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 man in a suit coming through the door, hide in this closet.” But a man in a suit, a child labor inspector, rarely came through the doors of cotton mills in South Carolina.
Harvey, even with Martin’s help, could not earn enough money to meet the basic needs of a family of seven. Although Julia was busy cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, and gardening, she had an idea: They could buy a house and take in boarders. Somehow the family saved and borrowed and finally had enough cash for a down payment. They were grateful that, at last, they did not have to live in a cottage that the mill owned and that charged too much for the rent. The children squeezed into the small bedrooms, and the extra room held two single men who worked at the mill. The boarders were glad to pay for clean surroundings and for the chicken with biscuits and green beans with corn bread that Julia prepared for each evening meal.
The mill owners, however, did not want their workers to be independent enough to own their own homes. They demanded that everyone who worked for them also rent a little house from them at the price the bosses decided. After two years they forced Harvey and Julia to sell the house back to the factory. Harvey needed the work. The family became renters again, paying the price the company demanded.
Martin was angry; angry at the mill owners and angry at being poor. He looked around the village and saw only one group poorer than the mill workers, black people. The teenager also noticed that other poor white people would try to feel better about themselves by dressing up in sheets and terrorizing their black neighbors. The Ku Klux Klan was gaining strength among people who were upset by their dead-end lives and needed someone to look down upon. Martin was just as poor and just as frustrated. But he had to find another way out. He could never join the Klan, or even use the insults their members did. “Remember,” Julia would say again and again, “a black man saved your grandfather’s life.”
3
Martin did find a way out. At sixteen only he and one other boy in the village finished high school; the rest had dropped out. Actually, he only finished the eleventh grade, since the school had to close due to lack of coal and to the terrible flu epidemic that circled the world in 1917 and 1918.
The young man could not
