East St. Louis woman who raised 12 children and helped feed the hungry dies at 105
Mattie Malone, an East St. Louis resident who died Thursday at age 105, will be remembered as a loving wife and mother and a community activist who always made sure people had enough to eat.
She registered families for government sugar rations during World War II. She volunteered in the school cafeteria. She established a free hot-lunch program while serving as Parent Teacher Association president.
“She fed everybody,” said her granddaughter, Denise Malone, 65, of Montgomery, Alabama. “If somebody was hungry, and they stopped by her house and told her they were hungry, she would feed them, especially the neighborhood kids.”
Mattie also cooked big for her family, including husband Louis Malone, who worked for Monsanto. She got up early each morning and fried pork chops or chicken for his lunch before whipping up a breakfast of eggs, grits, bacon or sausage and homemade biscuits for the kids.
“It’s just amazing that she had 12 children, and she would bake cakes for us to take to school, and she always had dinner ready when we came home,” daughter Ruth Carr-Townsend, of Edwardsville, said in 2014, when the BND profiled Mattie.
As of this month, Mattie had eight living children (four deceased), 28 living grandchildren (one deceased), 55 great-grandchildren and 15 great-great-grandchildren.
Friends and family describe her as a resolute and sometimes “feisty” woman with Christian values and a strong belief in education. Her greatest pride was knowing all her children attended college. Eight graduated, and some earned higher degrees.
“She was just a remarkable lady who always behaved and spoke with dignity,” said retired schoolteacher Ernestine Rives, 89, of East St. Louis, who attended St. Paul Baptist Church with Mattie all her life.
Granddaughter of slaves
Mattie was born on Nov. 28, 1914, in Starkville, Mississippi. Her parents, James and Lydia Bolden, were farmers with eight children. Their parents were slaves.
Mattie was a toddler when her father moved to East St. Louis, a city where many Southern blacks sought jobs in booming industries. He planned to find work then send for the family.
“(Mom) said she didn’t want that white man telling them to take that 12-year-old boy out of school and put him behind a plow,” Mattie said in 2014.
She was referring to pressure faced by poor black families to enlist their children’s help on farms to pay money owed to white landowners and suppliers.
James returned to Mississippi briefly after the East St. Louis Race Riots of 1917, when a labor dispute led a white mob to burn buildings and randomly shoot, club, stab and lynch black people.
“My father had two brothers and two sisters that lived (in the city), and my mother had a half-brother,” Mattie wrote in a short biography in 1994. “His wife barely missed being killed during the riot. She was shot in the face. Her nose was injured.”
Lydia and the kids moved to East St. Louis in 1921. They hauled all their possessions, including furniture, on a train.
Mattie and her siblings walked six blocks to the “colored” school, which consisted of two small, wooden buildings that students referred to as “chicken coops,” she wrote in her biography. The well-built brick school for white children was two blocks from their home.
“As a child, when I would pass there in the cold wintertime, I would wonder why it was I couldn’t go to that school,” Mattie wrote.
Valedictorian at Lincoln
Mattie was Class of 1933 valedictorian at Lincoln High School. She taught shorthand for an adult-education program and worked as a clerk typist for a state agency before marrying Louis, who lived next door, in 1934.
Besides volunteering at her children’s school, Mattie knocked on doors in the neighborhood and collected money to help poor families pay for funerals. She taught Sunday school, sang in choir, ushered and served on committees at St. Paul.
“She was my idol, because of the way she carried herself and the way she nurtured me and other girls at the church,” Ernestine said. “She wanted us to do our best. She wanted us to dress like ladies and act like ladies.”
Patrice Thomason-Bell spent a lot of time at the Malone home in the 1960s and ‘70s because she was friends with Mattie’s youngest daughter, Cheri Gaston.
“Miss Malone always made sure we had a little snack,” said Thomason-Bell, 58, a state budget manager who lives in Elk Grove, California. “She was a sweet, family-oriented lady, but she was a disciplinarian, too. She always required her kids and her kids’ friends to be well-behaved and polite.”
Louis Malone died in 1979. In her 60s, Mattie took classes at State Community College and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in East St. Louis for a year. She quit to care for her grandchildren.
Same home for 69 years
Mattie suffered a heart attack in 1984 and a stroke in 1988, but she recovered from both and continued to garden, go to church and take care of her bungalow on Boismenue Avenue. She lived on the same block for 80 years and in the same house for 69 years.
Mattie began using a wheelchair in 2011 because of muscle weakness believed to be a side effect of cholesterol medication. She died Thursday in her sleep.
“She passed away peacefully in her own house in her own room and in her own bed,” Denise said.
In recent years, family members cared for Mattie with help from Lucy DeBoise, 53, of East St. Louis, a home health-care aide.
DeBoise noted that Mattie had good days and bad days near the end, but she was able to talk on the phone and visit with people who stopped by the house. At bath time, she would take control of a portable shower head, spray DeBoise with it and burst out laughing.
“Even at 105, she was well aware of what was going on in her surroundings,” DeBoise said.
Mattie Malone’s visitation will take place from 9 to 11 a.m. Dec. 23 at St. Paul Baptist Church, 1500 Bond Ave. in East St. Louis. It will be followed by a funeral service with the Rev. Ervin Yarbrough.
This story was originally published December 18, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
