‘Big Mama’ Makes Christmas a Little Merrier

Her cellphone rang, beeping the opening bars of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The large woman in the long, billowing black dress replied: “Big Mama. Yeah, baby?”

On the other end of the phone, someone else wanted help from Essie Reed, former fish market owner, single mother and well-respected dynamo of concern, kindness and action in her community.

This time, it was a blind girl from a broken home, looking for a place to live.

“I help people. And I get people to help people,” said the woman who calls herself Big Mama and who seems to be universally known by her self-assigned title from Fort Lauderdale’s City Hall to the gritty neighborhood where she lives.

Thousands of children and adults, Reed estimates, have found temporary shelter with her over the years after their families disintegrated or parents shirked their duties. This autumn, after Hurricane Wilma damaged roofs and blacked out power in the predominantly poor and black area of northwest Fort Lauderdale, the woman they call Big Mama fired up her barbecue, cooked pork tenderloin and other donated food, and fed about 1,000 people in a week.

To give some comfort to the youngest victims of another recent hurricane, Katrina, Reed spearheaded a drive to have schoolchildren collect teddy bears and socks to send to children in Louisiana and Mississippi. As the holidays approached, Reed and the people she had gathered to help her distributed forms asking needy parents in Fort Lauderdale to list “three miracles” their child would like for Christmas.

She and her helpers then matched the replies to a roomful of toys and games that had been contributed by local benefactors. To distribute the presents to children who otherwise might have gotten nothing for Christmas, Reed had the vacant lot next to the single-story concrete-block apartments where she lives decorated with plastic candy canes, strings of Christmas lights and a “miracle tree.”

She enlisted her brother, James Hill, to play Santa Claus. To feed the hundreds of children and their parents who were expected at the outdoor party, donations of food arrived, including chicken fritters sent by the Miami Dolphins football team.

For the children, “it’s nice to receive a gift,” said Reed, her smile baring a gleaming gold tooth. But what she really wanted to get across to the boys and girls, she said, was an appreciation of their own worth, plus a sense of responsibility and self-reliance.

“To be the child you can be, you don’t have to hang out on the street corner,” she said. “And if they are big enough to sass their parents, they are big enough to work.”

Her energy and effectiveness have won Reed countless friends and allies in this coastal city that, although famous for its beaches and boating facilities, also has its impoverished and rundown areas.

“She has taken in a lot of young women from the neighborhood and really turned their lives around,” said Jim Naugle, Fort Lauderdale’s mayor, who counts himself among her admirers. “These were people struggling with drugs, alcohol and other problems.”

“Big Mama is a continuous conduit of blessing, goodness and discipline to youth,” said Tim Dobbins, director of outreach at the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, which has helped Reed in many of her activities. “For years, she has brought children from troubled homes into her home and let them know that there is a better way, that there is hope.”

Sonia Wees, now 25, was one of those children. “She showed my brother that everyone was not against him,” said Wees, who works in special education. And every time that Wees was faced with what seemed like an insurmountable problem -- for example, needing a computer so she could do her schoolwork -- Wees said, Reed managed to get it solved.

“She was always there,” Wees said.

For at least six years, Reed has acted as a surrogate parent to adolescents at one of Fort Lauderdale’s schools. “A lot of my kids go to Big Mama either for material things, emotional issues or whatever,” said Eden DuBois, a seventh-grade teacher at New River Middle School.

Reed, who refused to divulge her age (“I’m a young lady,” she told a reporter), said her activism and sense of community responsibility sprang from her deep religious faith and her own life story.

In the 1980s, she said, her husband walked out, leaving her and their three sons. For three years, Big Mama said, she and her children slept on the floor of the fish market she then owned in neighboring Pompano Beach, her hometown.

Those were hard times, but she never despaired, she said. “I knew that the Lord was going to take me out of there one day,” she said. When benefactors presented her with bicycles and a car seat for her sons, they also showed her how she could help others. The persona of Big Mama was born.

In 1989, Reed opened a youth ministry on Fort Lauderdale’s streets, helping children whose family lives were all too often marred by drug and alcohol problems, poverty and violence. In 2002, her house, which had served as a shelter for troubled youths, was condemned for code violations. The city temporarily moved her into the small apartment complex where she now lives.

According to Chaz Adams, a spokesman for the city of Fort Lauderdale, an urban homesteading program now is helping Reed acquire a new home. The program will lend her $85,000 to buy a house, but she won’t have to pay the money back if she lives in it for 10 years, Adams said. Private benefactors are also raising money to help her.