Notes
Notes Introduction 1. Mays, Born to Rebel, 45–47; Dallas Blanchard, interview with Mays, August 16, 1983, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill (hereafter SHC). 2. Mays, Born to Rebel, 46. Chapter 1. Seed of James, Branch of Prophets and Judges 1. For relationships between and among black and white families in Edgefield District, see Burton, In My Father’s House, and Mays, Born to Rebel, chapter 1. 2. Edgar, South Carolina, chapters 1 and 2, talks about South Carolina as being a “colony of a colony,” that is Barbados; Wood, Black Majority; Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities ; for quantitative and theoretical discussions of “colony of a colony,” see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 111–16; 176, and Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States. 3. Mays, Born to Rebel, 2. For Finnish names in the southern Piedmont, see Jordan and Kaups, The American Backwoods, 229, 238–39, 241–42. A. J. Rambo and Joseph Rambo are listed as slave owners in U.S. Census, 2nd ser., Slave Census, Edgefield District, 1850 (count of June 30, 1850). 4. For the white Mayses and their slaveholdings, see U.S. Census, 2nd ser., Slave Census, Edgefield District, 1850. Henry Hazel Mays is listed with a son, William H. Mays, and fourteen unnamed slaves, including one man of James’s age and complexion and a child the age and complexion of Hezekiah (and the age of the white child, William H. Mays), U.S. Census, Population Census, Edgefield District, 1850 and 1860. After freedom, Hezekiah (also spelled Hesikah and Hezikah) is listed as a renting farmer with his wife, Vinia, born in Virginia, which squares with family memories ascribed to Julia and Louvenia, and with Vinia bearing eight children and losing one, U.S. Census, Population Census, Edgefield County, 1880 and 1890; Population Census, Brooks Township, Greenwood County, 1900. U.S. Census, Saluda Regiment , Edgefield District, 1860, lists Henry Hazel Mays, child William H., and the notoriously cruel overseer S. C. Deale with slaves the right ages for James, Julia, and Hezekiah. Ages for slave children owned by the other Mayses do not line up in this way, nor do ages for slaves owned by A. J. Rambo and Joseph Rambo. On September 25, 1880, William H. Mays married Nola Lou Barmore (who was remembered by the black Mayses as “Nora” instead of “Nola”); they appear in U.S. Census, Population Census, Edgefield County, 1880. More important, in U.S. Census, Agricultural Census, Edgefield County, 1880, William H. Mays’s farm operation is detailed in the same line with his renters, including Hezekiah Mays for that year’s agricultural census. 310 Notes to Pages 8–16 5. The exact statistic for illiteracy among nonwhites during the final five years of slavery and the first four years of freedom is 79.9 percent. That statistic would include some former slaves who had learned to read and write after slavery ended (U.S. Census, Historical Statistics , 1870). In the official statistics, Hezekiah Mays is listed among the 79.9 percent unable to read and write (U.S. Census, Population Census, Edgefield County, 1880 and 1890). 6. Mays heard and used the call/response of the Baptist minister; call: “How long / O, Lord / How Long?”; response: “Not long / Not long,” or “Only a little while,” or sometimes both blended as “Not long / Only a little while / Not long now / Only a little while now.” The expected triumph of the just is on this earth, not in an otherworldly place. Here too Mays pronounced himself Born to Rebel. Sources include Psalms 94:3 and 6:3b, as well as references to the Hebrew prophets in Hebrews 10:37–38 and Romans 1:17, but mostly the Old Testament books of Isaiah (26:30) and Habakkuk (2:3–4); see notes on texts and sources in Jones, ed., Jerusalem Bible (hereafter JB). 7. Mays, Born to Rebel, 2. 8. Ibid.; see the discussion of this phrase in Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, chapter 2. 9. Mays, Born to Rebel, chapter 1; U.S. Census, Population Census, Edgefield County, 1880; on the marriage of Louvenia and Hezekiah Mays, see ibid., 1890. 10. On the Mayses’ slaves see U.S. Census, Slave Census, Edgefield District, 1860. The phrase “he lived and moved and had his being” is attributed to the classic Greek philosopherpoet Epimanides. Mays used it in correspondence (Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Library—hereafter MSRC) and also in his...
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