Benny Bailey, Pudding and Pie, Chased the Girls And… [F, 12-27-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man--Benny Bailey, Pudding and Pie, Chased the Girls And… [F, 12-27-24]

 

In a way, I was glad that Ben was chasing the girls all around the parking lot of the gas station. It was good fun. The girls enjoyed it. They liked Ben. Everybody liked Ben. He was a jolly fat boy who would not have known what to do with a girl had he caught her.

There were some problems, though. The gas station was in Mississippi. It was 1967. The girls were white. Ben was black.

I was glad that the kids thought it was natural to act the same way with each other in Wenona, Mississippi as they did in Normal, IL, the site of IL State U, where they were part of my campus ministry unit, The Wesley Foundation. That was the way life should be.

But it was not.

Not in Mississippi, in 1967.

So I was glad but also horrified that Ben was chasing the girls, in front of a passel of scowling hillbillies [1] where we were putting gas in the nine passenger Plymouth station wagon that I had rented for the trip. [2]

It was an end-of-Christmas-break trip. We were going to Holly Springs, MS, the site of Rust College. Rust was one of fourteen black colleges the Methodists had started in the South a long time before. The denomination had recently rediscovered them, realized that they needed new life for a new era after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. The colleges were underfunded. We of The Methodist Student Movement were tasked with getting college students in the North familiar with our HBUC [3] schools in the South, so that they could go out to churches and tell their story, and raise money for them.

It was a successful trip. My kids were rightfully chagrined at the primitive conditions of Rust College, and rightfully impressed at the courage and commitment of the faculty and staff and students. They were glad to go back to Illinois to raise money to support their fellow students, to scatter out to churches large and small, with a slide projector, and their own stories to tell.

It was also successful because Ben never caught any of the girls, and so I didn’t have to explain to the scowling locals about how it was okay for young people of all races to act like regular kids now.

Several of those girls liked going to talk at churches about Rust College so much that they became preachers. Time after time they were the first woman preacher their church ever had. It was no problem to them, though. Thanks to Ben Bailey, they had learned how to be chased without getting caught.

John Robert McFarland

1] I use that term affectionately. I gladly refer to myself as a Hoosier hillbilly.

2] I was amazed at the cutting-edge technology of that new, dark blue Plymouth. The turn signals went off on their own when you straightened up after a turn. I had never seen anything like it. I thought, “They’ve gone about as fur as they can go!”

3] HBUC = Historically Black Universities and Colleges

I assume you figured out why, in the column for 12-23, I referred in the title to the Xmas program and changed it to Christmas program in the column.