Great Grandma Mimi
My Mother’s cousin Fonda remembers Grandma Mimi…
The earliest memories of her is when we lived with her at 650 Jackson Ave. Memphis, Tn. I was about the age of 5, I think. She ran a rooming house on the corner and we had rooms upstairs along with another couple.
Her name was indeed Ella Susan Fonville Hanson.
The thing I remember most about that time is that she loved to hold revivals in the back yard of the house with many lights strung on wires and poles around the yard to see by and many long benches for the people to sit on. I remember just across the street and down the block were the projects for the blacks and if one of them came to the back door for a meal she would have them do something like raking the yard or? and she never turned them away, she always fed them.
I remember her white hair and sitting on her lap all cozy soft in the rocker. She loved to rock, and dip snuff and she would spit it into a coffee can which she kept by the chair, and I hated the thing…UGH! I recall she was always cooking for everyone and I think that must have been her main interest. She also loved to quilt, and most times had a frame up with a quilt in progress and she always had me go under the frame to catch the needle as she pushed it though when she was sewing the layers together and making her design. She even made me a quilt with all kinds of ducks and animals on it for my bed.
She did not put up with misbehaving and would scold you but she was a gentle woman and very loving. I remember visiting her in different settings and places in Mississippi also. She came to the Memphis Cotton Carnival with us and she enjoyed riding a few of the rides. I never saw her angry but always a happy person.
She loved all the gravies and fried chicken, sweet potato pies, fudge pies…in fact I have her fudge pie recipe and your aunt Margaret can remember that!!! She loved making a big pot of turnip and mustard greens together with salt pork and cooking them down to get the juice which is called Liquor, and along with that we had corn bread which we crumbled up in the Liquor and ate, it was so good. Buttermilk was her favorite drink and often times she left it over to sour to make biscuits with, which was called clabbered milk.
