Going Through Mama's Things
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	10-13-1998


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Last week Cornelia Dunnings had the bittersweet job of going through her mother's
things.

Not that her death came as a complete surprise. On Oct. 3, when Mary Belle Holman
finally closed her eyes and said goodbye to this world, she was 106.

"She used to say, 'I been here so long I think the Lord forgot me,"' Cornelia said.
"I'd tell her, 'No, Mama, he just doesn't want you up there harassing him.'"

There is great affection in Cornelia's voice when she speaks of her mother. Also
regret, because she realizes she should have asked her a thousand questions and
recorded her answers for the children who will never have the privilege of knowing
their great-grandma.

Somehow, she expected Mama to preside over her little corner of the world forever.

She insisted on living alone, a few blocks from Cornelia, with her cats and family
photographs to keep her company. She liked watching Angela Hill, and when she turned
off the television, she liked watching the parade of people that passed by the Palmetto
Apartments on Dixon Street.

"She'd say, 'You're all the most out-of-shape people. You all eat too much. You're
deformed,"' Cornelia said, smiling.

Arrival via banana boat

Cornelia, 56, knows bits and pieces of her mother's early life:

"Mama was born in the West Indies, and her father was a merchant seaman," she said.
"Her first memory of America was coming up on the deck of a banana freighter to feel
the mist of Niagara Falls on her face."

Her father sent her to live with his mother in Alabama, where all her records were
burned in a fire.

Eventually she moved to New Orleans and worked as a housekeeper, while she dreamed of
being a nurse.

Most of what Cornelia knows of her parents' marriage is a certificate pressed in a
book.

When she was a girl, it was just her and her mama, so some nights she accompanied her
to the Coinson School of Nursing on Carondelet Street, and she played with Jake, the
school skeleton, while Mama went to class.

Her mother became a licensed practical nurse in 1950, and whenever she worked a double
shift at Mercy Hospital, the nuns would let Cornelia sleep in one of the hospital beds.

"Mama loved being a nurse. She was good at taking care of people," Cornelia said.

'Mama saved everything'

Oh, the things Cornelia found in her mother's apartment: An old hubcap (wrapped in five
garbage bags fastened with safety pins), a fly swatter repaired with duct tape, flower
seeds meant for planting, and every letter her grandsons had ever written her.

"Mama saved everything," Cornelia said.

She kept a beer can from the 1984 world's fair, a letter from the Department of Defense
asking her to join the Army Reserve during World War II, and an ancient scrapbook full
of newspaper articles on new medical procedures. "Woman conscious during birth of
baby!" one headline read.

In a closet, Cornelia found her mother's uniform, and high up on a shelf, wrapped in
plastic, the nurse's hat she always wore.

"Look, it's nice and starched," she said, with tears streaming down her face.

She wishes she could have been there that last afternoon, to tell her mama how special
she was and how much she was going to miss her. But that wasn't the way Mama wanted to
do it.

She was fiercely independent to her last breath.

"She had the cutest little smile on her face when she died," Cornelia said. "She lived
a full, rich life."