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3 SaintsTales Almost all of the founding saints migrated to Philadelphia from the South. When they were interviewed for this research project, they had risen to the office of elder, serving as the spiritual leaders of The Church, and ranged in age from seventy-six to ninety-eight. Some elders were talkative and others were laconic; some stayed on point, while others pursued lines of thought that produced rich and germane information. In presenting their stories, I have focused both on common experiences and on individual insights that illuminate the trajectory of lives marked by struggle and by faith. The first narrative is that of the oldest elder interviewed for this work, who died before its publication; the last narrative is that of the oldest living elder. Because members of the Nichols family predominate in this group, narratives of elders who do not belong to this extended family are interspersed among them. The narrative of Elder Holly Nichols Stables appears before those of her siblings because her story grounds theirs. A recurring theme in the Nichols narratives concerns the interweaving of Black and White family histories in their southern hometown. All the elders’ narratives discuss the processes of chain migration to the North and of the spiritual journeys that led them to The Church. The chapter ends with an exploration of recurrent themes that “enflesh” the social-historical information about the Great Migration in the previous chapter. Elder Hannah Pope Nichols (1915–2007) “Honey, you don’t know the half!” “Sturdy Welsh” and “Negro Scalawags” In the middle of our interview, tears began to roll down Elder Hannah’s face. She explained that earlier that day she had seen a television spot for the Christian Children’s Fund. The pitiful conditions of these poor children, she 50 · Saved and Sanctified explained, had “brought back so much” about how she had “come up” as a child in South Carolina. Hannah was born in 1915 in Blenheim, a small town in Marlboro County. Located on the North Carolina border, the county had a history of sustained and concentrated slaveholding. Here, according to the 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules, 6,893 Blacks were held in slavery, with forty-nine slaveholders owning close to half of them.1 Some enslaved Blacks had worked side by side with Whites in cotton mills, but a century later job discrimination excluded African Americans from the textile mills (Lander 1953: 165, 172). A 1927 document prepared by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Industries and Clemson College, refers to the Reconstruction period in Blenheim as “the days of negro scalawag government”; it describes when “one negro mysteriously disappeared” as “the nearest approach to a lynching in the county’s history.” The same document reports that in 1785 the area was settled by “sturdy Welsh Baptists and reinforced a little later by numbers of hardy . . . Scots.” Blenheim, renowned for its mineral springs, had a population of 234 in the early 1900s, when Hannah was growing up, and has remained a small town into the twenty-first century.2 In 2000, this town of 0.6 square miles had a population of 130, and just over half of its residents were of African descent.3 Elder Hannah described Blenheim as an isolated town with a substantial Black population who enjoyed very few opportunities for economic improvement and where an indiscretion—or even the perception of a possible indiscretion—could be dangerous for Black people. Hannah was one of twelve siblings. Her father was a sharecropper who worked on “thirds”: “When you picked three bales of cotton, the third one would be yours,” she explained. Like her mother, she married a sharecropper . Elder Hannah reflected that if she, like her parents, had had more than two children, and if she and her husband had owned more farm animals and equipment, she might not have seen so little for her years of hard work. Hard labor, minimal fruits, and times of scant food were recurrent themes in her recollections of childhood and young adulthood in Blenheim. She talked of picking cotton as a child and “not seeing a nickel”; after working all day, they went to the creek to “catch our supper.” At times they only had what they grew in their garden. At this point in the interview, Elder Hannah’s eyes began to tear up as she recalled the Christian Children’s Fund TV spot. Hannah had the good fortune to attend a school set up and...

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