By Eric Stanley
This is my great grandmother Martha Boone holding me in this picture from 1991. She was born in Gates County, North Carolina on April 25, 1904.

She was a sharecropper and worked fields they didn’t own just to survive. As she got older, she passed down stories about what it was like growing up in those times.

Gates County is more than a quiet rural town and it carries a deep history. It sits on land once home to the Chowanoc people.

They were a powerful Native American tribe who lived along the Chowan River for thousands of years. Over time, many Chowanoc people blended into nearby Black and Native communities.

Laws had erased Native identity and reclassified people by appearance rather than ancestry.

Martha was also a housekeeper. She worked very hard, cleaned other people’s homes, and was a wife all while raising her own family.

She passed away on January 4, 1997 at 92 years old. She gave it everything she had just so her children and grandchildren could have a better future. That is the definition of a mother’s love.