Callie Lymon Jones, 91, died Saturday, leaving behind “hundreds” whom she nurtured during their early years, laying a foundation of care and love in her South Greenwood community.
Jones, who was a resident at Golden Age Nursing Home for 12 years, lived just up the hall from her sister Carrie Ward, 95, who remains at Golden Age. They were the last two surviving children of George and Callie Lymon, who raised eight children at Craig Plantation in Leflore County.
Yolanda Jones, Jones’ granddaughter, said her grandmother kept kids in her house for as long as she, Yolanda, could remember, and many of them stayed connected with her for as long as she lived.
“She had a huge influence in the community,” Jones said. “Babysitting and cooking and civil rights and porch sitting and voters’ registration. That’s what I learned from her.”
Former Greenwood Mayor Sheriel Perkins said Jones cared for her first child, James, soon after she and her husband, Willie, moved from her hometown of Gulfport to his hometown, Greenwood.
“She kept him all the way to first grade,” Perkins said. “I was a young mother, and Miss Callie had this warm and caring spirit. She gave him a good sound foundation for how to get along with others.”
Sheriel Perkins worked at First Federal Bank when young James and then her second child were both cared for by Miss Callie.
“I often had to work late, and when I came to get the babies, she’d offer me a plate of something to eat. She cooked real meals for the kids and everybody else who came to that house.”
Perkins said Miss Callie was the only babysitter she ever had, and when she became mayor of Greenwood, she invited Jones up to her office at City Hall.
“Even when I became mayor, she was like my mom away from home. I told her whether or not her family adopted me, I was in the family.”
Retired Circuit Court Judge Betty Sanders knew Jones well and said her husband, longtime Greenwood attorney and former County Supervisor Alix Sanders, who died in March, was particularly close to her.
“She had a large impact on people,” Sanders said. “She knew a little something about everything. She was a great all-around mother to many people in the community and was the quintessential grandmother.
“Or as we say, the Big Mama.”
Alix Sanders, Betty said, often went to the nursing home to take flowers from his garden to Jones at Golden Age. “As he became ill and didn’t drive anymore, her children and grandchildren made sure that he was at every family function involving her.”
Sanders said Jones and her sister Carrie were both knowledgeable about infants and helped many young parents learn how to care for them when they were sick or when they were having problems.
“She was a religious woman who served as a confidant to many young couples on marriage and child rearing,” Sanders said.
“She was also a great cook, which is probably how my husband made his way to her front porch many times.”
Callie Jones held court and conducted business from her house in the 200 block of what was then Stone Street, now Martin Luther King Drive, just a few blocks away from her sister Carrie.
She had four children — Arlean McCain, Robert Jones, Buford “Heart Attack” Jones and Laura Ann Jones, all who remain in Greenwood — and leaves behind many loving grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other relatives here and around the country who grew up visiting the Stone Street house when they were kids.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Rhasaan Lymon, 44, a great-nephew who lives in Boston, said when he was growing up in Greenwood, the school bus dropped him every day at his Aunt Callie’s, just two houses down from his grandmother’s home.
From the front porch of Jones’ Stone Street house, young Lymon got a civics lesson he never forgot.
“She was extremely conscious of the social and economic conditions of African-American life at that time,” Lymon said. “She’d be out on the porch and you’d hear someone call out, ‘Hey, Miss Callie.’”
“She’d call back, ‘Hey, did you go and vote?’”
Lymon said it impressed him that someone like his Aunt Callie, with so little formal education, was so politically conscious.
“That’s what drives me to get out and vote,” he said.
“I think everyone that came out of that culture of 200 Stone Street, we have always excelled at whatever we set out to do because of the environment we grew up in.”
A memorial service for Jones, where public tributes and reflections on her life are welcome, will be held on Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church.
Funeral services will be at 2 p.m. on Saturday at Providence Missionary Baptist Church.
nContact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
