Full Circle
99-year-old woman came back to N.M. and the group that embraced her
When Athalia Jones showed up for her 99th birthday party at the Center for Spiritual Living last month, assistant minister Andrew Groves asked her how she was.
“Every time I see her,” he said of the petite and bespectacled Jones, “when I ask how she is, she says, ‘I am so happy to be here.’ That’s just who she is — just happiness to be wherever she is, happiness to be on the planet, and I think that’s a mutual thing: she brings that out in everyone.”
The party there was one of three birthday celebrations for Jones, one of the oldest living black New Mexicans, the oldest living black graduate of the University of New Mexico and a member of the black women’s organization, Home Circle, which celebrated its 100th year of service this year.
Jones was born in Roswell, went to high school and college in Albuquerque, lived in California with her husband for more than half a century, and then, 15 years ago, came home to New Mexico. She drives wherever she needs to go in her ‘91 Chevy.
“It runs so good, it makes me speed!” she said a few days before her milestone birthday during an interview in the library of the retirement complex in which she lives near Morris and Montgomery. “I have to watch that, because I’d be mad if I got a ticket!”
Homesteading
Jones is part of New Mexico history, and a key piece of that dates back to the Federal Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln and called one of the most important pieces of legislation in U.S. history.
It enabled more than 100,000 people to stake a claim in lands in the west, as it called for the turning over of vast amounts of public land to private citizens.
Ten percent of U.S. land — 270 million acres — was settled under the act, according to “Black Heritage in New Mexico,” a booklet compiled by the City of Albuquerque’s office of Diversity and Human Rights.
For an $18 filing fee, homesteaders could get 160 acres of land once they turned 21. They were then expected to live, farm and build a home on the land within five years, and, if successful, they were eligible to own it.
Clusters of homesteading
households started to turn into black communities. The most famous one in New Mexico was called Blackdom, a town developed at the end of the 19th century about 18 miles southwest of Roswell.
In the early 1900s some 25 families — about 300 people, including the state’s first black lawyer — lived in Blackdom on about 15,000 acres of land, many farming cotton, cantaloupe, onions, alfalfa and sugar beets.
One of its residents was Crutcher Eubank, who’d walked there from Kentucky after seeing an ad about the town, according to the booklet. In 1908, he was able to claim ownership of a parcel of land on which he’d built a small house and raised horses, cows and chickens, and grew corn and beans. He and his wife had 11 children. Unable to make a living homesteading, he’d walk 16 miles to Roswell every day to farm for a white farmer.
He moved his family to Roswell around the time of Blackdom’s demise due to an outbreak of worms, an alkali buildup in the soil and the water table lowering, which caused the artesian wells to dry up and made it hard to farm.
The descendant
One of Eubank’s 11 children, Mary, was the mother of Athalia Jones, whose family still owns the 160 acres of land in Blackdom.
Jones, the third of four siblings, lived in Roswell until her family — her mom a homemaker and her dad a janitor — moved to Albuquerque when she was in elementary school.
Throughout her school years, most of her classmates were white. She was one of three black students in her graduating class at Albuquerque High School, where she liked, but struggled with, her English class. “I had to write a poem,” she remembered. “Oh, I had a time writing a poem! Couldn’t get nothin’ to rhyme.”
There wasn’t much mixing among her white classmates. “We just kind of ignored them,” she said. “We can ignore them just as well as they ignore us.”
As for the teachers there, she said: “I don’t think I had any problems with them, because I didn’t have much to say to them.”
After high school, she worked at a drugstore. When asked if she was a cashier she said, “A cashier? Are you kidding? We didn’t get to be cashiers.” Her job was clearing the counter.
When she began college at the University of New Mexico shortly thereafter, she studied chemistry, biology and home economics. One day, a UNM psychology professor made a derogatory comment about black students. “I don’t remember what he said, but I didn’t like it. I finally just quit the class. The other professors had no comment about skin color; they treated me with respect, just like I treated them, ’cept for that old goat.”
Black students weren’t allowed to live in dorms at the time, so she lived in the homes of local families.
She graduated in 1941 with a bachelor’s in education, a degree she wasn’t keen on using. “I just didn’t want to teach, period. I’m not comfortable around little children — I don’t know what to say to them.”
That’s likely why she didn’t have children, she said. “It was probably just as well. It wasn’t meant to be.”
The year she graduated from college, she married James Jones, a man she’d met at a tea gathering. The attraction: “Tall and dark, and he was nice to his mother. Any man that’s nice to his mother is nice to you, and he was.”
Joining the Circle
Being married qualified her to join Home Circle, which she did in the early 1940s. One draw for her: “There were so few of us in the state of New Mexico that the women needed a social outlet.”
But it was much more than that, according to Rita Powdrell, a local historian and long-standing member of Home Circle. “Women’s clubs were a part of a voice of resistance,” Powdrell said, referring to the first half of the 20th century. They gave black women a way to come together because many white women’s groups at that time were not open to them, she added.
Powdrell spoke last month about Home Circle, along with Jones and other longtime members before 20 guests at an OASIS Albuquerque panel discussion on the importance of the group.
Members said that being in Home Circle provided social sanctuary, raised money for soldiers sent overseas and for college scholarships, and wrote letters challenging state law that had allowed school districts to segregate schools.
Jones moved away from New Mexico when her husband’s brother, who lived in Los Angeles, suggested they move out there some time after they got married in 1941.
Athalia Jones wasn’t much for the beach, visiting only a handful of times during the 60 years they would live in L.A. But she and her husband traveled extensively when away from their jobs — hers as a clerical worker and his as an asphalt plant foreman. They cruised the Panama Canal and the Mexican Riviera, and flew to many countries in Europe, including to Italy, where she picked up a leather jacket she still has.
Her husband passed away in 1985, and by 2000, Jones was ready to come back to New Mexico, to be closer to family. Since returning, she’s rejoined Home Circle. “When I came back, I was surprised how much work they’d done while I was gone.”
Holding meetings in people’s homes, they’ve planned fashion shows and bake sales to raise funds; they’ve bought gifts to put into gift baskets for needy families, and they’ve taught each other to knit, crochet and embroider.
Besides going to Home Circle meetings, she said, “I come and go as I please.”
And there’s been a lot of it, according to her niece, Brenda Phillips. “Until four years ago, she would just go on tours by herself,” she said. “She’d just book them and go. We would just drop her off at the airport.” Now that she’s no longer up for solo trips, she enjoys watching the Dodgers and “Jeopardy!” on TV and enjoying her free time.
“Mrs. Jones is an independent spirit who has always followed her own path,” is what’s written about her in the program celebrating Home Circle’s 100 years at OASIS Albuquerque. “She is having the time of her life, driving to church every Sunday and to the grocery store every two weeks.”