By Faith and By Love: Martin and Mabel’s Journey

By Faith and By Love

Martin and Mabel’s Journey

Beverly England Williams

By Faith and By Love

Martin and Mabel’s Journey

Copyright © 2014 Beverly England Williams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-514-2

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-763-7

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/08/2014

Sources for this book include family letters, reports and letters from Burma to the Foreign Mission Board, the Baylor University Oral History Project, and the American Baptist Historical Society. Used with permission.

Although he was named Jasper in memory of his grandfather, he never liked the name and went by his middle name, Martin, or by J. Martin. To the end of his life, however, he tried to honor Jasper and the man who had saved Jasper’s life. This is Martin’s story, and the tale of a cautious, yet brave, woman for stood by his side for fifty-five years.

By faith and by love may you go. From a note Mabel slipped into Martin’s suitcase as he was leaving to observe the March on Selma, Alabama early in 1965.

For Mabel and Martin’s grown-up grandchildren

Margaret Eileen (Peg)

David Alan

Martha Lynn

Kenneth England (Ken)

Charles Martin (Chas)

Benjamin Louis (Ben)

and for their great grandchildren

Pictures and Letters

1. Martin and Lizzie May – 1905

2. Martin and Liz – 1909

3. Mabel and friends – 1918 (Mabel is Farthest Right in the Middle Row)

4. Photos of Martin – high school to 1932

5. Yancey Collegiate Institute baseball team

6. Excerpt of early letter from Martin to Mabel

7. Mabel – Summer 1930

8. Martin to Mabel’s parents – August 1933 (4 pages)

9. Excerpt Mabel to Martin – planning a wedding by mail, September 1933

10. Mabel to Martin – October 15, 1933

11. Mabel’s wedding portrait – October 21, 1933

12. Martin and Mabel sightseeing – late November 1933

13. From Mabel, a letter home

14. Anniversary note from Martin – October 21, 1939

15. Menu, farewell dinner S.S. President Coolidge, November 1939

16. Reunions, 1939 and 1940

17. Mabel, Birmingham, Alabama, July 1941

18. Excerpt of letter, Martin in New York, July 1945

19. Excerpt of letter, Mabel to her mother, 19 July 1945

20. Foreign Service letter – 5 January 1946 and letter to family (2 pages)

21. Excerpt of letters from Mabel to Martin – 22 January 1946

22. Excerpt of postcard to Mabel’s parents – November 1946

23. Invitation to State Dinner on 19 December 1948

24. Here and There: Family News (3 pages)

25. Notes from Martin to Mabel – 1951

26. Mabel to Martin – November 1969

27. Three photos – At home in New Jersey and South Carolina

28. Excerpt of letter from Martin to family – 14 February 1983

29. Martin and Mabel honored in Greenville – February 1986

30. Cove Road – from Mabel’s poetry class – no date

31. Mabel’s calendar from November 1986

32. Furman University honorary doctorate – 1986

33. Pictures presented to England Habitat for Humanity House – February 1988

34. Martin’s obituary – 4 January 1989

35. NAACP resolution read at Martin’s funeral – 6 January 1989

36. Last picture of Martin at Rolling Green Nursing Home with young guests from Montessori School – Early 1988

1

Deep in the hills between South Carolina and Georgia lived a farmer named Jasper Wilson. Though he worked hard, the red clay and sorry land kept him poor. He and his wife did have enough food, fresh vegetables in the summer and smoked hams and potatoes for the winter. At least the steep and rocky hillsides were their own.

Jasper heard the talk about slavery, rising taxes, and rumors of war with the North. But he had bigger worries: too much rain or too little, the corn crop, how to get enough cash to buy a mule. Let the rich men go to war to keep their slaves.

In 1861 the farmer received a letter, a most unusual event up in the hills. Jasper Wilson, it stated, must report for duty as a soldier. He was sure that he could get out of the military. Jasper had a wife. Small as it was, he had a farm. He was needed at home. Besides, the war had nothing to do with him. Jasper might have gotten out of serving if he had had one hundred dollars to pay some other, even poorer man to take his place. Where would he get a hundred dollars? He couldn’t even buy a mule. The few items he bought at the general store were paid for in crops, not cash. The young farmer, who had never left the mountains, had to journey to the big city of Charleston, South Carolina to become a Confederate soldier.

Soon after Jasper had gone off to fight, his wife became ill. Food was scarce. Even while she was sick, Jasper’s wife, Jeanette, and his sister, Margaret, tried to farm the rocky hillsides. With no mule, they took turns walking behind the plow and being the animal pulling it. Since there was no coffee at the general store, and no money to buy any if there had been, Jeanette and Margaret roasted the rye and wheat they had grown and drank it to relieve headaches. Since there was no salt for preserving meat, the women dug up the dirt floor of the smokehouse. They boiled the dirt and strained out the bit of salt that had dripped from hams and bacon in happier times.

Jasper and his fellow farmers discovered that conditions in Charleston weren’t any better than in the mountains. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight, they would chant as they prepared to eat another bad meal and to sleep in their crowded barracks, too hot in the steamy summer and too cold when the damp winter winds blew in from the ocean. At least Farmer Wilson was lucky enough to have a friend from a nearby farm sharing his misery. Whenever they had free time, the two draftees would walk through the city, and they discovered that most of the fine Charleston homes were empty. The owners, who had made their fortunes in the slave trade, had fled to their country homes. The rich folks had taken all their young, strong slaves with them, leaving one old man as caretaker. Jasper and his buddy decided that since this wasn’t their war, and since they had to be in the city anyway, they might as well make themselves a little extra money. The two young men smashed open the huge front doors, frightened off the old slave with only one gunshot, and ripped lead pipes from the basement. Their Army supply agent, always looking for lead for more bullets, paid them without asking any questions.

