There are two ways of writing the story of Elizabeth Bolden. The first is to say that she had a very long life. She died in December, aged 116, passing on the mantle of the world’s oldest person to a man from Puerto Rico.
Seen this way, you marvel at the endurance of a woman who was born in the year that Wyoming became the 44th state of the union, that Dwight Eisenhower was born and Sitting Bull died. It was also the year that Bram Stoker began writing Dracula.
But turn the lens around and look at her life from the other direction. This story has a different narrative: its emphasis is not on longevity but on the compression of time. Events that belong to the shelves of history are but a single lifetime away.
Lizzie was the daughter of freed slaves. She was brought into a world defined by the immediate and bitter aftermath of slavery. The year of her birth, 1890, saw Louisiana pass the country’s first ”separate car law”, which made it illegal for blacks to sit in railway carriages reserved for whites — an important stepping stone in the creation of the ”Jim Crow” system of southern segregation.
She was born in Somerville, near Memphis, Tennessee, in the heart of the cotton-picking region that relied on slave labour. Her parents were emancipated, either voluntarily by their owners or at the end of the Civil War. The details are unclear. Lizzie’s eldest grandson, John Bolden, recalls that Lizzie’s sister, Phillis, was married to a former slave. Again, the details are hazy, but Phillis would sometimes go into a kind of trance and shout: ”Don’t hit my husband no more! Don’t hit him no more!” Her children assumed she was re-enacting the slave-owners’ abuses.
Bolden (77) last saw his grandmother about two weeks before her death in the Memphis nursing home where she had lived for seven years. He says she was the ”sweetest grandmother”, with a sharp memory until towards the end and a fondness for lollipops and ice cream.
Lizzie and her husband, Lewis Bolden, lived a life that in many respects remained unchanged from that of her slave parents. They worked as croppers and then tenant farmers, hand-picking cotton in the autumn months and carting it by mule to the gins.
”Farming, that’s all she ever done,” said Bolden. ”She never had any other job: just cotton and raising her own peas and sugar cane for molasses.” There was very little education, and Lizzie could barely read or write. At times food was scarce and they relied on ash cake — patties of flour and water cooked in the ash of the fire.
Six generations
”We didn’t even know we were poor,” said Bolden, who worked one of his grandfather’s mules as a child. ”I thought it was a fine thing picking cotton. So, I was hungry from time to time, but I only learned later that things could be better.”
As the years went by and her family grew, Lizzie became more and more focused on her religion. She acquired the distinction of being the ”mother” of her church, and people took to calling her Mamma Lizzie. Geneva Tunstall (78) worked a neighbouring cotton farm and remembers her firm guidance. ”As the mother she would pull aside the girls when they were doing wrong and put them back on the right path. She was a deeply Christian lady.”
Her funeral was held in the church where she worshipped for decades — the New Wright chapel of the Missionary Baptist church, founded in Memphis in 1927. Many of her six generations of descendants attended the service, squeezing into the chapel as best they could. At the last count there were two surviving children, 40 grandchildren, 75 great-grandchildren, 150 great-great grandchildren, 220 great-great-great grandchildren and 75 great-great-great-great grandchildren.
It was Mamma Lizzie’s religion that saw her through the darker experiences of Memphis life. Tunstall recalls having to drink water from the fountain marked for blacks. ”When we ate out we’d go to the back of the café to get ours, and the whites went to the front.”
John Bolden said that discrimination never went away. ”It wasn’t slavery when I was growing up, but it was slavery’s first cousin.”
He spoke of how he came close to being lynched as a teenager in 1947. The daughter of a wealthy owner of a pharmacy had nearly been caught with her boyfriend, who had fled through her bedroom window. When questioned, she made up a story about a black man peeping at her through the window.
The police were called and set out across the tracks — blacks lived on one side of the railway and whites on the other — to hunt the culprit. Bolden was the first person they came across. He was arrested, and the white girl said he was the Peeping Tom, to cries of ”Kill him! Kill him!”. The intervention of a conscientious police officer spared him; he was freed and told to leave town.
Belief
Through all this, Lizzie Bolden hung on to her belief. ”When things got bad, Mamma Lizzie would say, ‘We all got to pray and God will make things better,”’ said John. ”Remember, for her things had got better: her brother-in-law had been a slave, she was free and would be paid for her work. There was no more whipping by the master.”
She was still preaching the power of prayer when the civil rights movement came to Memphis. In 1966 James Meredith, a black student activist, set out on a ”March against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Two days into it he was shot and wounded.
Then, in the spring of 1968, black sanitation workers went on strike in protest at discriminatory wages, under the slogan ”I am a man”. The strike drew nationwide attention and brought Martin Luther King Jnr to Memphis on April 4.
It is only a 10-minute drive from Lizzie Bolden’s chapel to the Lorraine motel, but it represents a much greater journey. You can still see room 306 and the balcony in front of it, preserved as a memorial. A wreath marks the spot where King was standing. If that sniper’s bullet now seems a long time ago, look at it like this: Lizzie was already two-thirds through her life by then.
In later years she had other tragedies to cope with: the deaths of five of her seven children. When her youngest daughter, Annie Pearl, died seven years ago she was too confused to take it in.
Recently, Lizzie had been heard to cry out: ”Take me home!” At first, relatives thought she meant she wanted to leave the nursing hospital. But then they realised she was saying something else. ”She was talking about heaven,” said John Bolden. ”That’s where she wanted to go. And that’s where she is now — in peace at last.”
A life less ordinary
August 15 1890
Born in Somerville, outside Memphis. Had at least one sister, Aunt Phillis, and one brother, Monroe Jones. Vincent van Gogh killed himself; United States cavalry massacred more than 400 men, women and children at Wounded Knee.
1908
Lizzie marries Lewis Bolden and they begin farming cotton as tenant farmers outside Memphis. First Mother’s Day is observed in West Virginia; Baden-Powell starts the Boy Scouts; Henry Ford produces first Model T automobile.
1909
First child, Ezell, born. Ernest Shackleton reaches the magnetic South Pole.
1950
Husband dies.
1990
Lizzie turns 100. Her son, John Bolden’s father, dies. Manuel Noriega of Panama surrenders to US; South Africa’s FW de Klerk legalises the African National Congress.
1999
Youngest daughter, Annie Pearl, dies and Lizzie enters nursing home. Bill Clinton avoids impeachment; war in Kosovo.
— Guardian Unlimited Â