Purchase
SLAVES IN THE FAMILY
By: Edward Ball
Penguin
September 1999
On Sale: August 28, 1999
512 pages
ISBN: 0140275797
EAN: 9780140275797
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
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.
 Media BuzzNews and Notes - June 24, 2008
Talk of the Nation - February 27, 2007
| 
© 2003-2026