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A1B Seed of James, Branch of Prophets and Judges 1894–1898 He was the son of slaves. His mother, Louvenia Carter Mays, was born into slavery in Virginia, and his father, Hezekiah Mays, was born into slavery in South Carolina. His mother, called Vinia, did not really remember slavery, but his father Hezekiah did, as Benjamin Mays reported in Born to Rebel. His parents ’ stories of the valley of the Saluda are frustratingly vague at crucial points, but this much can be recovered: Hezekiah and Vinia Mays—and the patriarch James Mays before them—saw and felt the worst of slavery, including the peculiar institution’s violent intrusion into family life. More focused memories of his parents show a married life marked by great turmoil between Vinia and Hezekiah inside the home, but they also show a home even more violently intruded on by white people. The Mayses lived in a beautiful valley; they loved the land and often marked the “rainbow ’round their shoulder.” They also marked the “blood on the Carolina moon.”1 The Hebrew chronicler of Judges in the Bible wrote admiringly and longingly of a promised land “washed by nether springs”; and the black song master inspired by such Hebrew images sang of a “goodly land.” Surely the verses describe the valley of the Saluda, a goodly land washed by springs in Greenwood , which was part of Edgefield District in the Piedmont of South Carolina in 1894, when Benjamin Elijah Mays was born. Men of color had come, and they had settled this land generations earlier, perhaps as long ago as when Jesus Christ walked the earth. These bronze men were called “Cherokee” by the European settlers who found them, and European scholars have called the forefathers of these Cherokees “Mississippians.” The land was rich with topsoil that was thin but fertile. The soil was bright red, the color of blood, and it made its 6 Seed of James mark on people. Some of their clothing was always red, no matter how long they soaked things in boiling water: red soil and bronze people, themselves often dyed red. Then white men had come from England and had displaced these men of color. They were new folk with new techniques, new beliefs, and new systems; it was an old red land with new white people. Following the patterns established in the lowcountry of South Carolina, themselves patterns established in Barbados in the Caribbean, these Englishmen pushed northwesterly into the Piedmont frontier, cleared the land, and began to raise cash crops. The most important of the crops became cotton: King Cotton, short-staple cotton. This short-staple cotton had bolls with thickened fibers enmeshing many seeds, and only Eli Whitney’s cotton gin could pull the seeds out quickly enough to make it a cash crop fit for the world markets. Once ginned, however, this shortstaple cotton was sold by the boatload to the lords of the mills in Old England and in New England. Still following the patterns they had learned in Barbados , the Englishmen imported black folk from Africa, who were bought and brought forward to work the cotton fields in that land. The enterprise made the Englishmen at once lords of the land and lords of the labor, and these fellows who were lords of this red land and lords of this black labor became rich indeed. Yet they spared little of their silver and none of their gold for the black people who were the slaves plowing, sowing, weeding, hoeing, and picking the cotton, and then bringing the jute bags stuffed with it to the cotton gin.2 Black men and women found themselves “strangers in a strange land,” as the psalmist wrote. They found themselves obliged to sing songs for their overlords in the strange land. They sang their songs; they worked their work; and at least a portion of their songs they sang for themselves, and at least a portion of the work they did for themselves. The young child Benjamin Elijah Mays learned about the seed of James, his own black people, from his grandmother Julia, wife of James, and from her daughter and his mother, Vinia Mays. He learned too that this same red soil had produced men who became judges, even over the white folk, and—more important—prophets who reminded people of all colors—black, red, and white—about the right way to live. Julia and Vinia Mays both told him to be proud of being black, and...

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