In the spring of 1805, Charles Ball was working hard for his
owner and dreamed of purchasing his freedom and that of his wife and children,
who belonged to another man. In
Maryland’s decaying tobacco economy, many slave owners were letting African
Americans purchase their freedom. Ball
was strong, intelligent and of even temper.
He had demonstrated the ability to find faster better ways of doing things.
He was excelling in the position in
which he found himself.
One morning as
he was finishing up his breakfast, he saw through the window his owner talking
emphatically with another white man.
When Ball emerged and began to unhitch his owner’s oxen, he felt someone
behind him. He turned to find himself
surrounded by a dozen white men. One of them announced that Ball now belonged
to him; Ball’s master had sold him. The
man said: “You are my property now. You must go with me to Georgia.” Bound, they began to lead him away. Ball asked if he might see his wife and
children first. The man replied that Ball
could get another wife in Georgia. Thus
began Ball’s harrowing march to servitude in Georgia.
Edward E. Baptist writes of Ball on the journey to Georgia:
Ball’s emotions continued to
oscillate. Yet slowly he brought his
interior more in line with the exterior face that men in coffles tried to
wear. “Time did not reconcile me to my
chains,” Ball recalled, but “it made me familiar with them.” Familiar indeed—at
night, as everyone slept, Ball crawled among his fellow prisoners, handling
each link, looking for the weak one (The
Half has Never Been Told—Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,
p.24).
I found Ball’s words “reconcile” and “familiar” a telling
juxtaposition. Life had allotted to Ball a certain place in the structure of things—a piece of property to be bought and sold like livestock. He was familiar with his chains.
Yet he was not reconciled to them. He knew he was more than a piece of
property. He knew what the world was
telling him about himself was a lie. To
reconcile himself to his chains would have been to believe that lie.
In modern terms we might say Ball was a well self-differentiated
person, meaning, in part, he knew who he was apart from what others around him
were telling him about himself. When he
looked at his reflection in a pond, he did not see what others saw.
Paul writes that we should no longer be conformed to the
pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans
12:2). The Phillips translation puts it
this way: “Don’t let the world around
you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from
within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good,
meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.”
Part of this remolding of our minds is to see ourselves
through the grace-filled eyes of God rather than through the darkened eyes of
others. Our world tells the poor, the marginalized by birth or life or gender or ethnicity,
and the strangers among us that they do not matter as much
as others. They are told their place in
the world is fixed and they ought to accept it with grace.God does not share in this system of categorization. In scripture, God seems to show what has been called a predisposition for the poor, the outsider, and the powerless. The Hebrews were told in Deuteronomy 10:17—19:
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty
and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who
executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers,
providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the
stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The world works hard to tell people who they are. God sees thing a bit differently.Ball was familiar with the world’s assessment, but he did not accept it.
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of New York State
