Slaves in the Family

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Honest exploration, very well done submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 23, 2017, 3:43pm This excellent book was written by the descendent of a slave-owning family (Ball counts that his family owned 4,000 slaves over the history of their dynasty) who decided to explore the breadth and depth of his family's history, slavery in South Carolina, and what happened to the descendants of the people his family once owned. He is honest about the reception this journey received among his White relatives and among the Black families he was able to locate. He matches his family's prodigious record keeping with oral histories and is often able to make direct connections, once even telling a story from opposite sides of the same mirror.

This book is an honest exploration of one slice of the United States' history of enslaving human beings, from villages in Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean, into auction houses, being purchased and named, and working on plantations from before the American Revolution until the Civil War (and what each of these wars meant to both wealthy landowners and enslaved people hoping for freedom). It looks at the freedom granted by the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and what has happened for descendants of both the Ball family and those freed who had been owned by them. It is both intensely personal, in that we get to know intimately the stories of individuals in these families, and global, in that the forces playing out on the Ball plantations were the same as those playing out all across the slave-owning United States (and to be clear, that includes the North as they had slaves officially until (variously) the mid-1780's, but really many Northern states didn't end slavery until the 1840's).

I was thoroughly drawn in to Ball's storytelling, and thought he did a great job balancing general U.S. history with family history, past with present, and his story with others'. This is a great book for this moment in our national dialogue as our nation continues to struggle with our difficult past, and particularly with White America's desire to say, "Let's leave it in the past," "It was my ancestors and not me," and "I'm not responsible for what others did." This book challenges those ideas, offering Ball's idea that he is accountable for his family's actions, even if he is not responsible, and asking forgiveness of those he encounters.

There is MUCH to learn in this book, whoever you are. I invite you on the journey.