Their next plot was even more embarrassing than alarming old men and stealing pipes. Since this is a true story, it must be told. Jasper’s friend worked in the mail room, and he knew that some packages from home, containing precious food, clothing, tobacco, and medicines, lay unclaimed for days and even weeks. Jasper looked up the owners in the list of battle victims. If a man had died, Jasper presented himself to different post offices using the name of the dead soldier. The two farmers used what they needed from these parcels and sold the rest to the other hungry and uncomfortable soldiers. Before long each man had a big pile of Confederate money.

But the South was at war, and the friends could not spend all of their days in illegal activities. Though the family does not know how long he was in Charleston, they do know that Jasper was sent into battle and wounded badly. After he had been in the hospital for several weeks, Confederate officers decided to send Jasper home, one less mouth to feed and one less crippled soldier in a hospital bed. His friend knew that Jasper’s discharge was a bad sign; the officers thought he was going to die. He came to the hospital to say good-bye, bringing half of their money. Patiently his friend ripped open the lining of Jasper’s coat, stuffed the dollars inside and sewed it up again. He prayed that his friend would die at home, not on the train, and that his family would find the lump in the coat.

Jasper’s grandson Martin told the next part of the story:

The train crews lifted my grandfather off one bumpy, crowded train and onto the next. Finally Jasper got to the village of Walhalla, South Carolina, the end of the railroad. It was about forty miles to his home in the mountains. No one in the family knew he had been wounded; no one knew that he had been sent home to die. He lay on the station platform in Walhalla two whole days, begging anyone to take him home or to get word to his family that he was there. Finally a black man, a former slave who had bought his freedom, an old man who hauled freight in a horse and wagon, put Jasper in his wagon and took him the two-day journey home. When they got to the little stream beside his house Jasper called to his wife, my grandmother Jeanette, I’m home. Bring clean clothes and towels and soap but don’t come near me. Caked with blood and pus and the lice that spread from soldier to soldier, he warned her, I’m lousy. Don’t come. Throw my clean clothes across the creek. And my grandmother did just that. The old man gently undressed and bathed my grandfather there in the stream, dressed him in clean clothes and took him home. Carried him across the creek and up to the house in his arms. My grandmother lived way up in the hills and had seen very few black people. But that sight, of the old black man carrying her young husband across the creek, made an impression on her.

She never allowed any of her children, any of her family, any of her grandchildren, to be rude or discourteous to a black person. Ever. Even, Martin recalled, when an African American woman sometimes helped out with family chores in exchange for food:

To us children, that woman was a bit odd, a bit strange. And the other children of the village would make fun of her and laugh at her. We never did, because we knew that my grandmother, and my mother, would not stand for it.

2

The South, as we know, lost the Civil War. Jasper’s pile of Confederate money was worthless; Martin remembered playing with it when he was a little boy. But his grandfather recovered from his wounds and was rich in children and grandchildren and a little farm of his own.

Julia, one of Jasper’s daughters, grew up on that farm. When she married, she moved with her husband, Harvey, to the small town of Seneca, South Carolina. On June 29, 1901, their first child was born and they named him Jasper Martin. Harvey worked in the cotton mill in Seneca, on the railroad, in a store, any work that he could find to support his growing family. One of Martin’s little sisters died before she was a year old. But he, Liz, Grace, Leonard, and Dick needed food and clothing and shoes when the summer barefoot season was over and school started for another year.

While Martin’s childhood was one of poverty and hard work, he remembered many good times as well:

Little schoolhouses a plenty have I seen, but the only one actually painted red was the first I attended. At least it once had been red. When I knew it there were only a few rusty flakes of paint showing here and there on its weatherboarding. But inside its drab walls was as eager and lively a lot of youngsters as ever cooked up mischief in any school in the land. The combination of saint, genius, and athlete who presided over the young bedlam was also the village preacher. He could lean backward, rest his head on the ground, and come back to a standing position without ever bending his knee. He could jump backward and forward over a stick which he held in his hands. He could wiggle his ears up and down, and make his hair move backward and forward down to his eyebrows. The old folks, however, seemed not so enthusiastic about Mr. Huff. Even if he could hit a home run, they thought his sermons were dull, and soon after I came to adorn his schoolroom they let him go. But he was my hero still. Stern, honest, and kind all at the same time, he was my measure of a man.

Martin’s love of school, and his patience with teachers not as wonderful as Mr. Huff, came from that first grade experience. But his most honored mentor was his grandmother Jeanette:

The gentlest and wisest teacher of them all, however, had no classroom. She could not even read or write, having been brought up in mountain country before the Civil War, when schools were few and far between and the struggle for bread was nip and tuck. But she understood more than many who have read, and even written, stacks of books. Her stories about life on a mountain farm during the war of

1861

–

1865

and about her husband Jasper’s life spared by the old freed slave held her grandchildren by the hour.

Although Martin was born in Seneca, he lived in several mill towns in the northwestern corner of South Carolina. When there was no more work at one mill, Harvey and Julia and their five children moved to be near another factory. Once they even dreamed of a better life all the way out West. Years later Martin wrote to a grandson:

April

4

,

1909

Pa left for the timber country of Washington state. The rest of us were to come later. Never did. A forest fire burned up the little town where we were to live. Pa looked for work and did some lumbering and then came back to South Carolina.

With that dream shattered, the family returned to whatever work could be found at the local mills. By the time Martin was fourteen, he was earning money to help with the family expenses. During the school year, he left home at dawn, or in the winter before dawn, to light the stove in the schoolhouse. Summers he worked in the mill. Even in those days, it was not legal for young teenagers to handle big and dangerous machinery. But it was a job, and the family needed the money. Martin’s boss showed him how to operate the looms and then he ordered, "If you see a