Jessie Pearl Watt Stewart has three biological daughters and one adopted, but she’d tell you that she has more children than she can count.
“I get Mother’s Day cards from children that still call me their mother,” she admits.
Stewart was selected as The Greenwood Commonwealth’s 2015 Mother of the Year. She was nominated by her daughters, Cora Denise Stewart Lowe, Valerie Stewart Skinner Moses and Yolanda Yvetta Stewart; adopted daughter Ollette Crowley; and grandchildren Kwanz Skinner and Jasmine Crowley.
Stewart was married to the late Conway Stewart of Greenwood. According to Moses, she has a close connection with all her children and grandchildren: “They will call her before they call us for advice or help.”
Stewart was a teacher in the Indianola, Grenada, Leflore County and Greenwood public schools for 40 years, and each child she took under her wing at that time became one of her “children.”
Her father, Plummie Watt of Grenada, was the same way — and she married a man who continued the tradition, opening their home to children whom either Conway Stewart coached or Jessie Stewart taught.
“I didn’t come from a luxurious background, but my parents gave what they could to anyone in need,” Stewart said. “These are their values that I will take to the grave and continue teaching to others.”
With the open-door, open-heart policy, her daughters were exposed to many different people from all walks of life.
“I taught them to treat everybody as somebody,” she said. “When you do that, you can work with all kinds of people.”
She also has followed that rule when working with children.
“I remember when I was little my mother and I were driving home from somewhere. She saw one of her students, who hadn’t been in class that day, playing in his yard,” Lowe, Stewart’s oldest daughter, said. “Miss Jessie marched right up to him and asked why he wasn’t in school. He said he didn’t have any shoes to wear to school, and her heart just about broke.”
She walked up to her student’s house and asked if his mother would be OK with her buying him a pair of shoes. After getting consent, Stewart took him shopping for a whole school outfit, which he got to pick himself.
“When she brought him home, she turned to him and said, ‘Now I will be seeing you in school tomorrow, right?’ It wasn’t a question that he could say anything but ‘Yes, Ma’am’ to,” Lowe said.
“She really never met a bad kid,” Moses added.
This might be because Stewart lives by the belief that children are children — they aren’t bad — and if they acted any other way, then something would be wrong.
Buying tennis shoes, adopting her sister’s daughter and inviting her husband’s basketball team into their home are all just her way of accepting anyone, young or old, who walks into her life.
“Whenever you look at my mother’s face, you know she loves you,” Lowe said, “whether you are a friend, family or a stranger.”
She may not admit it, but aside from these values of respect and education, Stewart is also a trendsetter when it comes to motherhood.
“Mom figured out that the best way to get us involved in whatever she was doing, whether it was going to church or doing a project, was to take all our friends with her,” Lowe laughed. “Many people I know wouldn’t be involved in a church without her.”
Her daughters say Stewart is even responsible for many of her past students getting into college, because she stood up for them and their future — in the principal’s office, in the classroom and outside school.
“I taught my girls to stand their ground and fight for what they think is right or important,” she said.
She fights for faith, respect, education and the hope she has in the children of the future. She’s not about to slow down on any of them anytime soon.
In fact, Stewart is still keeping the teachings alive as a Sunday school teacher at Jones Chapel Missionary Baptist Church No. 2 as well as with her visits to the sick or when she offers her home to someone in need.
“She always says, it’s not what you do, but how you do it,” Moses said. “And she sure does a lot.”
•Contact Laura Kay Prosser at 581-7233 or lprosser@gwcommonwealth.com.
