RALEIGH, N.C. _ In any other time there would have been hundreds of mourners gathered here, in the shade of the trees where Cleora Mann spent most of her 104 years.
For a long time, she liked to garden at the edge of the woods. She planted turnip greens, beets, tomatoes. She found solace working with the land, in a land that didn't always love her back.
She'd had 16 children, and outlived four of them. When her husband died, in 1954, she was pregnant with her youngest. She never did remarry. Her sons and daughters grew up in an era when walking down the country road at the end of the driveway tested their courage. People drove by and threw eggs at them. A neighbor's dogs put the fear in them.
"Those dogs would come out," said Robert Mann, one of her sons, "and he wouldn't ever call them back."
Now Robert Mann is 78, and last Friday he stood near the oak tree that for decades offered he and his siblings the kind gift of cool shadows. They'd grown up without running water or indoor plumbing, let alone air conditioning.
He wore a dark suit and a face mask. Soon the Hearse turned between the black iron gates and slowly moved up the driveway. Cleora Mann was coming home.
She was born in 1915; she would have been 3 or 4 when the Spanish flu killed millions. She lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Mann, who was black, survived the horrors of the Jim Crow South. She was in her 50s during the civil rights movement. She lived long enough to vote for America's first black president.
And then, after a century of life, she died quietly and alone of COVID-19.
The day of her funeral, her family was still reconciling how quickly everything had turned. Robert Mann received a call from the Louisburg Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center on a Wednesday, informing him that his mom had tested positive for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. By Saturday, he learned that she wasn't eating. The next morning, he learned she was having difficulty breathing.
That afternoon, she was gone.
For years she had suffered from dementia, but physically she'd been strong. And then the Louisburg Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center became overrun with the virus. Out of 61 residents at the facility, 56 have tested positive. Eighteen died. Thirteen staff members have tested positive, too.
Some residents died in the hospital nearby. Cleora Mann died in her room. After, one of her daughters, Ernestine Keith, came to see her, and had to look in through her window.
Less than a week later, that was still one of the most difficult parts of it all: 12 surviving children, 29 grandchildren, 36 great-grandchildren, 15 great-great-grandchildren _ and nobody could be with her when she died. Nobody could hug her or hold her hand in the end. It'd left Robert, her fifth-oldest, with a "helpless feeling," he said, "not to be able to visit her."
A socially distanced funeral
Now Robert Mann began making his way toward the small family cemetery, on the other end of a short path through the trees. The Hearse followed behind. Five men slid the cream-white casket from the back and carried it to the grave. On one side of the grave was a large pile of reddish-brown clay, freshly dug out of the ground. On the other were two rows of chairs.
Robert sat in the front, nearest the casket. His sister Ernestine sat a couple of chairs over. About a dozen others stood around the canopy. Everyone wore masks and kept their distance.
Curtis Gupton, one of Cleora's grandsons, stood behind the chairs and held an iPad against his chest. About 40 members of the family watched the funeral through its camera.
"Everybody in? If you can't see, let me know," Gupton told them, and moments later the service began.
The minister stood at the front and spoke loud enough so everyone could hear. He wore a black shirt and clerical collar. His name was Larry Keith, and he was one of Cleora's sons-in-law. He and Ernestine have been married for 47 years, and he could remember Cleora telling him that he couldn't date her daughter until she turned 16. They were only two years apart.
Over the past five decades, Keith became less like a son-in-law and more like a son. He spoke with a spiritual reverence of a woman he'd known most of his life. Now he introduced another preacher who began reciting a prayer, and the small congregation answered each sentence with different versions of "amen."
"Father, we thank you God, how you looked down upon her for many, many, many years."
"Lord, thank you."
"And oh God, even in times like these, when family members can't come together, God, and hold hands and see one another, and touch one another, God, you're still God, you still bless, you still make ways out of no way."
"Oh, yes."
"We thank you God, because you did bless (her) for 104 years."
"Oh, hallelujah."
"And so God, we're grateful, and we're thankful for her life."
"Yes, Jesus."
"And the life that she lived, and the children, the legacy that she left behind."
"Yes ... oh, hallelujah."
Family has owned the land since days of slavery
The land where everybody had gathered was a part of that legacy. It had been in their family since the 1800s. As best Robert could tell the story, his family's ownership of the land could be traced to the days of slavery. A slavemaster, he said, fathered a daughter with one of his slaves. Later, that daughter and her husband "gained favor" with the slavemaster, Robert said.
"And she was able to purchase 105 acres of land back then," he said. "And that's how we were able to get the property."
Eventually, his father was born on this land. Cleora grew up about a mile away. They married when she was 19, and at first Cleora and her husband, James, lived in what was nothing more than a log house that stood near the cemetery where she'd come home to be buried. After that, she and her husband moved into a small four-room house on the other side of a patch of trees.
