The Strawberry Story: When I Can Read My Title Clear

By Mallory

I never read a book about the Black experience in Marshall County Mississippi; perhaps, such a book has never been written. Episodes of the black experience can be found in many books written about this historic County, but none take the Black experience as the theme. This book purports to do what other books about the County do not do; tell the black experience as lived by my great grand parent, grand parent, parent and me. I choose the historic Strawberry Missionary Baptist Church as the stage in which the story is played out.

As a small child, I went with my parents to a burial in Stephenson- McAlexander Cemetery. While adults occupied themselves with the burial ceremony; my cousin, Myrtle Zinn Robinson and I seized the opportunity to probe. While probing, we made two discoveries. First, two cemeteries claimed the same serene and shady hill side; one inside the fence, the other outside. As children, the second discovery was perplexing to us; many of the surnames of those resting on both sides of the fence were Stephensons. Those inside the fence, as we were admonished, were White; those outside the fence, as we were told, were Black. This was the day an interest in history was sparked within me.


The Strawberry Story opens with a statement of Marshall County in its pre Civil War
glory days. After being defeated, Confederate solders hobbled back home to wide
spread destruction and ruin. Among the post war problems that had to be resolved were social, political and economic issues relating to the ex-slaves. While these
issues were being debated, the ex-slaves in a five mile radius south of Coldwater
River in northeast Marshall County were concerned with survival and organizing a
church so they could freely serve God. In Part I of the book, research was used to
give the ex-slaves an identity. Through research, discoveries were made as to whom
these slaves were, where they hailed from and broken families were pieced together again. Part II of this book is oral history as told by third generation Strawberry people. As a church family, they provide continuity through time from slavery to now. From slavery to now, their continuity in the church has never been broken. They were born during the first third of the twentieth century and lived through Jim Crow, survived a system of diminishing returns sharecropping, survived the hardships of the great depression and lived through World Wars I. They stayed home and survived the adversities while their siblings joined the great northern migration. They witnessed cotton loose its crown. In spite of the rage encountered, they glow when reminiscing about their sweet Strawberry school days, Saturday afternoon baseball on Max field and memories of getting a religion. While they were living it, they loved the life they lived. Both laughter and tears flow from the line of The Strawberry Story: WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLE CLEAR.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 25, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462839247

Mallory

I was born into a tenant farming family in Marshall County Mississippi in the 1940s. My father was from Benton County and my mother was from the Strawberry community in Marshall County. When they married in 1938, they made their home east of Holly Springs. I started to school in a one room, one teacher church school. Much of my early education was interrupted with having to do field work. By the time I entered high school, cottton production had declined which gave me an opportunity to attend school regularly. I graduated in 1967. Thanks to my high school history teacher, Sister Donatilla Lorenz, who forwarded a college entrance application and paid the fee to Christian Brothers University without my knowing it, I entered CBU in the fall of 1967. After graduating, I took a job and attended evening graduate classes at Memphis State University and took on the responsibility of being a father to my son Tony and daughter Lori. Following my career, I took on job assignments in Memphis and later Oakland, California and Atlanta, Georgia. Returning to the county of my birth has afforded me time to pursue genealogical research and writing as first interests. The church of my membership, historic Strawberry Plains Missionary Baptist, has proven to be a haven for me to pursue my interests in research and writing. These interests have led me to engage in dialogue and befriend great and good people; including my mentor and friend, Dr. Hubert McAlexander.

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Copyright © 2008 by Willie H. Mallory.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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38778

Contents

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Part I

Part II

A Human Bond

Endnotes

Bibliography

Dedication

Annie Mae Zinn Mallory (1916-1984)

Fannie Lee Oliver Zinn (1917-2006)

James Oliver (1922-2005)

James Elihue White Howell (1935-2006)

Idalia Harris Holloway

Monroe Howell, Jr.

Maggie Rijane Jones Freeman

Grace Mallory Turner

Lillie Mae Matthews Oliver

Emma Howell

Fannie Jones Martin

Bessie Crane Cowan

Olivia Stephenson Batts (1926-2006)

Without the Strawberry senior, this book could not have been written. Your survival stories are great examples for us all. When I was a child, my mother, Annie Zinn Mallory, told me Strawberry stories. As events changed my life, those stories influenced me to become a Strawberry member.

