By Faith and By Love. Beverly E. Williams
of the most helpful services I have ever attended. No music. No fuss. No lilies.
That spring, among all the serious discussions in their letters, one ended: “I love you, Martin.” Would Mabel consider coming to North Carolina that summer? Administrators at Mars Hill College had asked Martin to teach in summer school. He planned to rent a house so that his parents could escape the South Carolina heat and go to the mountains. “And for the first time in twelve years, I can live away from a dormitory!”
What happened the week that Mabel came to visit? There are, of course, no letters. There are no journals. But Martin did write after she left: “Let each of us see all the way down into the heart of the other.” And it was after that reunion he began calling her the nickname he used even when they were old:
Dear Girl, I’ve just been up on Little Mountain, trying to get my bearings. No, not just East and West, but about my work next year, and lots of other things. Does my idea of going back to school next year seem foolish to you, with no job in sight?
Martin had hoped to visit Mabel in Florida at the end of the summer, but, as usual, he had no extra money. He took one last hike along what is now the Blue Ridge Parkway, and his letter reminds the reader that hikers could once drink safely from mountain streams:
I brought pen and paper to write to you. There are ranges of mountains one after another, until they are completely lost in the blue of the sky. Cold water when you are thirsty and wondering how many miles until you find a spring. The faint chug-chug of a train in the middle of the night. Stars. Birds. Sunrise. Sunset.
6
In Kentucky Martin had completed two of the three graduate school years needed to become a minister. But, he wrote to his sweetheart,
Crozer has a certain number of required courses, and no matter where you studied, you have to take them again here. For New Testament I’ve had to wait until the professor comes back from his year’s leave. It is a good thing in the long run, since I have been able to take extra courses, including one at the University of Pennsylvania.
September 22, 1932
Dear Heart,
Beginning my hardest year in school. The courses in seminaries are run for preachers; other folks are just tolerated. But I have been forced anew to commit myself to missions as a life business. I feel that God needs me most in Africa, because the needs of God’s children are perhaps greater than anywhere in the world and there are so few people to help. But money matters don’t look good for going out with the Southern Baptists.
Two weeks later, Martin was in a more jovial mood, sending Mabel letters about the Crozer Student Association and his job, like the one at the YMCA center, as dining hall supervisor. “No sleeping through breakfast this year since I must be down to give the gang their prunes and oatmeal.”
While it seems strange to us, in the time of cell phones and e-mail, Martin and Mabel had to watch all purchases carefully, even stamps. Martin’s December letter, mailed as soon as exams were over, told Mabel that he was leaving Richmond, Virginia, with a classmate at 5:00 a.m., and that they were planning to drive all night, arriving in Miami late the next afternoon. Martin spent eight cents on a special delivery letter to let Mabel know what time on Christmas Eve he hoped to arrive.
January 5, 1933: I love you and know that you love me.
January 11: The fellows have been kidding me about being so different since came back. I know I am different.
January 17: Do I love you? Is coal black?
But the realities of finding a job in the worst days of the Depression began to intrude again on the love letters. Martin could get a doctorate from Hartford Seminary, but there was a catch. Scholarship winners had to be under appointment from a church board. The board, however, told him they didn’t have any money. And his age was beginning to be a worry: “A year or two does make a difference in this missions business. Sometimes thirty is tops.” Martin was thirty-one. By February he wrote: “The scholarship to Hartford is off.”
In between midwinter exams, Martin hoped to return to New York to try to negotiate a plan with the church officials in that city. After exams he wrote another long letter, with another “3 Cents Due,” about his dreams and how hard it was to give up on them. And how much he wanted Mabel to join him as wife and partner: “Two weeks at the honeymoon cottage at Blue Ridge, where we met?”
In February he wrote to Mabel, worried about one of the last big projects before graduation, the Senior Sermon:
What shall I say to these fellows? Better to say nothing, in times like these, than have some namby-pamby nothings that sound pretty but leave people as hungry as before. An opportunity, but a responsibility bigger than I am.
In the spring of 1933 Martin heard about a little country church in North Carolina that needed a pastor. “Two of my friends are looking into it for me.” Back to the South. Closer to Mabel and her family, and to his family. Security, if there was any during the Depression. But Martin knew that more experienced men would be applying for the job. He did not want to give up on his dream of serving in another country. And he would not hide his views on war and on race.
April 8, 1933
Wish I could talk and not have to write this.
The problem? Martin was applying to work for the (Northern) Baptist church overseas and Mabel was a Methodist. While it doesn’t sound like much of an issue today, both of them knew that it would matter to the church leaders. Martin tried to explain his dilemma:
There are so many Baptists who are constantly making trouble with the officers. Frankly I do feel that denominationalism (different Protestant groups) has outlived its day. We can talk it over later. It is your decision whether or not to change your church membership. Should we pull out all together or stay in and try to encourage fellowship among groups?
Martin must have felt sad even bringing up this subject with the woman he loved. Two days later he tried to joke with her and forget the last, difficult subject:
Are you making those what-do-you-call-it Hope Chests for your wedding gifts? Or do only foolish girls do that nowadays? Sensible YWCA directors?
His next letter to Mabel was back to worries about money and the future.
Things do not look encouraging. Work and save a “nest egg” before we are married? I think that I have never been tested as I am now. I have been recommended for a church on Long Island that cannot support a pastor and his family. But they expect their pastor to stay for several years. To get a job, you have to camp on their doorstep.
How could he do that and complete his studies at the same time?
Mabel must have opened these letters with a mixture of joy and dread. Sometimes Martin’s mood was light, even with the worries about his future. He and his friends had gone over to Princeton, New Jersey: “We heard ninety-four young men and women from Westminster Choir College perform the most wonderful singing I have ever heard.” And back in Philadelphia he had attended a lecture on China by the novelist Pearl Buck, who five years later became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
May 1933. Mabel was coming from Miami to Pennsylvania for Martin’s graduation!
Dear Girl, Come as soon as you can. Today I found out that I have an exam at the University of Pennsylvania on June 6th. Maybe you can see some of the campus while I write Sociology. Then I will throw my books out of sight and the world will be ours.
Even when Mabel was old, she enjoyed telling her family about that trip and how Martin’s friends had teased her. As she waited in the lobby, they would run by with pictures of their own girlfriends, or a classmate’s girlfriend, and tell her they had found it in Martin’s room.
After graduation Martin returned to his parents’ home in South Carolina and finally gave himself permission to relax: “Lazy as I ever was in my life. Sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping. Blackberry picking.”
But the vacation did not last long. He was