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A5B Wisdom in Northern Light 1918–1919 It was not only that he ran away from the tyranny of the lords of the South. It was not only that Bennie Mays was drawn to the morality, the right conduct, and the good hearts of the men in the North. There was more. Bennie was a stirring man, a man who strove. He was ready to set himself against the best, against brilliant Yankees. He had ached to compete with the white boys at the University of South Carolina, but he thought them to be “intellectually inferior ” to the boys of New England. He was going to Bates College to do what the white boys back in Greenwood and Orangeburg were afraid to do. He was going to Bates College to compete with Yankees in a Yankee school. It was the hate and the love that stirred inside him: “How could I know that I was not inferior to the white man having never had the chance to compete with him?” Now he would take that chance. Nor could he turn back without dishonor: “Yankee superiority was the gauntlet thrown down. I had to pick it up.”1 Yet the love was there too, and cooperation as well as competition. He found it so on the train ride north. A young white northerner introduced himself as a Bates College student, and Bennie and his new schoolmate talked as the train made its way into the northern woods. The boy was filled with the wisdom that comes from several years study at a small college, and he freely shared it. In particular he told Bennie about places to live and things to do. He was friendly and warm, and he loved his school. He hoped that Bennie would love it too. He seemed to regard Bates College as a kind of family. Mays did not record the name of the friendly welcomer. He did record that on the same trip he met a black youth named Julian Coleman. This Bates student was not from a southern family though his father’s people may have been. Julian was from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and he also told Bennie that Bates College was a family, a good place for a young man to learn and grow. 1918–1919 61 Julian helped Bennie find a home in Lewiston, Maine. It is not recorded if black people owned the home where he lived. It is recorded that Bennie soon came to agree with Julian and the unnamed white boy that Bates was a family, even though it was bigger even than any extended family Bennie had known. Like siblings in a family, the college students sometimes picked on each other. But even the teasing at Bates was different in kind and degree from what Bennie had seen before. Back in Orangeburg don’t care boys had teased the scholar and even pulled a knife on Bennie. Now at Bates there was a family member who teased, Paul Tilden. He had no knife, but his cuts went deep, deeper than any threatened cut from a don’t care boy. Paul Tilden cared much, and he could do much, and his teasing cut sharp and deep. He was a smart white boy, a brilliant Yankee who spoke the proper New England way as he recited his Greek lessons in the classroom with Bennie and the other scholars of Greek. As Bennie recited, Paul Tilden laughed and laughed at his Piedmont dialect because, even when Bennie got the emphasis right and got the classical rhythm right, he sounded wrong, what with the rolling cadences of his black Piedmont speech. He sounded like a Carolina farm boy practicing words in church, and Paul laughed and laughed at the sound. Paul laughed at all the Young Benjamin Mays. Courtesy of the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center, Howard University. .129.70.157] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 22:16 GMT) 62 Wisdom in Northern Light black fellows who attempted Greek, not that there were many, and he laughed at all the black folk he encountered, and there were some numbers of black folk in the largest cities in New England. Bennie was not the only dark man who had abandoned his own community to seek a better way in the far North, not the only dark man who had run away from the white lords in the southern valleys of the slow moving rivers. Bennie’s mathematical mind told him that Paul must spend much...

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