Priscilla’s Legacy: A story of family, fate and faith

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) — As we celebrate Black History Month, News 2’s Carolyn Murray takes a look at a remarkable story of a woman connected to her family history by a man whose ancestors owned the plantation some of the women’s family lived on.

The woman, Thomalind Martin Polite, says her name combines the names of her grandparents, Thomas and Rosalind. Thomalind’s appreciation for her family history was recently heightened when a stranger knocked on the door of her family home.

“When I was 19 years old, Ed Ball came to the home and presented my family documentation in his research of the family’s plantation,” Thomalind said.

Ball was an author and researcher who traced the Martins’ family history back nearly 250 years.

He showed them a paper trail of a young girl, 10, who was kidnapped from Sierra Leone and brought to South Carolina. She was purchased by Ball’s family and given the name Priscilla.

Priscilla later became Thomalind’s seventh-generation grandmother, Thomalind explained. She also said her father, Thomas Martin, had been working on a family tree, and that Ball’s discovery was stunning and welcomed.

“My dad was elated – he was at a loss for words because he had also been trying to trace our family’s history and had come across stumbling blocks. He hadn’t gotten very far in his research and into going back generations, so he was elated, and so was his sister, my aunt,” Thomalind said.

She learned that Priscilla married a man named Jeffrey, and together they had ten children on Comingtee Plantation.

“We found out that, even though she was placed in a situation that could be detrimental, that she made a life, the life, but she made with Jeffrey and her children,” she said.

When asked about the man coming to deliver the information, she said Ball was a true gentleman, calm and mild-mannered. Although she sensed Ball was nervous delivering the information, the Martin family was welcoming towards Ball.

Thomalind recognized that Ed Ball was not the man who created the circumstances of Priscilla’s and brought her to the plantation. Ball wanted to find the relatives of the enslaved people his family owned long before so he could share with their descendants a piece of their family history as his own family kept detailed records.

“He felt that he knew his history, but he felt they were the forgotten history, and their history was forgotten as well, and he wanted to bring like to that find those descendants Africans that his family had enslaved,” Thomalind said.

News of the discovery spread to Joe Opala, a scholar and researcher of the connection between Gullah Geechee culture and West Africa. Opala organized a trip for the Martin family to travel to Sierra Leone. The Martins chronicled the journey in a documentary.

Thomalind says the trip was a homecoming celebration. The group traveled to one village that declared their visit an official holiday, and they were able to meet with local schoolchildren.
“It was as if they were seeing a ghost… They couldn’t believe they were seeing an actual person that came back that actually had ties to Sierra Leone,” she said.

They even made sweetgrass baskets like they do here in the Lowcountry. Thomalind understood some of the language, explaining that it is similar to the Gullah Geechee language. While in Priscilla’s home, the family had a portrait commissioned of her by Dana Coleman.

They used images of Thomalind when she was ten years old, girls from Sierra Leone, and other photos they believed could help decipher Priscilla’s image to create the portrait.

Sadly, Thomas Martin passed away before Priscilla’s homecoming to see Sierra Leone. Still, Thomalind says her father’s spirit was with them as they witnessed a testament to the survival of African culture in America.

“…there were some people that thought that the people that were just gone forever and that they died, and they never made it to a final destination, so to see an actual person come back and to see some of the same cultural similarities, they realize that, our culture did survive,” she said.

Next, I spoke with author Ed Ball, who teaches at Yale University, about his book ‘Slaves in the Family’ which won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation on race.

“When I was a young adult, I respected the taboo surrounding slavery. I did not want to open that box because I knew that it was too difficult and too full of shame for me,” Ball said.

He explained that it wasn’t until after college he began his deeper exploration into his family’s acquisition of land and people.

“The Ball family controlled they more than a dozen plantations in the Lowcountry for about 200 years and enslaved close to 4000 people on those rice plantations,” he said.

He also gave insight into a conversation with former longtime Charleston Mayor Joe Riley that took place in 1999.

“I had just published ‘Slaves in the Family,’ my first book. Mayor Riley asked me to come and see him, so I went down to his office and sat down… He said I read your book is very powerful. What do you think about establishing an African-American Museum here in Charleston? I said Mayor Riley, I think that’s a great idea, but you’re going to see some resistance. That was 25 years ago, and the museum opened last year,” he said. “It’s a very good thing it did.”

The International African American Museum (IAAM) was opened in June 2023 at Gadsden’s Wharf on a two-acre plot of land in the Charleston Peninsula. Historically, Gasdens’ Wharf was a point of embarkation for the tens of millions of enslaved Africans.

Dr. Tonya Matthews, Chief Executive Officer of the International African American Museum, says the Martin family history being linked back seven generations is rare, but it doesn’t have to be.

Matthews says the museum has many resources and is connected to the largest digital genealogy database in the world. Not only do they have genealogy resources to help connect people with their past, but they also have one-on-one workshops every day.

“I am so appreciative because so many African Americans don’t know their origin…,” Matthews said. “We assume that we are from Africa. We don’t know the region, we don’t know the tribe, but here we actually know the person. We actually can say this is the person that we are related to. This person started our bloodline here in America. That’s just something that you can’t take away. You can’t put a price on it. It’s priceless information.”

Another way for people to share information from generation to generation at IAAM is to record a message, memory, or even conversation and store it in the museum’s story booth. The recording will be emailed to the creator and stored in IAAM’s archives.