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Penguin
September 1999
On Sale: August 28, 1999
512 pages
ISBN: 0140275797
EAN: 9780140275797
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon,
England, to Charleston, South Carolina, to take possession
of his inheritance: part of a plantation and twenty slaves.
Elias and his progeny built an American dynasty that lasted
for six generations, acquiring more than twenty Plantations
and enslaving close to four thousand Africans and African
Americans until 1865, when Union troops arrived on the lawns
of the Balls' estates to force emancipation. Edward Ball, a descendant of Elias, has written a nonfiction
American saga that is part history, part journey of
discovery. Ball chronicles the lives of the people who lived
in his ancestors' lands: the violence and the opulence, the
slave uprisings and escapes, the white and black heroes of
the American Revolution, the mulatto children of Ball
masters and "Ball slaves," and the culminating shock of the
Civil War. He reconstructs the genealogies of slave
families -- from the first African captives, through ten
generations, to the present--and travels to Sierra Leone to
visit a prison from which his family once bought workers. Most remarkable of all, Ball has traveled all over the
United States to meet descendants of Ball slaves (who number
between 75,000 and 100,000 living Americans). In a series of
memorable encounters, Ball hears from black families--some of
whom are his blood kin--their stories, passions, and dreams,
and reveals how the effects of slavery live on in black and
white life and memory. Slaves In the Family is a microcosm
of America's defining national experience, a story of people
confronting their inescapable common history.
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