Author: By Douglas R. Egerton

Date: SUNDAY, February 22, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Three hundred years later, journalist Edward Ball, the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of Elias (all of the Balls, it seems, are terribly precise scribes), returned to the river from New York City to attend a family reunion. As a rented sightseeing boat pushed up the Cooper River, Edward Ball determined to explore his family's involvement in the peculiar institution. Ignoring his father's early injunction against talking ``about the Negroes,'' as well as older kinsmen's furious objections to dredging up a tangled and unhappy past, Ball began a journey of discovery. The result is a gripping account in which antiquity rests easily beside the present. Vignettes on Carolina history elegantly give way to the author's interviews with aged Ball relations as well as some of the 12,000 descendants of the slaves who labored for the Balls along the Cooper. Historians and the general public alike will find it fascinating reading; there is simply nothing quite like it in print.

A former columnist for The Village Voice, Ball based his study on oral testimony -- corroborated by birth, marriage, and death records in public archives -- as well as on an impressive mastery of the voluminous secondary literature. Elias and his children maintained detailed records, allowing Ball to construct not only an impressive family tree of Elias's progeny, but also family charts for slave matriarchs Angola Amy (purchased by Elias in 1736) and Priscilla (sold away from the English colony of Sierra Leone in 1756). In eloquent testimony to how the American drama reaches into the modern day, a reproduction of a 1768 advertisement placed by Elias Ball Jr. for a runaway bondman named Tom adjoins a triumphant 1996 photograph of Chiemeka Egwu, who is a recent Miss Junior ROTC and a ninth-generation descendant of Tom.

Ball treats all of his subjects with the enormous respect Southerners habitually accord the elder generation, but the extent to which the author quietly allows black and white memories to contradict one another is the greatest strength of this book. ``I think most of the slave owners were responsible, good people,'' one aged relative remembers. ``The Balls would have been very upset if there were any beatings of Negroes,'' she adds. But plantation records betray payments the Balls made to the Charlestown Work House, a brick prison where local authorities administered expert floggings for a small fee. A notice in the South Carolina Gazette tells an even more bloody story. Red Cap, a habitual runaway, was hindered in his attempt to escape the Cooper River region by the fact that ``Two Toes upon each Foot seem as if they were cut off.'' The second Elias Ball, it appears, practiced amputation.

By comparison, the Ball papers reveal little about African rituals such as the wedding ceremonies that took place along the Cooper. Until just after the Revolution, few bondpersons around Charleston -- as it was renamed after American Independence in an attempt to disguise its kingly appellation -- were Christians, and their masters could neither be bothered to understand nor record their family arrangements. But Ball family members stubbornly remember their ancestors practicing sound family values. ``I know that time and time again the Balls refused to separate families,'' 90-year-old Dorothy Dame Gibbs insisted.

Black Carolinians recall their past somewhat differently. ``Interbreeding was something that happened in those days,'' sighed Leon Smalls. ``These guys rode around as if they were kings during the daylight hours, and at night they did their share of slipping around in the slave quarters.'' Sales receipts in the state archives also support the recollection that the Ball patriarchs sold African-Americans away from their spouses and parents.

Memories clash most sharply when each family recalls the War Between the States. Like most Southern planters, William Ball harbored few doubts regarding the loyalty of his bond ``servants,'' even as his records indicated a precipitous decline in harvests on his five plantations. His slaves, impenetrable as always, simply began to labor more slowly. A number of Balls served in the Confederate armies. William's youngest son, another Elias, enlisted at 16 in the Stono Scouts. John Ball wore a shrapnel scar on his cheek throughout his life. William's brother-in-law, Isaac Gibbs, died fighting in Virginia. Shortly before his death, the once-lordly Isaac scribbled a prophetic entry into his journal that foreshadowed the strange new world soon to come: ``Begged for the first time for a meal.''

The final chapter finds the author on Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, whence 10-year-old Priscilla shipped out in 1756, and to where Ann Ball's self-emancipated slave Boston King returned following his escape during the Revolution. Edward Ball's patience won him an interview with Chief Modu, whose royal ancestors sold Priscilla and countless other Africans into the Americas. The chief conceded the involvement of his forefathers in the Atlantic trade, but instructed Ball that the dead watch over and affect, for better or worse, those still walking the earth, yet another reminder that the past lives on in the present. That old Elias Ball and Angola Amy yet command the fates of the descendants of those who labored and loved and warred along the Cooper River is a most satisfying conclusion to this uniquely American of sagas.