When I started pastoring this church in 2002, I began hearing about the age of the church. My interest was further peaked when I learned that some of our children members are direct descendents of the ex-slaves who started the church. The last item, which convinced me that we needed to write the church history, was when I learned that the name Strawberry came from the fact that the first church was built on a hill of wild strawberries.

38778-MALL-layout.pdf

Willie F. Jeffries, Jr., Pastor

Courtesy Dr. David Wharton

When I suggested that we write the church’s history, my schoolmate and friend took the challenge. He has done a masterful job. He has worked tirelessly researching, interviewing, writing and rewriting the pages we now enjoy.

Willie Mallory was always a self-starter even when we were in elementary school. His initiative and ability to see a job through has blessed our church with one of the richest contributions Strawberry has made to the community in 140 years. This book will live on so that thousands will know of this little church and the people who worship here.

Brother Mallory, thank you. Your just due will come with time.

Willie F. Jeffries, Jr., Pastor

Strawberry Plains Missionary Baptist Church

[e-mail]

Acknowledgement

Dr. Hubert McAlexander, your scholarship is awesome. When research did not provide answers, you shared your personal archives. The meetings and e-mails kept me focused. Thanks for challenging me to go further and learn more.

Dr. Sylvester Oliver, the chronology of history you and Mrs. Lula R. Brown Oliver Mitchell put together was the best starting point for researching and writing The Strawberry Story. Your interest in the church’s history inspired this writing.

Thanks for your encouragement and support: Madge Lindsay (Audubon Mississippi), Dr. Jennifer Ford (University of Mississippi), Dr. Susan Glisson (University of Mississippi), Dr. Philip K. Ensley (San Diego, CA.), Marie Jones, June Marie Talley, Queneta Thigpen, Brankley Spight, Myrtle Zinn Robinson, Pearly Jones, Ann Bennette, Clara Howell Isom, Carol Talley Thigpen and the Strawberry family.

Introduction

When the Strawberry Historic Society was given the challenge to research

and record The Strawberry Story, the first question to arise was how best to tackle the challenge of piecing together the one-hundred-forty-year-old mystery. The survey of history and chronology written by the church’s first historian—with the assistance of her nephew, Dr. Sylvester Oliver—was chosen as the instrument to guide the study. The church’s seniors were selected as the best resources to get the ball rolling. After rounds of interviews with them, curiosity was sparked that lead to an in-depth genealogical investigation seeking answers to the questions: Who were our slave ancestors? Where did they hail from? And who owned them?

When the Chickasaw were removed from this territory, the first American landowner in the northeast section of Marshall County, Mississippi, south of the Coldwater River, was the United States government (1832). The government sold the land to speculators who shuffled ownership about for a few years. By 1841, the land adjacent to where the church would later be located was purchased and cleared by Major J. P. M. Stephenson, Ebenezer Davis, and Benjamin Williams. They brought slaves with them to clear the frontier, till the soil, and build their masters’ homes. Against the odds of a frowning world, the slaves’ first contribution to the county, after they had read their title clear for the first time, was to organize a church—the Strawberry Plain Baptist Church (1867). This is the origin of the Strawberry Story: When I Can Read My Title Clear.

The Strawberry Story is more than a story of a church. It is the story of a people, their survival, and determination. Theirs was the world of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, sharecropping, World War I, the Depression, World War II, Jim Crow, and the like. Through it all, they swallowed their feelings hoping for a better day. It is hoped that the message in this book match the magnitude of the subject matter discussed.

The church that started out with members from three plantations thrived as the community’s only black church. Relationships based on land and labor created a mutual dependency between the races that enticed the former slaves and their heirs to remain on these plantations from the end of slavery to the end of the cotton era (1960s). The Strawberry school (1892) provided another strong incentive for them to remain grounded in the community. The school, with its exceptionally high enrollment, served as feeder for the church’s growth. Those who attended the Strawberry school joined the church. Their concept of the world was limited. They lived, labored and died on the same plantations where their slave ancestors lived, labored, and died.

History is sometimes best told by those who lived it. The oral history section of this book provides true accounts of life as experienced by the church’s seniors, some of whom were born before 1920. Their subjects are diverse and far-reaching. Subjects range from their school days to a goat in the upper level of the old school house. Some of their stories are humorous, others are sad. As they lived it, they loved the life they lived. Their stories, highlighting the struggles of black people during the early and middle twentieth century, contribute to a point of view that is often omitted from the pages of the Marshall County’s history.

