Quotes from Edward Ball

The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the "I," prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors

It is a performance of blackness that whites want, not the real life of being black. They still want it, I think.

stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge—a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other.

Ecclesiastes 1:15, "The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite.

Marriage between cousins was common in the planter families—rather, it was expected.

The names of families are the front doors of history.

White supremacy is not a marginal ideology. It is the early build of the country. It is a foundation on which the social edifice rises, bedrock of institutions. White supremacy also lies on the floor of our minds. Whiteness is not a deformation of thought, but a kind of thought itself.

More than six out of ten runaways from the Balls and their peers had been born in Africa.

Family memory flows more completely through women. It is the women who learn much of the lore and who convey it to the young. Men forget the past in all its fleshiness and select which parts best fit into their lives.

Aunt Maud was a schoolteacher during her working life. For forty years she taught in the white public schools in New Orleans. English was her subject, mainly, and in retirement, genealogy became her vocation. She was quiet and inward. Maud never married, she had no children. Our ancestors were her offspring.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

The topic of slavery is like an electric fence. Touch it and people will react.

It's not a common thing for a Southern white family to go out and seek their black cousins.

There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.