Forbidden Fruit (22 page)

In 1911, Samuel and Rebecca celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in a house
Samuel had just had built on Boulevard Extension. Since most of the Balltons’ furniture
hadn’t yet been moved in, their guests had plenty of room for dancing. The
Brooklyn Eagle
reporter who interviewed Ballton in 1910 mentioned that he had just “moved into a
$5,500 house on which he is putting the finishing touches. On this plot he has erected
five houses, all within a short time. His own residence is of cement blocks to the
second story, then shingled, and is a substantial structure. It is wired for electric
lights.” It was a long leap from the days when the family, while waiting for one of
Samuel’s houses to be built, lived in a shed so small it was later used as a washhouse.
That Samuel Ballton had lived in and wrestled with constant pain since the Civil War
made his achievements all the more remarkable. After putting in a hard day’s work,
he sometimes had to spend a day in bed recovering.

In his application for an invalid’s pension, he claimed to have chronic diarrhea and
rheumatism and cramps “inherited while in service.” Such complaints were common among
former Civil War soldiers. The pension file for Octave Johnson, another U.S. Colored
Troops veteran, noted that he suffered from defective hearing and vision, lung disease,
articular rheumatism and hemorrhoids. The surgeon who examined Samuel Ballton wrote
that he had “crepitation” in both shoulders, meaning his bones crackled when he moved
them. Ballton also found it difficult to raise his arms above his shoulders or to
walk with his stiff knees. His other joints, muscles and ten-dons were apparently
normal, according to the doctor. The doctor also noted that Ballton claimed that he
had severe hours-long attacks of diarrhea, usually following fatigue and accompanied
by muscular pain. His liver was said to be enlarged about half an inch and was sensitive,
his stomach distended and tender, tongue coated, breath offensive, spleen and rectum
normal. According to the doctor, he had “roughened respiratory murmurs” and “sibilant
rales over both lungs.”

Yet Ballton never stopped pushing himself or pushing others, including the Commission
of Pensions, which he accused in a June 1913 letter of “beating an old soldier out
of $5.50 per month for the rest of his life.” In a 1982 tape, his granddaughter Virginia
Jackson said “he could figure in his head better than I could do it on paper.” Despite
never attending school a day in his life, he also learned to read and write. He even
became literate enough to write letters to the editor, including one published on
March 18, 1914, in the Huntington
Long-Islander
newspaper, pointing out how much he had contributed to the hamlet’s growth and noting
that the place would be further along if more people had done as much.

“Please let me give a little history of Greenlawn, which I think is as nice a locality
as there is on this branch of the Long Island Railroad,” his letter began.

When Samuel Ballton died on April 30, 1917, he was buried in the black section of
the Huntington Rural Cemetery on New York Avenue. After his death, Rebecca applied
for his pension, but since they had never married legally she had to collect affidavits
from people saying they had been recognized in the community as man and wife. The
leading citizens all signed the affidavits. In May 1925, Rebecca died at the home
of her daughter, Jessie Easton, in Greenlawn. She was survived by six of her sixteen
children. She had been living with her daughter, Mrs. Tina Taylor, in Atlantic City,
but had returned to Greenlawn a week before her death, saying she wanted to die there.
The death of the pickle industry in Greenlawn soon followed. By the 1920s, a disease
called “white pickle blight” turned cucumbers white and hard and stunted their growth
at two and a half inches.

The Balltons, however, remain living presences in their adopted hometown. Huntington
Township, which includes Greenlawn, remembers them with annual celebrations of Pickle
Day, and Huntington saluted them with a special presentation in 2002. Seven of the
houses Ballton built still stood in the spring of 2003: a cinder-block and stucco
dwelling at 67 Boulevard, the last house Ballton built and the one in which he died
in 1917; the house he built in 1894 for blacksmith William Hudson Jr. at 3 Smith Street;
the house with clamshell shingles on the gable ends that he built between 1894 and
1900 at 14 Gaines and sold to Joel Barnum Smith in 1903; the house he built at 75
Boulevard Extension and where he and Rebecca celebrated their fiftieth anniversary;
the house he built around 1894 for the Howarth family, first owners of the general
store, which had been moved twice, most recently to 5 Smith. In 2003, Ballton’s eighty-eight-year-old
granddaughter Berenice Easton lived in a building her grandfather had put up at 34
Taylor Avenue between 1905 and 1910. He had built it for commercial purposes, but
later converted it into a house. Also still standing at 30 Taylor Avenue near Boulevard
Extension was the home Ballton built for vaudevillians Charles Gardner and Marie Stoddard.