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Part I

Against the Odds

The Treaty of Pon te tok (1832), opening of the Natchez Trace, the Mississippi State Legislature’s decision to grant Marshall County a charter (1836), an abundance of slave labor and the opening of the Grand Junction-Holly Springs Railroad—to transport its cotton to markets in Memphis and New Orleans—earned Marshall County the celebrated title king cotton. Over the Indian and buffalo trails, settlers flocked from Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, to purchase and clear the rich land south of the Coldwater River.

Many of those who came to the new frontier brought a supply of slave labor. Before there was a Strawberry Plain Baptist church—slaves harboring the hope of a church—tilled the soil, cleared the wilderness, built railroads and roads, constructed Greek revival homes for their masters near the fertile Coldwater. A Marshall County ex-slave, Sally Folts, said that before the slaves had their own churches, They had church in a old barn or in a ditch and they had prayer meeting at one another houses.

Lizzie Brown, an ex-slave from Marshall County’s Fant plantation, left a dramatic account of what it was like for slaves who slipped away to have church on their own. Her story reads:

One time niggers from the different plantations sneak off and had a preaching in a ditch. Uncle Pat made him a pulpit out of a split log and the niggers stand up at the other end and listen to him. Uncle Pat was a-zoring and a-zoring them sinners, when all a sudden, they saw him reach behind him, slap on his cap, fall backward off that log and run like the Devil wus after him. They turned around and patarollers wus all around ’em. They wus surrounded. Some of ’em got away but the pataroller got a lot of ’em. Yes’m, them patarollers sho wus a ’noyance in them days."¹

Major J. P. M. and wife, Eliza Mitchell Stephenson, Eben Davis, Benjamin Williams and his wife, Eliza were among the earliest to settle south of the Coldwater River. These homesteaders played a major role in transforming the Coldwater wilderness into great estates. Theirs were the wealthiest of the early Mt. Pleasant Road plantations.

In 1840, Marshall County had 8,268 slaves. Major Stephenson recorded twenty-eight slave births on his plantation from 1841-1866. History has it that Eben Davis’s Strawberry Plains Plantation had one hundred thirteen slaves. It is not known how many slaves Eliza Dawson and her husbands owned; however, many freedmen in the community bore the surname of Eliza’s parents and her three husbands (Perkins, Williams, and Dawson). Her second husband, Benjamin Williams, mentions five slaves—Caroline and her child and Priscilla and her two children—in his 1848 will. Evidence indicates that the Dawsons owned a large number of slaves. The slave roots of many of the founding officers and members of the Strawberry Plain Baptist Church can be traced to these plantations. Fortunately, these were large plantations that could afford to hold slave families together rather than sell off family members to meet financial obligations.

The land of Cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South was changed by the Civil War, Negroes were free to establish their own institutions such as churches, schools, fraternal order, burial societies, etc. Oral history has it that, in the pre-Civil War glory days, Mr. Davis established a church at Strawberry Plains for his slaves. Following the numerous General Grant raids, Strawberry Plains was left in no condition to take on humanitarian efforts like a church. The church closed and left a spiritual void in the community.

The aftermath of the war is best summed up in the words from the movie Gone With The Wind: "Home from their lost adventure came the tattered Cavalier. Grimly they came hobbling back to the dissolution that had once been the land of grace and plenty." Civil War battles raged and soldiers plundered for food a stone throw away from what would become the church’s backyard.

When the slaves first got their freedom, the first issue to arise among them was a church. This issue merited careful consideration. The war ended slavery, destroyed property, and it left "Southerners far more self-conscious . . . far more aware of their differences and of the line which divided what was southern from what was not." Some Confederate sympathizers were driven by motives that were not always noble. Except for the Mississippi Baptists, other protestant denominations had not made fundamental rule changes to allow freedmen to organize separate congregations.

The rule of some Protestant denominations, allowing only the educated to preach, simultaneously barred freedmen from the pulpit. Slaves were most likely to be uneducated due to having been enslaved and therefore restricted from an education. In its effort to protect local church autonomy, certain scripture beliefs, and to grow the church, the Mississippi Baptist Convention sanctioned called preachers in a 1840 resolution.