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From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1998
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 (10,000 pages of family papers spanning four centuries, National Archives documents, census reports, and more) 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, while falling short of reparation, does establish a vital entre 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 America's most shameful institution. Together, their searing, soul-searching grappling with past sins strikes deep at the heart of the country's enduring racial division. (First serial to the New Yorker) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

Black history month this year amplified the campaign to demote the Confederate flag to the status of just another historical banner. When this flag finally goes, it will go kicking and screaming, its X motif lingering in the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi, embraced by white supremist groups, intractably associated with revered Civil War leaders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. It would surprise the hell out of me if the Confederate flag were missed by any black American. The Southern confederacy, those states which fought and lost the civil war, were in essence fighting for the right to preserve a way of life that survived on the ownership of other human beings. Focusing on this symbol of the old south, with its courtly lifestyle propped up by oppression, we almost forget that the plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas were not the only places supported by slave labor. It prevailed from the founding of the United States, even in the north.

A television mini-series last month brought us the story of Sally Hemmings, who was both property and a blood in-law to Thomas Jefferson. She bore him three children. His attempts to champion the banishment of slavery in the new nation were intellectual... the effort was quickly abandoned as it alienated the southern states they were trying to unify with the northern states. He conceded the cause for a fight he could win, and yet kept his slaves at his estate at Monticello.

In one scene, Sally Hemming's mother shows a family quilt with figures for each family member: her six children by her white owner, and her mother's children by her mother's white owner, and her daughter Sally's three children by their white owner Thomas Jefferson, several who could easily pass for white themselves. Even carefully measured levels of whiteness, using terms like "octoroon" and "quadroon", did not place a slave within jumping distance of crossing the line to being officially white. They could only be incrementally less black. It's like the conceptual math example where the frog jumps half the remaining distance toward a wall... even with an infinite number of jumps times a million, the frog will never reach the wall. The gap may become smaller, but the gap never goes away.

Until only recently, to try and bridge that mathmatical tolerance and unilaterally declare yourself "close enough" to white, was to break the law. "You must have noticed by now," said a Dupont to his younger relative in the Hemmings biography, "that the plantation is crawling with white slaves." Appearances may deceive, but bloodline had the final word. And so fathers sold their own children like livestock, families sorted and divided according to their utility, a house worker here, a field laborer there. The red-haired oldest son of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson escaped to the wilderness of Ohio in order to re-create himself as a free white man. He risked being executed as a runaway. Was it worse to not know your heritage at all, or to know it in such detail that you fully understand the injustice you were born into?

It's difficult to determine how harshly one should judge Thomas Jefferson, an anti-slavery activist who nonetheless owned slaves. The customs and pressures then are not ours today. Or are they? From the safe distance of our era, we can confidently declare that we could never have been oppressors, but what if everyone else was doing it? What if my plantation couldn't couldn't survive without slave labor? Is it less immoral to be a benevolent slave owner?

I certainly had to wonder if a residual sense of entitlement lingers in my genetic memory when I started reading a record I found during some genealogical research a few years back.

"The Inventory of the Estate of Captain Daniel Harris" was written upon his death in Connecticut in 1735. Harris was born second of ten children in 1653 and lived in Middletown, Connecticut his entire life, probably farming when he wasn't soldiering. His estate, when he died, consisted of land, buildings, household goods, personal belongings and livestock. A partial list of livestock included four sheep valued at 10 pounds, a horse at four, two oxen at 10, a cow at 3 pounds 10 shillings, and... "The negro man mingo at 30 pounds."

My first reaction was that it was something of a relief that the slave was at least valued more than most of the livestock combined; that if they insisted on putting a price tag on another human's life, it was a high one. Then I wondered: is this the kind of rationale that Jefferson entertained as his own son fled for his very life? Did this flattering markup console him at all as his financial ruin forced him to watch his own children standing naked on an auction block, sold to the highest bidder? Would a more affordable price tag have enabled him to keep some of them with him, or buy their freedom, or buy him the choice to select their next owner?

I always wondered what happened to The negro man mingo, valued at 30 pounds. Was he also valued for his character? Were his own Sunday waistcoat and good hat part of his price? Was he purchased by a neighbor or was he sold far from his home of Middletown? Did he ever have a chance to marry, or learn to read? And if he ever had children of his own, was he happy at their arrival, or tormented knowing that they, too, would be someday listed after the oxen and the sheep in the inventory another man's estate?

The more she learns, the more author Leslie Strom is sure she isn't done with this topic yet.