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104 years of history
Woman set to celebrate birthday on Monday
Robert C. Reed | Hickory Daily Record
Annie Dawkins, of Hickory, turns 104 on Monday. Here, she sits with her daughter, Carrie Usery, who is 74.
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Published: July 5, 2009
HICKORY - Annie Dawkins doesn't hear well. Her voice is softer than a whisper when she talks, which is rarely.
As her family prepares for Dawkins' 104th birthday Monday, she doesn't need to speak to tell her story. The testaments to how she lived her life sit by her on the sofa. They boil greens on the stove.
They detail, with pride in their voices, the generations that have come after Dawkins, the doctors and nurses and preachers and church deacons.
Her children, three of the five of whom are still living, speak for her.
Dawkins was born in 1905, according to the family history. She was born in Putnam County, Ga., where her mother before her was born on a plantation.
Her children know she attended a one-room school in Georgia, that she picked cotton and pulled corn as a girl.
They also know she was the 10th of 14 children and the family rode to their Primitive Baptist church in a mule-drawn wagon.
They are sure there were other stories, but mostly what they remember about their mother was how she worked.
After her first husband died of pneumonia, Dawkins moved to Cleveland County with five children in tow. There, she married again and had five more babies.
To help feed and clothe the children, she rode to Hickory with her husband every morning to scrub floors, do laundry and clean houses. For her pay, she brought home $1 a day, a little lard, a little meat, canned food and used clothes and shoes.
"She had to take a lot to feed us," says her son, 71-year-old James Odis Maddox.
When his mother turned 100, he put together a scrapbook full of newspaper articles and obituaries, along with handwritten accounts of the memories his mother still had.
One story he recorded is from Nov. 22, 1963. Dawkins was at work in a Hickory house when she heard President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. She relayed the news to her employer, who answered by saying she was glad. Kennedy, the woman of the house said, didn't work for her. He worked for Annie.
Dawkins never went back to that house.
The other stories are less concrete.
Carrie Usery, 74, remembers hearing that, when her mother was 5, she stopped talking or walking. Dawkins' mother thought the girl would die.
Annie Maddox, the 78-year-old daughter who lives with and cares for Dawkins these days, can clearly remember when she started cooking for the family around 1940 or 1941. That was because her mother was in the hospital, sick after taking a vaccination shot. A doctor told them she would not live.
Dawkins' children figure she outlived the doctor.
She lived to make sure her children went to church and school, taking off on foot in the morning and showing back up after dark.
"If we had to go barefooted, we'd go to church," Usery says. "She'd carry us."
She lived to teach them the value of hard work. Annie Maddox cooked. James Maddox milked the cows. The children gathered wood before school and afterward. And when they worked in the cotton fields, as they all did, they would look up at mealtimes to see their mother balancing a pan of beans or corn on her head and carrying plates of blackberry pie or pintos in each hand.
Dawkins was equally skillful with a switch, her children say.
"We'd better not accuse our brothers or sisters of lying," James Maddox says. "And when company came you went outside if you were a kid. She didn't want any children looking her in the mouth while she was talking. If you didn't get outside, you'd get it."
If the Maddox kids touched something that didn't belong to them or if they were suspected of dishonesty, the switch was swift.
"I used to holler like it was killing me, " James Maddox says. "She'd say, 'It'll heal before you get married.'"
He shakes his head at the recollection. He is sure today's youth could use a little bit of Dawkins' discipline.
"That made me what I am today and I'm glad for it," he says. "She made me what I am today."
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