The Greenlawn-Centerport Historical Association, located in the Oldfield library,
evokes the Ballton family’s history, too. Its memorabilia includes Samuel’s rusty
Civil War saber and a mammoth Bible belonging to one of the Balltons’ sons, Charles
H. Ballton; it recorded the births of two children, one of whom lived only a week
and the other who lived less than a year. Like everything else about Samuel and Rebecca
Ballton—their escapes, their journeys, their ever-expanding ambitions—the book seems
an outsized but appropriate tribute to a family that not only loved in sickness and
in health, but in war and peace as well.

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Legislative petitions filed in Virginia in the nineteenth century by blacks seeking
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Barry, Joseph.
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Bennett, Lerone, Jr.
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The Slave Community.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. This talks about slave marriages
dissolved by their masters. The dissolution of the marriages of Hosea Bidell from
his mate of twenty-five years and of Lucy Robinson from her mate of forty-three years
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Brown, Stephen D.
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February 23, 1875. Obituary for George DeBaptiste. It reads in part: “The most interesting
portion of Mr. DeBaptiste’s life was while he was connected with the so-called underground
railroad which as most of us know was a secret organization formed during the days
of slavery to assist slaves in escaping from the slave states into Canada. Mr. DeBaptiste
became connected with the underground railroad while living in Madison, Indiana, and
has aided hundreds of poor negroes to escape their masters and take refuge in a land
of freedom. He used to say that he had walked on the bank of the Ohio river, half
the night while the rain was pouring down, intently listening to hear the oars of
an expected boat which contained one or more fugitive slaves. It was his custom to
pilot these fugitives ten or twelve miles north to the home of a farmer who kept them
secreted during the day, and on the next night would send them on to another stopping
place. This method of travel was kept up until they arrived at Detroit where they
were taken across to Windsor. Mr. DeBaptiste would usually perform these journeys
on foot walking sometimes twenty miles during the night, returning to his work the
next day, probably to shave the man whose slave he helped escape the previous night.”

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Colored Population of Upper Canada.
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Runaway Slaves; Rebels on the Plantation.
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Reich, Jerome P.
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sic
] Fugitives to Escape; Secrecy of Its Workings and Fidelity of Its Operators; Exciting
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The Detroit Post,
May 15, 1870. The interview with DeBaptiste notes that “Of late years, perhaps, the
principal manager of the UGRR in this city was George DeBaptiste, our well-known colored
fellow citizen. The Secretary of the concern here, for a long period, has been Wm.
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began his active career as agent of the road, at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837, though
he had as early as 1829, while yet a lad, assisted the escape of a fugitive from Richmond,
Va. In 1838, he became the station agent at Madison, Indiana. The principal business
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from most skilled occupations and from serving in the militia and as witnesses. In
1830, the president of a trade-oriented association was publicly tried for helping
a black youth learn a trade.

Bell, Lyndon Conrad. “The Underground Railroad.” Canada was often the final destination
for slaves chasing freedom in the North.
African Americans on Wheels,
Vol. 8, No. 3 (June/July 2002).

ben-Jochannan, Yosef.
African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”
New York: Alkebu-Lan Books, 1970.

Blassingame, John W.
The Slave Community.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1979. This describes the Nat
Turner and Gabriel Prosser rebellions.

Blockson, Charles L.
The Underground Railroad:
First-Person Narratives of Escapes to Freedom in the North.
New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987, pp. 205–12.

Brown, Thomas J., ed.
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Carter, R. A. “What the Negro Church Has Done.”
The Journal of Negro History,
Vol. XI, 1926, pp. 1–2.

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography,
Vol. 1. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924. Copyright by Clara
Gabrilowitsch. Twain talks about his uncle John’s farm, four miles from Florida, Missouri,
and notes that the local church taught that God approved of slavery and that it was
holy.

Daniel 6:7–24 and 3:14–30. Holy Bible (KJV).

Denne, Darrin. “Remembering the Past.”
The Windsor Star,
Saturday, October 30, 1999. Describes Labor Day weekend in North Buxton, Ontario,
the most successful of Ontario’s antebellum black settlements.

Drew, Benjamin.
A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in
Canada, Related by Themselves with an Account of the History and Condition of the
Colored Population of Upper Canada.
Boston: John P. Jewett & Co; Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; New York:
Sheldon, Lamport and Blakeman; London: Trubner and Co., 1856, p. 80. “I belonged in
Norfolk, Va., from birth until 34 years of age,” ex-slave Henry Atkinson told researcher
Benjamin Drew. “…In regard to religious instruction, I was allowed to go to church
on Sunday, to a white clergy-man—no colored preacher being allowed in Norfolk…. The
white clergymen don’t preach the whole gospel there. Since I have been here, I have
heard the passage about the fact that the Lord hath chose to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke.
I never heard that down South. If a colored man were to say it, he’d have the handcuffs
put on quick—if a white man were to say it, he’d have to leave, because they’d say
he was ‘putting too much into the niggers’ heads.’” See also pp. 205, 211 (betrayal
by friends); p. 234 (description of Chatham).