Born: Brownsville, Tennessee, USA, 1955
Mother tongue: American English
Grandchildren: Makeeva, Arion, Andre, Shay, Jordan, Deshia, Deshawn, Ashton
They call her: Grandma
I’ve been developing a top-secret BBQ sauce recipe for 20 years. I can’t disclose that at all, but you’re welcome to my beans, coleslaw and potato salad. I’ve been here for 23 years. I never cook at home. I just cook at my barbecue smokehouse.
Here I have all my contraptions and various slicers, so that things happen much faster than people would expect them to. I have so many different gadgets to chop down my carrots real fine and cube my peppers extra tiny to add to the beans. I just have gotten used to this place and so it’s here that I do all of my cooking. I’ll probably be here until the day I die.
I used to work for the previous owners in this same ol’ spot. I worked for them for 15 years making sandwiches, until they passed it on over to me. It used to be a garage before it was a BBQ smokehouse and would you believe, this rickety old shack is almost 100 years old?
This has basically become my home. I just live here and I just love it and I love my customers. All of them are so sweet. I don’t have any problem at all out of my customers. My family are always in and out too. It’s a family affair here – my granddaughters come all the time to help me out. They’re the only customers I get any hassle from. Nieces, nephews – all of them – they come down here when they need a little loose change, if you know what I mean. I end up helping all of them and cussing them at the same time.
I was real young when I had my first kid. I was only 18 and I just got stupid. I didn’t even like his daddy. My current husband and I have only one child together, but I have a lot of grandkids. My son seems to be planting kids all over the world. He got them here and he got them there. He has a set of twins by one girl. Then he got another boy by another girl, then he got two girls by another girl. I do warn these women, but they don’t take any heed. ‘He doesn’t take care of these babies,’ I say, but these girls don’t listen to me. He certainly won’t ever listen to me. He’s just very charming and I’m proud of him for that, at least. With children and grandchildren, you can try and tell them, but if they don’t want to listen, they just won’t and it’s our job as a parent or grandparent to just accept that you have done your best.
As a grandmother, I’m doing all the things that the mother ain’t doing. I have raised two of my grandkids. I raised the two girls, Andre and Shay. I could see they needed it and so I stepped up. That’s your role if your kids can’t take it on.
I don’t think I’m going to be retiring any time soon. As long as I have my health, I’ll just keep going. The key for me is to just keep on at it and I’ll be as young as I feel. The arthritis doesn’t help, but being occupied keeps me young. I can’t be as quick as I used to be because I have arthritis in my hands and my knees. There’s absolutely nothing you can do at all for arthritis, apart from hurt.
