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A6B For Every Time There Is a Season 1920–1924 The autumn season of 1920 began a time of troubles for the new couple with bright dreams. Bennie Mays labored in many places but with Boston as his hub. Ellen Mays labored in the valley of the Santee. Though they sowed much, their harvest was spare. Bennie and Ellen Mays loved one another, and they loved their callings, he to preach and she to teach. If they missed their drink and their meat one day, yet the lovers were filled with bread from heaven to eat.1 Bennie Mays worked for money and for a cause. Enemy of the bosses, he was no more respectful of the lords of industry and labor “at the North” than of the lords of land and labor “at the South.” Pullman porters became his brothers in still another branch on the large dark tree, and he fought for their cause. He stayed with porters, rooming with them in boardinghouses for African Americans near train stations. He continued to practice his speech, his declamation . Sometimes he was in front of church groups, sometimes in front of labor-union organizers, and other times before self-help and charitable groups. Always he worked to do the magnificent preaching and speaking fitting a man of true megalosukos. His magnificence now included the knowledge that some white people of the North could be trusted to practice the right habits of “the good.”2 He must have worried about his wife, Ellen Harvin Mays, supervising her own people in her valley of the Santee, where still other white lords ruled that flat land with no more justice or righteousness than such people exercised in his native Piedmont. The Mayses needed to get her out of South Carolina. They needed to be together, but first they needed to serve out this hard season in order to enjoy the fruits of the next season promised them in Chicago. 1920–1924 75 There was just no money. Ellen Mays earned her Jeanes Fund income by working with Sumter County and Clarendon County schoolteachers, teaching the teachers, all women, to teach the children most desperately in need of teaching . She did not live with Theodosia Richardson in Manning, but rather with Sallie Conley and Gilbert DuBose in Pinewood. This arrangement is a little hard to make sense of, given Richardson’s kindness and her pain and emptiness after losing her son, Rufus Richardson. Nor was anything written to show that Gilbert DuBose and Sallie Conley assisted or in any way encouraged Ellen Mays in her chosen career or in her marriage. The living arrangement in some way had to do with the mystery that was Ellen Mays, the “very fair skinned” and “pretty girl.” As noted earlier, Bennie Mays had met her in Orangeburg at some point not recorded anywhere, then became engaged to marry her at some secret point in his Bates College days, and thereafter spent long seasons apart from her, apparently losing or destroying all correspondence with her during their time apart. And they were apart more than they were together. In Born to Rebel Mays wrote that she helped persuade him to become a theologian rather than a professor of mathematics and that they talked long and feelingly about racism and white people. It is obvious that this man, who could stir emotions in others and who could tightly control his own emotions, fully intended to keep entirely unto himself most of what he alone knew about Ellen Mays.3 Christmas season drew near, and Bennie and Ellen Mays told each other that during the new year of 1921 they must remain apart yet a little longer, at least until summer. Bennie Mays counted his savings and found that he had forty-five dollars to take with him to Chicago, where his university matriculation was set for the first Monday of 1921. He had gone to Bates College in the town of Lewiston with ninety dollars, and now he was going to an expensive city with half that sum. His mother had always told him that God will provide, and he kept these words in his bosom. He prepared himself to study among the brilliant Yankees at what Dr. Nix had assured him was the world’s greatest university. Then came the news that he was no longer a Pullman porter. In Born to Rebel Mays stated tersely that he got into a dispute about assignments and duties, was found...

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