Mamie Reels Ellison
Appearances
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
How long have you lived on this land? I've been on this land all my life. I am 64. I'll be 65 in August. I've been here all my life. And how long has your family lived on this land? 100, 200 years. We've been here all our life. That's all we know.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
Those are the questions we ask. What were they supposed to do? Melvin makes his living on the water. Lycurtus was a brick mason. Okay. This is heir property, so you cannot get a loan to do anything. Okay, you live in Carteret County, we now call it Jim Crow County. Okay, it ain't like you can go walk in a bank and they're gonna loan you money to buy property to go somewhere else.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
But what were we to do? What was they supposed to do? Where were they going? Had been here all their life, know they own the land, and then you're gonna just take them and throw them out of the house?
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
Well, for me, being that little girl, always wanted to go to Disney World. So the water... was just this magical thing to me. Because I just always had that imagination about mermaids. But growing up here on this road, you were free. I was a little girl, but I could kick off my blouse and run like the boys, you know? And you could run free. You had the fields to play ball in.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
You could ride your bikes. And you could basically ride in the road because it was a dirt road. And I remember as a little girl, there was an ice cream truck that came down. So this was a quiet area. It was so quiet you could hear the crickets and the frogs at night. But the ice cream truck was coming. You could hear the ice cream truck coming, playing the music, and you run out.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
The attorney we had at that time, he forewarned us before court. He said, this judge don't want to hear nothing. He just want to lock him up. He said, you're thumbing your nose at the court.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
and get your ice cream if you had the money. And growing up in the summertime, you wanted that beach ball and that float, and you could go to the water, you could go swimming. And then my mother would go to work and say, don't go to that water.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
I had enough time to go to that water, go fishing, go swimming, and go to that water hose and shower off, get the sand off me before she got home from work. And the only thing that stopped me from doing that was I went fishing one day with her swimming pole, and she told me not to. And I caught an eel. I had never seen an eel, but I thought it was a snake. I let go fishing, pole and all.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
So I paid the consequences when she got home from work. But that was the beauty of growing up here on Silver Dollar Road. You could just run free.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
When you come on Silver Dollar Road, you might see 20 homes on Silver Dollar Road. But if you go down a dirt road or a lane, there are probably five or six or more homes back there. Coming up here as a little girl, it was like the place to be because you didn't see a lot of law enforcement. You didn't see a lot of strangers.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
And the amazing thing is you really knew who was who by the sound of their vehicle. You knew who vehicle it was. We lived off the land. My grandfather had hogs and my uncles did soybean, but we lived off the land so we had enough to keep us busy. I remember my mom doing the pickle, the pickles in the jar, the beets in the jar, and
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
stained the green beans and preserved them for the winter and shucking the corn and them cutting the corn off the cob and preparing it for the winter. And so it sounded like hard living, but it was good living.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
There was a lot of good memory because if my mother were at work, it was that village looking out for you. You know, if she was at work, my uncle and different ones would come and say, okay, I'm making sure you kids is all right over here. Mamie, where's LaCurtis? LaCurtis, where's Mamie? So we all looked out for one another.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
My grandfather, he was a deacon for Reels Chapel for 50 years. And he had this love for people. We would sit out under his tree, pecan tree in his yard, and then we'd pump water for the hogs and his animals. Our reward was to go to the store and pick out what we want and eat it. But he would sit under the tree and he would talk to us. And he was that kind of person that it wasn't monetary for him.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
Now, he knew a lot of white people with businesses and money, and they respected him. And when you said Mitchell Rills' name, it had a lot of power to it. Because he owned land. He was a business person. But my grandfather was that nurturing kind of person. He was that loving kind of person. If he loaned you money, you didn't sign a paper saying you owed him. Your word was your bond.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
And he was the type that once you got out of school or got married, wanted your own place, you could tell him what part of the land you wanted to be on. And that's where you would be. And if he didn't want you there, then he would tell you, no, you can't have this spot, but you can have that spot.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
Now, I remember the night my mother went to C-level hospital. to carry him and him telling my mother he had waited too late, waited too long. Mitchell Reels was dying, and he didn't have a will. And so I think he realized then that, you know, I didn't do what I really should have done. But I raised my children. and they know to try to hold on to the land because he knew.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
He had that feeling when he got sick that the family would run into some issues with this land. He realized by not making a wheel that that was going to become a problem. What were his wishes for the land? What did he tell your mother? The night that my mother took Mitchell to sea level hospital, He told my mother, whatever you do, don't let the white man have my land.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
His wish was to hold on to the land for the family to keep working the land. making a living off it. And he knew jobs were hard for family, because a lot of them, they went up north. But if they kept the water, fished the water, they could always make a living.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
I remember talking to him. And talking to him, I realized he was a, he was total opposite from my grandfather. My grandfather had that giving, loving heart. He had this business spirit. money-hungry attitude about him.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
Mitchell bought it at the courthouse door. So if he bought it at the courthouse door, she wouldn't have owned it one way or another because he's not Mitchell Real's child.
Criminal
The Family Land, Part 1
And I remember when my mother and them first started with this land situation. I would go with them to lawyers' offices, and I would help keep up with paperwork. And so I started being like my own little detective, keeping the papers, reading their papers, because they were old. They didn't understand a lot of things. And so I felt like I was the educated one to help them understand it.