To supply water, Robert and his siblings would retrieve it from a stream on the edge of the property and carry it back up a hill. Cleora worked as a housekeeper. If they needed to go anywhere, they walked. Her children worked in nearby tobacco fields, or picked cotton. They labored 10 or 11 hours per day, Robert said, earning $3 for a day's work. They gave most of it back to their mom.
The family could tell a lot of stories about Cleora, and many of those stories revolved around two things: her work ethic and her cooking, and particularly her biscuits and pies.
"She always had some type of pie cooked," said Matthew Keith, one of those grandsons, and he could also still smell her buttermilk biscuits. She offered those as a reward for a day's work, said Gupton, the grandson who held the iPad during her funeral.
"There was nothing like her fixing those biscuits, those fresh biscuits," he said. "And she would feed you, but you worked."
Perhaps that was the trait she'd most instilled in her children and grandchildren: her relentless drive to keep going, to continue working, day after day, no matter how difficult the circumstances. For a long time, Robert Mann has kept a black-and-white photograph that reminds him of his mother's challenges.
The picture is from the mid-1950s. In it, Cleora Mann is sitting in front of that small house, which stood about where part of the driveway is now. In the photo, she's surrounded by her children. She's pregnant, and her husband had just died, and she's wearing the tired but determined expression of a woman faced with raising 16 kids on her own. Robert keeps that photograph close. He pulled it out again after the funeral and stared into his childhood.
He and his siblings could all remember one of their mom's prayers, how she always said she wanted to live long enough "to see all her children get grown." She did, and then lived long enough to watch some of them become grandparents themselves.
"She gave up her life, put her life on hold, for us," Robert said. "Didn't have that much. Materially, she didn't have that much to sacrifice, because we didn't have anything. But she put her life on hold. She made sure that we had food no matter if it was chicken, or just gravy."
Sometimes it was just gravy, and that didn't matter.
"She could take some flour and water and salt and pepper and do wonders with it," Robert said.
The first running water, in 1969
Four of his siblings went on to college. Robert did not, but moved to New Jersey and worked his way up in the heating and air conditioning business. First he was a door-to-door salesman. Then he started his own business. It slowly took off. By 1969, he had enough money to put a trailer on the property, and finally his mom moved out of that four-room house.
The trailer was modest but in other ways palatial. For the first time in her life, Cleora had running water.
"We had bathrooms," Robert said. "We never had bathrooms before."
Over the next two decades, his business was so successful that after a while, he could afford another upgrade for his mother. In 1988, he built a large brick house in front of that trailer. Cleora lived in the house on her own until she was 95.
From the road out front _ the same road where Robert and his siblings dodged eggs and sprinted from dogs, if only because people nearby didn't like the sight of black children _ the home he built for his mother looks like an estate.
A fence borders the road. A black iron gate is at the foot of the driveway. The front yard, almost 7 acres of it, is covered in bright green grass, neatly manicured. The day of the funeral, luxury cars lined the driveway where once, in another time, Cleora Mann grew vegetables to feed her family.
Robert looked around, surrounded by the proof of success but also memories of more difficult times, the ones his mother taught her children to fight through.
"God is good," he said.
Last goodbyes
Now at the service, the funeral director, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose family had run the Richardson Funeral Home since 1918, invited the mourners to line up and say goodbye to the woman they'd come to celebrate. Herbert Richardson, wearing white gloves, opened the lid of the casket. The 15 people who lived close enough to come lined up to view her one last time, and say goodbye.
They stood in their masks and their suits and gave each other space. They'd known this day was coming for a while, but not like this. Not with the end so sudden, without a chance to be by her side, without a chance for the entire family to come together.
"I envisioned us having a big celebration with 500 or more people," said Larry Mann, another of Cleora's sons, and he said that vision included a gathering filled with "embracing and celebrating."
In the back of his mind, he wondered how the virus had spread so quickly in that nursing home. Nowhere else in Franklin County had been hit so hard. He wondered how it had spread throughout America. He couldn't avoid the thought that "we waited too long" to act, he said.
He and his wife lined up and walked past the casket. Each person who passed shared a short, quiet moment. Soon the last person had walked by, and Richardson gently lowered the casket lid. There were more prayers and amens, and Larry Keith, the minister with the clerical collar, concluded the service.
"I believe that Mama felt like she was already ready," he said.
Her family, the small part of it that could be here, walked back on the path through the trees, toward the large brick house. Robert had set up chairs, spaced more than six feet apart, in an expansive gazebo next to the driveway. He and the others sat for a while and told stories, and for a time they could see her working her garden again or planting flowers; they could smell her biscuits or taste her coconut pie.
Now those memories brought comfort. Beyond the trees, the funeral director and his son folded the chairs and packed them away. They lowered the casket into the earth. Moments later the Hearse, now empty, slowly rolled past the family and down the driveway.
Near the gazebo came the sound of a small tractor. A man guided it down the path and into the cemetery and moved the reddish-brown clay back into the rectangular grave he'd dug a day earlier.
Soon the grave was covered, and Cleora Mann had become part of the land she loved.
