COLUMN: There’s a special place in heaven for single mothers

They were not just single mothers.

They were saints.

They never thought they would have to wear so many hats and  juggle so many balls. They never dreamed the double duty of raising children alone would require such a level of ambidexterity.

Full-time mothers. Part-time sleepers. They were superheroes long before it was a word in the dictionary.

There is a special place in heaven for Magnolia Edwards, Jewell Henderson, Ella Mae Fincher and Lucy Ellington. 

They are already there… gone from their earthly lives, having left a legacy of strength and kindness.

I never had the honor of meeting any of these four women. But I knew their sons, all good men. They loved their mamas more than life itself. 

Magnolia died the week after Mother’s Day in 1981. She is buried in the church cemetery behind Macedonia Baptist on East Broad Street in Sparta. Lucy was laid to rest in Oaklawn Cemetery on Ga. 49 south of Fort Valley. The graves of Ella Mae and Jewell can be found beneath the pines and on the slopes of hills at Macon Memorial Park.

I thought about Magnolia a few weeks ago when city officials renamed part of Millerfield Road after her son. The late Lonzy Edwards was one of Macon’s most respected citizens. 

He was pastor of Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist. He was a Bibb County commissioner, an attorney, a small business owner and an author. He died in 2016.

On a wall at his law office, he kept a washboard, a wash tub and the irons his mother once heated with coals from the fireplace. She washed and ironed clothes for folks in Hancock County in the 1950s for $5 a week.

They served as daily reminders of the sacrifices a single mother  made for her only child. Lonzy would look at that wall and never forget the gentle soul they called “Mag.”  

“That’s where I come from,” he once told me. “It keeps me humble. Those were the tools of her trade. I put them there to remind me of the sacrifices she made and the values she instilled in me. She always told me to go out and make something of myself.’’

She truly was a Steel Magnolia. 

I remember the emotion on Carl Ellington’s face when he told me the story of his mama, who died 16 years ago last month.

Lucy married her high school sweetheart, Wiley Ellington, in Fort Valley on Dec. 7, 1941, the same day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.  Her newlywed husband soon left for France to serve his country in World War II. After the war, he returned home and worked at a furniture store.

The Ellingtons started a family, but Wiley and another Macon man drowned in a boating accident in 1955 while fishing at Lake Blackshear. Lucy was left with two young boys. She never remarried.

“There are a lot of women raising children on their own, but I just don’t see how my mother held up all those years,” Carl told me. “She was one of the true heroes in America — someone who accepted her lot in life and made the best of it.”

Lucy found work as a secretary and squeezed every red cent when she sat at the kitchen table to pay the bills. She provided for her sons. She never bought a new dress the entire time Carl was in college.  

“She never went out or did things for herself,” he said. “As we probably would say these days: ‘She didn’t have a life.’ Oh, but she did. Her life was her boys. She had joy in her family.”  

The youngest of Jewell Henderson’s four children went on to become one of Macon’s greatest athletes — and later coaches. Her hard work and dedication was a beacon of light for Billy Henderson, who worshiped his mom with every breath he took. 

His father died of complications from a ruptured appendix in May 1937, one month before Billy’s ninth birthday. Jewell never married again. She found work wherever she could to provide for her family.

 She made sure her boys wore clean shirts to school. Although they qualified for a welfare lunch program, she would not accept charity and packed them a sack lunch every day. She read the Bible every day of her life.

Billy died on Valentine’s Day in 2018, six years after the interchange at Interstate 75 and Sardis Church Road was named in his honor. He always said his mother could not have had a more fitting first name. 

“She taught by example,’’ he said. “I was blessed she was my mother. Every Christmas, she made me think of the less fortunate. I never considered us not being wealthy. She gave me more than wealth.’’

Her fingerprints were on every page of his life story. And I was honored to later write his biography.  An entire chapter was devoted to Jewell.

The same could be said about Ella Mae.  I wrote a book about her son, too. Durwood Fincher grew up in the shadow of the cotton mill in Payne City and went on to become a nationally-known comedian known as “Mr. Doubletalk.’’

Every day was “Mae” day in the village. If the mill had a matriarch, it was Ella Mae. Her door was always unlocked. There wasn’t a mean bone beneath the buttons of her flower-print dresses. 

Ella Mae asked her husband, Jack, to leave when Durwood was 8 years old. She told her children that she still loved their father, and she begged them never to hate him. She kicked him out because she could no longer put up with his drinking.

For more than 30 years, she worked in the spinning department at the mill. It left her fingers so calloused and worn that she had no fingerprints with which to hold a deck of cards to play solitaire. She had varicose veins in her legs from standing on her feet all day. She was only 58 when she died of a heart
attack.

Ella Mae was described by a neighbor as “one of the grandest women ever born.’’ She made time for her children. They had perfect attendance in Sunday School.

“I didn’t know anybody who didn’t love my mother,’’ Durwood said.

 She was his mom. But in the mill village surrounded by Macon, she was everybody’s mom.

You probably know one, too. They were, are and always will be our north stars.

Ed Grisamore is the author of nine books and was the recipient of the 2010 Will Rogers Humanitarian Award, presented by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.