Proud, tender and fiercely independent, an aging matriarch clings to her home.

By Beth Macy
published Monday, April 21, 2008

Lucille “Big Mama” Blackwell is 83 years old and 273 pounds. She has diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure and congestive heart failure.

Her doctor has said she should be in a nursing home, that she needs around-the-clock care.

“Get outta my face with that!” she recalls telling him. “If God has spared me to have a little home, then I want to live in it.” Die in it, too.

Lucille "Big Mama" Blackwell readies a dose of insulin, watched by her sister Elizabeth Stokes (center) and home-care aide Benita Taylor.

Big Mama dispenses wisdom freely to strangers and family alike, most of it gleaned from the Holy Bible she keeps next to her favorite recliner.

She’s had to memorize the verses, though. A third-grade dropout, she never learned to read or write.

Among Big Mama’s favorites is a verse from Timothy: “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

That, to her way of thinking, means: Take care of your own.

Big Mama has spent nearly all her life doing just that. Working as sharecroppers on a southern Virginia tobacco farm, she and her husband raised 13 children — five of their own, the rest nieces, nephews and grandchildren.

But now she’s widowed and lives alone in her Rugby area home. Relatives are in and out, helping as best they can. And Medicaid pays a personal-care aide for 25 hours a week to cook, clean and help her bathe.

But when her patchwork of helpers comes unraveled, as it routinely does, Big Mama worries: Who will take care of her?