WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Winner of The Southern Book Award for Best Nonfiction

Slaves in the Family is the story of one man's exploration of his family's slave-owning past and his search for descendants of the people his ancestors kept as slaves.

In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon, England, to Charleston, South Carolina, to take possession of his inheritance: part of a plantation of twenty slaves. Elias and his progeny built an American dynasty that lasted for six generations, acquiring more than twenty plantations along the Cooper River near Charleston, selling rice known as Carolina Gold, and enslaving close to four thousand Africans and African Americans until 1865, when Union troops arrived on the lawns of the Balls' estates to force emancipation. Edward Ball, a descendant of Elias, has written a nonfiction American saga that is part history, part journey of discovery. This is the story of black and white families who have lived side by side through three hundred years, a tale of everyday people who face their vexed inheritance together. Ball chronicles the lives of people who lived on his ancestors' lands: the violence and the opulence, the slave uprisings and escapes, the white and black heroes of the American Revolution, the mulatto children of Ball masters and "Ball slaves," and the culminating shock of the Civil War. He reconstructs the genealogies of slave families—from the first African captives, through ten generations, to the present— and travels to Sierra Leone to visit a prison from which his family once bought workers.

~Includes a reader’s guide. ~

“Ball contributes to ‘at least partly’ reclaiming the humanity slavery worked to obliterate. He reminds us that slavery was not just about economics or politics or even abstract questions of morality, but most essentially about the millions of human beings imprisoned within its chains.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Ball is a first-rate scholar-journalist....Outside Faulkner, it will be hard to find a more poignant, powerful account of a white man struggling with his and his nation’s past.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution

 
WINNER 1998 - National Book Awards

 
Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, graduated from Brown University, and was a columnist for The Village Voice. This is his first book.