If I Live to Be 100 by Neenah Ellis

Author:Neenah Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307565839
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2010-02-26T08:00:00+00:00

10

LOUISIANA HINES

“You know, people used to sell

people a long time ago.”

I STAYED IN Detroit all week and saw Ruth Ellis three more times. To fill the hours between visits, I went for long drives along the river in the rain and listened to deejay Ed Love play jazz on WDET-FM.

One evening I went to visit another centenarian and drove west, out Grand River Avenue, which cuts through one struggling commercial district after another: liquor stores and Coney Island restaurants and vacant lots and plastic bags flattened against chain-link fences by the wind.

The woman I wanted to meet has the musical name of Louisiana Hines, and I knew very little about her except that her grandfather was a slave.

She lives in a brick Tudor-style home on a side street off Grand River. There are white cement planters full of red plastic roses on either side of the front steps.

Her granddaughter, Darlene House, meets me at the door. As she takes my coat, I see a woman out of the corner of my eye, in the living room, shoving furniture into place and plumping pillows. I assume that Mrs. Hines has live-in help, but Darlene calls the woman over and says, “This is my grandmother, Louisiana.”

She shakes my hand firmly. Her hands are large and strong but she is shy. She is wearing a floral-print dress (of her own design, she tells me later) and black basketball shoes. She looks and acts far younger than any centenarian I have met, even Anna Wilmot.

She chooses a velvet armchair to sit in and I perch on the edge of the couch, next to her. She bounces around in the chair like a child, smoothing out her skirt, leaning forward and back. She seems nervous, which is a surprise to me. I respond by trying to be ultra-cool and laid-back, to put her at ease before we start. This is one of my better acts. Actually I’m nervous, too. She smiles politely and nods a lot, but as I clip the microphone on, I know it’s a little too soon.

She was born in Luverne, Alabama—“out from Green-ville”—in 1898, to Ben and Callie Summerlin.

Her mother had eleven children, “but she only raised seven. Some of them I never see. People didn’t tell you what they was expecting. You don’t know what happened. It wasn’t your business. They didn’t tell you about their private self.”

Her father was a farmer.

“He raised peanuts and cane and had a big garden. They was lucky about using the Ladies Birthday Almanac. There was a time to plant his cane, a time for peanuts. They went by the almanac.”

Louisiana remembers they always had lots of food. Her father kept hogs and cows and her mother was always busy in the kitchen. “They called her Cookin’ Callie,” she says proudly.

I jump right to what I’m most curious about: “Were your parents born into slavery?”

“No, my grandparents were. But their master was a good man, Jack Bimbo. No whippin’, no, no. Nobody whoop his Negroes.

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