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A3B A Rambo Boy after the Riot 1898–1911 As 1898 ended and as the new year of 1899 came on, the Charleston Courier proclaimed that the “War” was over and that the killing had stopped, declarations repeated more loudly by the local newspapers, especially the Greenwood Index, in which the Mays family read the editorials by publisher S. H. McGhee and the byline stories by Kohn. Most of the white people repeated over and over that the killing was finally done with and “War” was over.1 Yet the killing did not end, for young Bennie still saw white mobs searching for members of his and other black families—sometimes right on Mr. Bill Mays’s lands that Hezekiah Mays rented—and he still saw other black people hiding out in the woods near the cotton fields where he worked. The farm that Hezekiah Mays rented from Bill Mays lay alongside a country thoroughfare traveled by many, including Klansmen in full regalia. From that early age, Bennie learned not to talk to the groups looking for African Americans nor to the African Americans who were in hiding. Among the white folk, schoolteacher Ella Dargan wrote of one landowner that “out of the thousand Negroes he has on his place only one talked as though he would stay with him another year.” She noted that it was unusual to see black children at play near white people, and in general “the Negroes around here are scared.”2 Such white recollections confirm what the mature Mays remembered from his early days in Rambo: “It certainly ‘put the rabbit’ in many Negroes. . . . Few dared to stand up to a white man. When one did, he got the worst of it. It was not unusual to hear that a certain Negro had been run out of town, or fearing he would be, had left the county before ‘they’ could get him. Most Negroes grinned, cringed, and kowtowed in the presence of white people.”3 There was yet good land and good weather for the rest of the harvest. Late November and early December of 1898 featured cold nights and short days, but there was no killing frost, and the fluffy cotton bolls sat there in the fields, 1898–1911 33 waiting to be picked. In the Bible, Jesus says to “lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.”4 But who would pick the cotton? Cotton prices were low, “nickel cotton” folks said, although you might get six or seven cents a pound. In addition to the 104 black people who had left right after the killings, hundreds more black folk—and even a great number of white folk—left, pulled away by the hope of better cotton prices or real wages somewhere else. So many black people left in that season that the tiny short-haul Savannah Valley Railroad filled its Jim Crow cars full with African Americans going west. The Jim Crow passenger cars were a new practice, just enforced that year under Governor Ellerbe, as was the careful segregation of the railroad stations. Even local white people were surprised by the effects of the new laws, and they noticed how seldom they “passed” black people. Looking back years later, Benjamin Mays could scarcely remember seeing white people when he was young. After 1898 Greenwood County became an extremely segregated little world, with the races much more separated than in the decades before the Phoenix Riots.5 The people of Hezekiah Mays’s extended family, and people of other black families, called it “the exodus,” and the white lords of the land called it the same thing; but black people used the term to signal deliverance while Bill Mays and other white landowners used the term to signify disaster as their cotton crops sat there untended. So many black folk left so often in such a short time that Bill Mays and other white landowners grew uneasy. They talked to railroad agents, the sheriff, and finally the governor. Governor Ellerbe even wrote to a judge in Memphis with a governor’s requisition order to return African Americans “stolen” from Greenwood. Police in Memphis actually detained a white agent and his recruits on their way to the Mississippi Delta because of the governor ’s requisition order, but a judge in that city released the agent and all the workers so that they could continue their journey to a better and safer land. The judge...

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