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A4B The Student 1911–1917 It cost money to go to school. The people of the extended Mays family received a portion of South Carolina’s revenues for public schools, but that portion was only the lesser part. There were twenty dollars for each white student in a public school, but only two dollars for each dark student in a public school. As for Greenwood County, the local monies were also marked by disparity. The largest group of children, the six of ten in Greenwood who were black, received the smallest portion, a little more than twenty cents of each dollar spent on schools. Greenwood’s white boys and girls, who were only four of ten, received more than eighty cents of each dollar spent on schools.1 The Bible says that in the fullness of time the last shall be first, but in Bennie Mays’s teenage years, the black majority was assuredly the very last. To have a “teacher of quality” such as Miss Waller, to buy books to read and slates to write on and benches to sit on, the people of the Mays family and their dark neighbors turned to Preacher Marshall, who passed the hat at Saturday conferences to keep the Brick House School going. Back in Greenwood, Preacher Marshall was even trusted to “live in” with a white Methodist minister : The public role of “living in” manservant gave him a protection among white people, especially during the riots in this long season of death talking and dream slaying. While Preacher Marshall told the black folk that no Methodist was going into glory, he was grateful to at least one white man who professed the Gospel in the style of John Wesley and Francis Asbury and sang hymns in the style of Charles Wesley. For his part Preacher Marshall was careful to avoid liquor and fornication and any other sort of cutting a hog—and of course after 1898 cutting a hog included any effort to integrate anything, so Preacher Marshall also accepted the new Jim Crow laws of South Carolina. 1911–1917 43 H.H. and Bennie played and talked and worked together, but they also strove together, and there was a friendly but intense rivalry between the brothers. They competed in picking cotton, and both did well, so well that they had hard cash to put in their pockets even when nickel cotton was the rule. In 1911 the price fell just beneath a nickel. If one of them picked 300 pounds of cotton in a day, he could make $1.25, as much as some grown men might make in a week; and if he kept at that pace, he could make more in a week than most adult farm laborers.2 One memorable day H.H. and Bennie pushed each other along, and each picked more than 420 pounds of cotton—each earning more than $1.80. But the brothers were dog tired by dusk. Much as H.H. and Bennie loved the physical tests of the body and the feel of the soil and the smell of the air, each boy ached for some kind of job where a man would make $10 a week, every week, without superhuman exertion. H.H. found his own answer, the same way that older brothers John and James had discovered theirs, leaving their father’s farm and starting their own. Eventually H.H. went to New York City, and John to Cleveland, but James went to glory when he was murdered by his jealous in-law. Before each brother left, he encouraged the favored young Bennie to earn a high school degree— and to leave Rambo and the valley of the Saluda River. Actually Bennie wanted much more than a high school diploma like H.H.’s. Bennie wanted a college baccalaureate degree like Miss Waller’s, and he wanted it from a school such as South Carolina State College in Orangeburg or Benedict College in Columbia or even Virginia Union University in Richmond, where Baptists “of great quality” studied. But in 1911 he dared not approach his father about college, since his father grew angry and roared even at the mention of high school. Instead Bennie talked with the elder Mays women, and he talked with H.H. and John, and only then did they talk with Hezekiah, who at least agreed to let Bennie continue his studies for a high school diploma. Then Bennie pushed harder, asking to attend the good...

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