Slaves in the Family

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 504, [2] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Sources. Notes. Index. Signed by author. DJ has minor edge wear and soiling. Edward Ball is an American author with six books of history and biography. Ball is best known for books that explore race through family stories, including Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (2020) and Slaves in the Family (1998). Edward Ball was born in 1958 in Savannah, Georgia to a religious, southern family. He is a son of Episcopal priest Theodore Ball and Janet Rowley Ball, a bookkeeper. Ball grew up in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as his family moved following his father's church assignments. Edward Ball received a B.A. from Brown University in 1982 and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1984. Slaves in the Family is a biographical historical account written by Edward Ball, published in 1998. The book is an account of the author's family origins, dating back to when they first arrived in America. It also outlines the lineage of the slaves long ago owned by his ancestors. Ball follows the stories of these people over many years as the families dispersed. Over time, the family earned the reputation as "the most prominent of South Carolina plantation owners." The author explores genealogy and history, via interviewing descendants from both groups. Stories from the black families are intense and varied, practically lacking in any kind of bitterness. The book depicts his family as being not the cruelest of slave owners. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998. Derived from a Kirkus review: 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 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 does establish a vital entree 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 institution of slavery in America. Together, their searing, soul-searching grappling with the past strikes deep at the heart of the country's enduring racial division.