Messenger of Faith : ‘ I know the Lord left me here for a reason. ‘ Mercury Adams, 101 : Charity, Piety, Struggle Enrich Mercury Adams’ Century of Memories

Time has a way of eroding moments that once seemed etched in memory.

After 100 years, memories are not always precise recollections of the sort historians treasure. They are feelings and unshakable beliefs left over from a lifetime of living.

You remember the way the waitress at a Jim Crow cafe down South “shooed us away, just like we was a bunch of chickens,” but not the day the civil rights bill was passed.

You remember when you first “received the Holy Ghost,” but not the year the Supreme Court handed down Brown vs. the Board of Education.

You remember--if you live to be 101 years old like Mercury Adams of Pacoima. “The Lord had brought me through some hard trials and tribulations, but he brought me out,” Adams said, sitting on the couch at home, firm in her conviction. “I know he brought me out so I could witness for him.”

Mother Adams, as she is known in Pacoima, is a woman whose faith in God is the most distinguishing characteristic of her life--and it is what her conversation always returns to when she discusses her first century on this Earth.

On a coffee table in the home she has lived in for more than 40 years sits a blue-covered, family-size King James Bible. On the wall above two TVs hangs the colorful paintings she created years ago at the senior citizens’ center: one of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, another of Moses with the Commandments. There are also plaques, trophies, commendations and a letter of birthday congratulations from President Clinton.

On a stand below is a bottle of the olive oil she uses when anointing and praying for those in need--like the man across the street who couldn’t sleep after his wife passed on. Or the man who stopped mid-conversation and asked her to pray for him and his young wife after he realized he was speaking to a centenarian.

“Little things like that, that’s what I call my personal work,” she said. “I know the Lord left me here for a reason.”

At a luncheon ceremony at the Pacoima Senior Citizens Multipurpose Center this week, Adams was honored by representatives of local politicians and more than 60 seniors for her lifetime of contributing to the community.

“She’s a woman of peace,” said the Rev. Alicia Broadous-Duncan, the center director. “She’s set an example for many of us over the years with her love for her God and her people.”

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Adams grew up in Cuero, a south Texas town about 100 miles from Houston and San Antonio. She was born April 6, 1893, just a bit more than 30 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Adams’ father was a Baptist minister. “He named me after the Greek god of speed,” she said. Her mother worked as a maid. When she and her older sister Elsie were old enough, they worked as maids, too, “cleaning the white people’s houses.”

After their father died, Adams watched as her mother struggled to raise her two daughters with only her faith in God and the support of a few relatives to help her through.

“Even though my mother was a widow, we never was hungry and we never begged,” she said. “Some of these young people today don’t know what it’s about. If they would only look to God. . . .”

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Her voice trails off and then she struggles to remember the biblical verse:

“I have been young and now I’m old, I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken or his seed begging bread.”

In Cuero and later Mission Valley, white people celebrated the Fourth of July while African Americans held Juneteenth celebrations commemorating June 19th, the day slaves in Texas learned they were free.

Life in those towns was segregated and education for African Americans limited by racism and the need to survive.

“I left school after the seventh grade,” she said. “The rest was experience.”

The kind of experience she learned from observing the older people in her life, like her mother, who used the only thing she had available--flowers and herbs--to heal her children.

“We didn’t know what a doctor was in those days,” Adams said, standing in her yard next to a bush of yellow roses.

Once, when the sisters had fevers, “she went out and got some wild flowers, put us in a tub of water and put a blanket around us and broke the fever,” Adams recalled.

In that time and place, raising children was a community affair. Neighbors watched out for each other and children obeyed adults, she said.

“Honey, we had to walk a chalk line,” Adams said. “Mama would get on us. When Mama was at work, the neighbors would get on us.”

In 1936, Adams moved to Los Angeles, back when “it was quiet.”

“You never heard of crime,” she said. “Me and my husband used to go to church at night. We never was attacked or bothered.”

They later lived in the community of Val Verde and worked at Dudley’s Cafe.

“That was when Val Verde was at its high peak,” she said. “People came on weekends and holidays. Big crowds.”

She remembers the road trips back to Texas, to visit friends and family, and to Bakersfield. Jim Crow was present on both journeys.

At a cafe on the way to Texas, after traveling “all night long,” she and her companions were told they could not eat.

“The young men was rising up,” she recalled of the time. “They said, ‘That’s what we’re fighting for now, to break down segregation.’ ”

Adams spent most of her working years in California as a maid, first as a live-in, then doing “day work.”

She still remembers the families: the Gilmores in Hermosa Beach, the Lizzas in Newhall and a family in Beverly Hills.

“We used to work for $3 a week and was glad to get it,” Adams said.

Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ had its beginning in Adams’ home on Hoyt Street in Pacoima.

When the church leader decided to found a church, Adams and her husband offered their garage. For more than a year church members gathered there, contributing “nickels and dimes” until a new building could be acquired, Adams said.

In Pacoima, feeding the hungry and elderly is part of Adams’ legacy, Broadous-Duncan said. She and others “took food down to Gonzalez Park and fed the seniors who didn’t have food,” Broadous-Duncan said. “They saw a need and filled it on their own, without money.”

And for years, she volunteered at the community center on Herrick Street.

These days Adams is both delighted and appalled at some of the changes she has witnessed over the years.

She was pleased to see the advancements in civil rights won by the struggles of people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “He was a great man,” she said.

But the lack of jobs for young people is troubling. It seems worse now, she said, than during the years following the Depression. The way some families have deteriorated, the lack of a sense of responsibility to each other is also bewildering.

“Used to be young people took care of the old,” she said. “Now the government takes care of them. Now everybody is separate. . . . It’s the ruination of young people.”

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She spends her days now taking care of the many flowers in her yard, going to church and sharing what she has from a “cupboard that stays full” with others.

Her cousin, who retired and returned to Texas after living in Inglewood for years, recently built a home in an area where African Americans could not live when Adams was younger.

“They can go and build a home anywhere now,” she said. “You couldn’t do it when I was there. That’s the only reason I’d like to go back is to see that boy’s house.”