plantations. The way to do this is to compare the family groups at the end of the Civil War in the plantation account books to family groups in the first federal census after the war, 1870, where the same households appear, now with surnames.
Connie Taylor from Richmond, CA: Are some of your relatives still angry with you for writing SLAVES IN THE FAMILY? How do they feel about your National Book Award?
Edward Ball: I would describe our family as bruised but healing. Some relatives, when my book was published, were close to being checked into the cardiac unit. But blood pressure has gone down in our clan. I think that none of us, including myself, have actually liked the experience of coming out as a slave-owning family, with all the necessary honesty and admissions that that has entailed. The National Book Award has soothed our nerves and helped give my work credibility among my kin, and perhaps among other former slave-owning families like mine.
Greg from Petersburg: Did you experience any sort of personal transformation during the writing of this book? I would think that some of the things that you discovered about your family would lend itself to introspection.
Edward Ball: I feel better now than when I started. I know better who I am, and I have tried to incorporate my family's legacy into my sense of self, whereas previously, like tens of millions of Americans, I shunned the hard part of our story -- the violence, the sexual exploitation, the purchase and sale of children -- preferring to believe these had nothing to do with me. Acknowledging even the worst things is liberating.
Emily from Williamsburg, VA: Your book is fascinating and is a good companion to Phil Morgan's work on slavery in the Chesapeake and South Carolina. Are you familiar with Morgan's book, SLAVE COUNTERPOINT, and have you two met and discussed your similar topic?
Edward Ball: I know Phil Morgan but haven't seen him in a couple years. He is a credentialed scholar whose work I drew on in writing SLAVES IN THE FAMILY. He manages to describe the everyday lives of people who lived in anonymity and in suffocating circumstances in a way that gives them the autonomy and social role they deserve in our memory.
Ken from Washington, D.C.: Why do you think there weren't more slave uprisings on the Ball plantations?
Edward Ball: I counted three or perhaps four plots that nearly erupted on the Ball lands. They decreased in frequency with each generation in part because people were born into slavery and knew nothing else. Acts of sabotage and running away -- both done by individuals, not groups -- seem to replace schemes for mass uprisings as time passed. The Ball slaves can not be said to have been "content," but perhaps they recognized the futility of their situation.
Zoe from Kansas: I understand that your research took you to West Africa. What kind of reception did you find there?
Edward Ball: I identified three families in Sierra Leone, a country of four million that is now in civil war, whose ancestors had been slave sellers and who almost certainly had a connection to the Ball plantations via their family business. Each family was among the elite of the country, and each was defensive about my questions concerning their legacy as slave catchers, and yet each tried honestly to reckon with the pointed questions I brought, welcoming me into their houses and sharing their stories, some reaching back two centuries, about their involvement in the slave trade. It was an important exercise, but much of West Africa is unprepared to acknowledge any complicity in the world's slave traffic.
Dale from Springfield, Ohio: Did you have any resistance from the black or white side of the Ball family in doing this work?
Edward Ball: I did, and it was impossible to predict when it would come. Not all black people feel the same about the legacy of slavery, and not all descendants of slave owners feel one way. Sometimes I touched off anger that erupted like a land mine. If this happened, then after two or three attempts to reach through the resistance failed, then I left people alone.
Rachel from Norwalk, OH: How does one even begin to apologize for slavery? How did you apologize to the descendants?
Edward Ball: It happened very naturally in the course of getting to know two families while writing this book. I did not apologize to each of the families that I met, because this would have been artificial and disingenuous. With two families, however, we knew enough about each other and had developed a sufficient emotional bond that it seemed natural and appropriate. I apologized just as anyone would ask for forgiveness for a terrible wrong. I said how deeply sorry I was for the damage and hurt that my family had caused their family, and I asked their forgiveness. I also said that I knew words were not enough, that they were merely a bandage on a deep wound. And yet words might be the start of a process of reconciliation between our families. That was at least my small hope.
Dennis from Atlanta: How can we start a real conversation on race and racial disparity in this country? And in your opinion, Mr. Ball, because of the legacy of slavery, will American ever be a harmonious melting pot?
Edward Ball: My pessimistic "night thoughts" are that what happened between black folks and white was so nightmarish that we will not have a national reconciliation of any honesty in the next couple of generations. But I have seen person-to-person and family-to-family healing, and I think that this grassroots repair is powerful and within reach for most people. Just as Jews are aware of the shadow of the Holocaust in their lives, and just as black people are made aware of the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow in their lives, we as white people have to try to think of ourselves as members of a race and acknowledge what we have done collectively. Individual acts of reconciliation between white folks and black are the most powerful and the best we have to work with.
Mark from Pittsburg: How does it feel to join the elite group of National Book Award winners -- with your first book? Is it intimidating? Daunting?
Edward Ball: Funny, I don't feel elite, as in riding around in a convertible, but of course, it is gratifying, especially when writers spend three-plus years, as I did, on one book, usually without any guarantee of recognition. After the National Book Award, the phone rang for a month, then it quieted. I am grateful to the National Book Foundation for their unexpected and flattering decision.
Ramone from New York: What was one of the most surprising things that you uncovered when researching this book?
Edward Ball: I was surprised to learn that the most esteemed ancestor in our family tree, a man called Henry Laurens, who was president of the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution and one of the delegates in the peace-treaty negotiations in Paris with the British, was not what he appeared to be. Known to all of us as a successful merchant, Laurens was the largest slave importer in British North America, and his fortune and social position were built upon the purchase and sale of more than 10,000 people in the years before the Revolutionary War. Although this may appear to be a personal family story, it is not unlike the legacies of other founding fathers. I think we have to paint a picture of our national identity that is both tragic and heroic, leaving in all the hard parts.
Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Edward Ball, and congratulations on the National Book Award! It's truly been a pleasure having you with us. Before you go, do you have any closing comments for your online audience?
Edward Ball: Thank you for the invitation. For everyone out there -- throw open the family closet and drag all the skeletons into the sunlight. It will help everybody.
