BIOGRAPHY OF

ELIZA ISABELLA TOWNSELL-BRYANT

“MAMA LIZA”

Submitted By:

Joyce Fowlks-Fort

Edison R. Fowlks

Transcribed by:

Barbara Jefferson-Bonner

Family Historian

1995

AS REMEMBERED BY GRANDDAUGHTER (Joyce Fowlks-Fort)

Eliza Isabella Townsell Bryant, Mama Liza, our grandmother, is a legend, for she lives in the lives of her grandchildren.  She touched our lives in a positive way. She held high Christian principles which directed her lifestyle.  Much of her life was spent in meditation and prayer.  Bible study was a daily routine.  She knew the Word.  If she heard any of her grandchildren say, “I can’t”, she would immediately correct them.  Mama Liza believed that all things are possible through Christ, if these things are His will for our lives.  Often she would affirm something and then say “if the Lord is willing”.  She new that the Lord has a will for each of our lives and she wanted us to seek His will.

Grandmother was also an industrious woman.  Like Dorcas, she was full of good works and almsdeeds which she did.  She took care of many children. Her yard was the gathering place for grandchildren and others after the school day was over.  Her caring personality seemed to attract them.

Gardening was one of her hobbies.  I can still envision her beautiful, fragrant flower garden.  There were roses, flowering quince, irises, bachelor buttons, zinnias, verbena, and many others.  These flowering plants shedded their sweetness far and wide because she planted and cared for them.  Mama Liza also planted and harvested many productive vegetable gardens and even grew an orchard.

Mama Liza enjoyed her role as mother and grandmother.  She busied herself providing for her family.  Canning fruits and vegetables, raising chicken, and making lye soap were tasks she performed.  She also quilted, sewed, crocheted, embroidered, tatted and patched.

AS REMEMBERED BY GRANDSON (Edison R. Fowlks)

Our first knowledge of America’s most brutal institution of slavery was calmly and thoroughly passed on to us as we sat around the wood heater in Mama Liza’s room.  Images of her words replete with expressions are still fresh in my memory:  Her account of the stealing of her grandmother from the District of Columbia and eventually working on a slave plantation in Mississippi, as her mother, Mary had told, is still vivid in my mind.  She recalled how mothers would stand on the porch and cry as their children were sold” into slavery.  And I can still hear Mama Liza recounting another slavery incident in which her grandmother was hit on the head with a poker iron by the “Ole Massa’s” wife because she burned the bread.  Her grandmother suffered from this “blow” to the head the rest of her life.

Not only did she pass on to her grandchildren the nature of the brutality of slavery, she also talked about the post-slavery activities such as the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and stories of our family’s resistance to these inhumane activities.  Other post-slavery activities consisted of share-cropping where the newly freed men were cheated out of their proper share.  This led to the old slogan.  “Naught is naught and figure is figure.....All for the white man and none for the nigger”.

Often I think about the keen insight Mama Liza had into racial relationship during the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s.  While most of us were strongly for integration, she told me once:  “What we want is not really to be with them, but we want some of the things they have”.  Even back there then our grandmother had gained tremendous wisdom and was aware that our struggle should be about equality rather than just integration.

Mama Liza probably never received any formal education, however, she was quite intelligent and an avid reader and fluent in her speech.  She read newspapers, magazines, and the Bible.  Her philosophy of life has had a great impact on the lives of her children and grandchildren.  Her strength was her compassion, her love, her serenity, her honestly, her kindness, her calmness, and her inner peace.  And it was this type of environment that she helped to create as my mother and her six children lived in her home from the late 1930’s to the mid 1950s.

Mama Liza’s life was an inspiration.  It is my hope that some of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren will write for future generations the story of her life, and erect a small museum on the site where her home once stood in Terrell.