Shelby County Today

April 24, 2023 - We grandchildren called her “Mama.” Many called her “Sister Richards.” For fifty years she preached in tent revivals, brush arbors, and did pastoral work. Most of her preaching engagements were in the towns and communities of East Texas including Rose Vine, Center, Hemphill, Stockman, Teneha, Timpson, and Evan’s Shop in the McClelland community. She played the organ, piano, harmonica, and accordion by ear. And she preached and sang… LOUD. One of her former church members told me, “When Sister Richards preached, you didn’t have to know where the meeting was. You just had to have your ears open.”

Her name was Mary Jane Oleatha (Holt) Richards. She and Paw Paw raised seven children in Center, Texas. Mama was a preacher and Paw Paw was a logger. She was a big, tall woman with hair hanging to her waist when it was not braided on her head. She was a carpenter, a gardener, and beautiful flowers covered her yard. All of the family liked eating at Mama’s. She canned vegetables, pork, beef, and some wild meat. When my brothers and I brought swamp rabbits from a hunt on Huana Creek, Mama pressure–cooked and batter-fried them. They tasted almost like chicken. Baking raccoons with sweet potatoes and frying frog legs and squirrels for us, she made the wildest game taste tame. The worst scolding we ever got from Mama occurred when we shot her purple martins with our sling shots and robbed eggs from her hen house for food while playing hookey.
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Mama didn’t always receive money for preaching. I knew her church had paid her when I saw her driving up in her Dodge pulling a trailer with a pig, a bushel of peas, and two watermelons in it. She kept what little money she received in a large handkerchief neatly tied at the top and placed on a closet shelf. We were always asked to eat when we visited her, and we always did. After uncovering the food left on the table from the last meal, we helped ourselves to peas, corn, squash, cornbread, and big buttermilk biscuits. Sometimes we had salt pork from her smokehouse. Salt, pepper, catsup, and pepper sauce were placed together on the table. Mama always left an onion sliced for Uncle Billy Gene to make his biscuit and onion sandwich when he got home from school. We all waited our turn at taking out the slop bucket, a mixture of dish water and leftovers, to Mama’s hog pen.

She didn’t approve of deodorant, perfume, or makeup, but always kept a box of Cashmere Bouquet powder on her dresser. Never using slang or profanity, her expression for the most trying situation was always, “Mercy me!” She loved her church members and spoke of them so often that I still remember some of their names: Sister Feddie, Brother Luman, Bro. Ross, Sister Meyers, Sister Belrose…While cleaning house, hoeing in the garden, washing the dishes, or punching clothes in the wash pot, her constant whisper was, “Thank you, Jesus, thank you, Jesus.”

Mama visited my wealthy Aunt Belle Rascoe in Mansfield, Louisiana to request a donation for a new church building. When handed a check for $5.00, she exclaimed, “Is that all?!!” Aunt Belle quickly replied, “Charity begins at home!!!” “Yes, but where does it end”?!!, barked Mama . I mused over that for years before I saw the teaching of the story: They were both right.

Mama encouraged us not to sin and often reminded us how long it had been since she had. But when our big dog Jack wandered over to her house and killed her kitten, she chased him down the hill with her garden hoe shouting, ”I’ll kill you Jack!” After she breathlessly returned to the house, I asked, “Mama, was trying to kill Jack a sin?” “No, Honey,” she replied. “That was just a mistake.” She won $500 for submitting the winning name for a new insurance company. She named it “The Ideal Insurance Company.” And every time I pass that sign in Kirbyville, Texas, I think of her.

When I was a young boy helping Mama hoe her garden, she told me, “Henry Doug, you are going to be my preacher-boy,” And her prediction came true, even though I became a Baptist instead of a Pentecostal. And looking back over the years, our theological differences don’t amount to much. Her influence on me, and all my nine brothers and sisters, was considerable. She was not just a grandmother, but a messenger of the Lord to us. Hearing she was in the hospital at Center, I arrived there in time to see her alive, but in a coma. Leaning over her, I whispered, “Mama, thank you for helping take care of us…” She could not answer me and I am not sure she heard me. But today I know in my heart that she knows what I said… and she knows I meant it. Two days later, Mama crossed the Jordan. She didn’t cross alone.