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Introduction: Getting Dr. Payne
- University of South Carolina Press
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Introduction Getting Dr. Payne Benjamin Elijah Mays. His given names were chosen with care, chosen for their magnificence. They are names of biblical characters chosen to lead. Mays was magnificent even in his youth, especially in 1917, when he was a college student recently matriculated at prestigious Bates College in New England after study in his native South Carolina. Tall, with an absolutely vertical posture that only God could lay out with a master’s plumb line, Mays was always dignified, able to smile broadly without playing the clown and able to cry without being maudlin. The physical embodiment of God’s priest for the city of heaven, he was in 1917 living in the city of people, and that city employed him not as a priest but as a Pullman porter. In the summer days when Bates College was not in session, Bennie Mays earned money on the passenger train running out of Boston, the hub of his adoptive Yankee region. It was good money for a kid, and this kid looked right for the job. The carriage, the visage, the body, the voice, and the manners were all perfect for a porter on a Pullman car in 1917. Perfectly understandable too was the emotion he recorded to describe how he felt for “several summers.” That is, the emotion was understandable if you remembered that the inhabitants of the city of people were created a little less than angels. He was waiting anxiously to see Dr. Wallace Payne, a physician from Epworth in the student-porter’s native Greenwood County, South Carolina . When Mays was a child, he had called this place “Rambo” instead of “Epworth,” and many African Americans still called the crossroads community Rambo. As the train moved southward, Mays watched eagerly. Surely one of these days, on one of these runs, Dr. Payne from Epworth would board Mays’s car. When Dr. Payne did climb aboard, Mays the magnificent intended to avenge himself. In 1916 the doctor had struck Mays in the Epworth post office, 2 Introduction and the youth had never forgotten. Now the aggrieved youth was a porter on a train, and he was trusted to be alone and unsupervised with white passengers. There was a lot of time, and there were surely a lot of places where a white passenger would be alone with Mays, without witnesses and without defenses. In the city of people, the passenger train was a good place for the sin contemplated by the magnificent one. He was going to arrange for the good physician to heal himself after a terrible beating. He later said with modesty and understatement: I intended to get him. . . . I guess he should be glad . . . because if I had ever met him in a place where the odds were not all against me I certainly meant to repay him in kind and more. . . . I was not as nonviolent then as I am now.1 Dr. Payne never boarded a train on which Mays was porter, and the moment, but not the thought, passed from Mays’s life. The thought was later brought back to Mays, however, in exactly the way that every southern white man fears. In 1950 Dr. Payne’s wife came forward to declare her admiration for the mature Mays. By then Dr. and Mrs. Payne had moved to the bright and hopeful “civil yet progressive” North Carolina, a halfday ’s drive but really a full epoch away from Rambo. Here was Mays the magnificent speaking to liberal women at a Methodist meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. At session’s end a clutch of liberal women insistently revealed themselves to be from the leader’s home place. Most prominent was Mrs. Wallace Payne, who wanted to be introduced to Dr. Benjamin Mays. Even in the civil rights movement , even in attempting a rebellion of the most radical sort by treating an African American man as a social equal and as an intellectual mentor, Mrs. Payne was yet “down home” and still a Sandlapper. She was determined to establish the hometown connection, to share names of people commonly known in their old home place. Evidently she and her physician-husband had never talked about how he beat young Mays in 1916. But the magnificent Mays was still that youth, and the sore was still festering there. Whether the larger hurt was guilt over his continuing desire to flail Dr. Payne or regret that he had never done so, the memoir writer did not say...