It's not a common thing for a Southern white family to go out and seek their black cousins.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.