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FSG's 'Slaves' Catches Fire
Bob Summer -- 1/26/98
Portrait of plantation family and the descendants of its human chattel gets large print run, paperback offer
Unlike the sporadic start of the national dialogue on race that President Clinton began urging last year, Farrar, Straus &Giroux has had no problem getting its leading nonfiction title for spring, Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, off the ground. Indeed, the trade and media buzz that began intensifying in the fall in anticipation of February's African American History Month has not only prompted a steadily upward revision in plans for an opening print run and ad/promo budget.

Cited by editor-in-chief Jonathan Galassi as "unprecedented" and "a microcosm of race relations in America," Ball's episodic chronicle of his dynastic family of South Carolina rice planters and the descendants of the nearly 4000 slaves it owned between 1698 and 1865 was projected for a 50,000 first printing back in September.

At that time, though, the 39-year-old Brown graduate and former Village Voice culture writer was still finalizing the manuscript for a Herculean research project that grew out of a 1994 NPR documentary. During the course of the book's production the print order rose to 60,000 in December, with a $65,000 ad/promo budget, which since then has nearly doubled to $125,000, according to FSG publicity director Jeff Seroy.

Key to the escalation in FSG hopes was a mid-December feature in Time magazine on slavery's legacy, which prominently included Ball and his book. And no doubt more buzz will accrue when the New Yorker is expected to run a 10,000-word excerpt this month.

Naturally, interest in paperback rights is also high. Michael Hathaway, FSG sub rights director, has in hand a $350,000 preemptive floor offer, while book club rights, at an auction he says went through many rounds, were won by Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club/History Book Club. And in England, where the first Ball to arrive in colonial South Carolina 300 years ago hailed from, Penguin UK paid a hefty L100,000.

Oprah and Bryant Gumbel have joined in on the excitement, too -- the former in a Martin Luther King birthday segment with Ball and some of the descendants of his family's slaves, the latter with a similar segment, tentatively scheduled for a January, Private Eye with Bryant Gumbel. Additional press coverage, though, seems likely to result from a national tour Seroy is still organizing, now numbering 18 cities, set to begin in Charleston on Feb. 19 at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, with local bookseller Chapter Two handling sales. "I'd like to think it's a first to have a white author's tour built on crossing the racial retail divide," notes Seroy.

Understandably the Balls traditionally have been reluctant to face the darker side of their past. "The Negr s," admonished Ball's late father, an Episcopalian priest, "are among the topics we don't talk about." Nonetheless, contrary to family lore upholding the Balls as benevolent slave owners, Ball, while finding confirmation that some in fact were, also found ample evidence of harsh treatment amidst occasional miscegenation.

The veil of secrecy covering hints of interracial breeding within the family began unraveling for Ball during his research. Fortunately his ancestors were meticulous record keepers, attested to by a wealth of documentation in collections of Ball family papers at four southern institutions. A diligent search through the collections' slave and post-Civil War sharecropping records was buttressed by results of genealogical searches he placed in African American newspapers or informational leads tracked down otherwise, and verified from data at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington.

"After freedom, the former Ball slaves made a distinct community," he points out, "but 50 years later, more married outside their old circle, half migrated to the North, and in other ways they came apart as a discrete society." By 2000, he extrapolates, there'll be at least 75,000 living descendants of Ball slaves in the United States, and by a slightly generous guess, even more-100,000.

Their history, Ball thinks, is bound to his. "I thought we should meet, share our recollections, feelings, and drams, and make the story whole," he adds. "The plantation heritage was not `ours' like a piece of family property, and not `theirs,' belonging to black families, but a shared history. The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave owners are forever linked."
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