SUTURING THE WOUNDS

Edward Ball drives along Sullivan’s Island, a spit of beach across the bay from Charleston, S.C., savoring his childhood. There is the clapboard house where he lived until he was 12. Here is the elementary school. “Had my first dance with a girl there,” he says. The reverie ends when Ball walks to the end of a pier where the sulfur smell of marsh grass rises, as rank as the tale he unspools. An estimated 40% of American slaves arrived first at this spot. Confused, terrified, usually sick, they spent two weeks quarantined in “pest houses” or onboard ship. Those who got better sailed on to Charleston and bondage. Those who didn’t turned the island into a mass grave. “This ground is soaked in blood,” says Ball.

Today there is no marker, no mention of any of this on Sullivan’s Island–just beach homes and speedboats bobbing in the sun. “The reason people are afraid to talk about slavery is the terrible truth of someplace like this,” says Ball. He learned of the pest houses while writing Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), his chronicle of his slave-owning family and the blacks they held. “Look at this,” he sighs. “The story has absolutely been erased.”

And so it has been, for years–white guilt and black pain colluding to forget. But periodically the zeitgeist erupts with flashbacks to a tragedy whose costs are still exacted on the street corners of America, at water coolers, in classrooms, along Sunday pews. Now is such a time. Last month in New Orleans, the name of George Washington, a former slave owner, was removed from a school. This week Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s epic about a famous 1839 slave revolt, premieres. Currently in repertory at the Chicago Lyric Opera is Anthony Davis’ opera, also titled Amistad.

And there is a spate of new books focused on slaves and enslavers. Velma Maia Thomas offers Lest We Forget (Crown; $29.95), an interactive children’s book serious enough for parents. Readers remove slave sale receipts from envelopes and pull back a paper ship hatch to find slaves stacked like cordwood. British historian Hugh Thomas (no relation) has published The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster; $37.50). Tracking the barter of Africans from 1440 to 1870, Thomas ranges through Europe, Arabia, Africa and the Americas. As societies spin and tug at one another like a warped solar system, a sad message emerges: no hand is clean. Thomas notes that the true voice of the slave, usually unable to record his own history, is missing. The best substitute, he surmises, is a writer’s imagination. “In the end, the novelist beats the historian at his own game,” he concludes.

Perhaps–unless that historian is Ed Ball. His clan stretches back to Englishman Elias (“Red Cap”) Ball, who came to Carolina in 1698 for his inheritance of 740 acres and 25 slaves. His descendants would ultimately rule 25 plantations and 4,000 slaves. As a child, Ed Ball heard tales of war heroes and beautiful plantations; slaves were rarely mentioned. Ball’s father once quipped about matters not to be discussed: “Religion, sex, death, money–and the Negroes.” When slavery did come up, two assertions were made as God’s truth: We were good to our Negroes. There was no miscegenation.

Unconvinced, Ball, 39, a journalist, set out three years ago to discover what had happened to those slaves, “to bring the stories of the obscure side by side with the powerful, as they had been in life.” He found, of course, violence and the mixing of black blood with white. But the voices rising from letters, family papers and the tea-colored pages of “blanket books”–records of provisions given to slaves–told uglier truths. One Ball ancestor, Henry Laurens, the first president of the Continental Congress, was also the largest slave trader in America.

Many in Ball’s family protested the project. “You’re going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!” shrieked one cousin. Blacks met Ball with suspicion, sometimes with anger. “The name Ball meant enemy,” says Charlotte Dunn, whose rebel slave great-grandmother barely escaped murderous Ball pursuers. Blacks, left with few documents or oral information, can rarely trace their lineage more than a few generations. Ball’s discoveries took them back to first contact. The exchange was painful, with stories of stolen 10-year-olds or slaves beaten or killed. “I came bearing terrible tales,” Ball sighs.

At first Dunn’s family would let Ball only onto the porch; he earned his way back to the kitchen table. Now “he’s family,” says Dunn, holding yellow roses sent by Ball after surgery. Extraordinary words in a Charleston heavy with the history she and Ball share. Even more extraordinary are the words Ball spoke to Dunn and her mother Katie Roper on a segment of Oprah never televised. “Words are not enough. But I’m sorry,” he said. “I want to ask your forgiveness.”

The apology, Ball’s second, doesn’t sit well with all members of his family. “Edward does not speak for me,” says cousin Jeff Ball, who still wishes Ed well with the book. The apology, he says, doesn’t “mean anything.” Perhaps it doesn’t. An apology doesn’t take Tenah, Dunn’s forebear, back to Africa. It doesn’t change the disparate lives Dunn and Ed lead. But apology, she says, was never the point; what mattered was the accountability the apology symbolized: “I didn’t go into this looking for a dollar put on the table. I was looking for acknowledgment of what happened.”

Since Ball began his work, other whites have shown up at the South Carolina Historical Society, seeking to make similar connections. Filmmaker Macky Alston, who sought Ball’s advice, won the Sundance Freedom of Expression award this year for Family Name, a documentary of his search for descendants of Alston slaves. Another Ball convert is Allen Hutcheson, 24, a descendant of the man believed to be the model for Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. “We have to find these people,” he says of his family’s former slaves. “You have to cut the wound open to get the poison out,” agrees Ball. “I believe in the power of truth telling. I’ve seen it suture that wound.”