The Sins of the Past

The legacy of black oppression does not end with liberation and freedom, as Edward Ball, a descendant of slave owners, discovers when he sets out on a journey to discover the true history of his family and finds a way to understand how the past and his ancestry connect him to the oppressed. Using the document archives of his family as a starting point, he begins a personal quest that takes him from the descendants of slaveholders to the descendants of slaves in an attempt to understand and transcribe an intimate corner of the slavery experience.

As former colonial powers attempt to rewrite their colonial pasts, and as the nations of Europe attempt to collectively forget the reality of the Holocaust, Ball's family too attempt to whitewash (no pun intended) the past. Like the descendants of modern-day Germans and the nations of oppressor countries, Ball's search is marked by a certain frustration: a sense that he has been deprived of an important history that he needs to recapture and understand.

This frustration drives him from meeting to meeting of organizations of diverse natures and goals, to seek out the descendants of the slaves his family once owned, at their homes, and finally visit Africa itself. As the personal narratives of numerous slaves are reeled off and the bloody history is recounted, "Slaves in the Family" shifts from personal narrative to an exercise in memory. In the remembrance of families and individuals who were thought of as property, who were used as property, beaten as property, killed as property, bought, sold and even occasionally married as property, the reader comes in contact with the ordinary people whose lives comprise a historical tragedy.

Although Ball's prose is only adequate and his writing abilities do not nearly approach the level his material requires, it is also marked by the sincerity of a man searching for the truth. As the narrative progresses, the title "Slaves in the Family" comes to mean more than a questionable pun, but rather the author's idea that there exists a link between the oppressor and the oppressed. Whether in the form of American slave owners, African slave sellers, or the African-American slaves whose identities were defined by these dual oppressions, all are brought together by a common darkness in their pasts. A darkness that can never be eliminated, but perhaps someday understood, and most importantly… remembered.