ROOTED IN THE
COMMUNITY A 95-YEAR-OLD TRACES HER FAMILY’S LONG HISTORY IN CHATHAM AND ORANGE COUNTIES BY KIM SMITH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN MICHAEL SIMPSON
have lived a long life, and I have enjoyed the people, especially the children.” With clarity and fondness, Mrs. Annie Mae Gattis Burnett recalls nine decades of people, history and reminiscences throughout Chatham and Orange counties. Born in 1926 in a house on Mitchell Lane in Northside, young Annie Mae was taught to love all people, a lesson at which she excelled. Her love and care of children began with her younger siblings whom she afforded safe passage through forest and field, unsullied petticoats as proof. The self-described tomboy was an unwitting pioneer of the 100
CHATHAM MAGAZINE
WINTER 2021-2022
modern-day Tanyard Branch Trail where she frequently wielded a hoe to cut away weeds along a nearby branch of Bolin Creek. Her days of formal education at the Rosenwald-funded Orange County Training School (now Northside Elementary School) coincided with the Great Depression, when her parents – Martha Williams and Sidney Monroe Gattis – separated and later divorced. As a single mother, Martha moved her daughters to Sunset Drive where the teenaged Annie Mae was a welcome help during difficult times. When recounting her life story, Annie Mae often frames the hardship with hope and humor. She recalls an open field at the end of Sunset, near the modern-day Midway Barber Shop on Rosemary Street, where an annual fair pitched tents and a Ferris wheel. When Annie Mae and her sisters became stuck atop the carnival ride, they directed a chorus of sibling giggles and shrieks toward their mother sweeping the back porch. Martha soon arrived, broom in hand, and the laughter resonates eight decades later. Annie Mae’s positive outlook was fostered by her forebears, generations of “everyday people, who were rich in love, respect and resourcefulness.” Legal segregation under Jim Crow laws often prohibited Black people from obtaining nonmenial employment. Her forebears were industrious farmers but also laborers, janitors, maids and laundresses at UNC, where low wages and long hours resulted in home responsibilities for children, including Annie Mae. By age 10, Annie Mae was an expert cook and an astute observer, skills taught by Lonnie Williams and Mary Kay Kirby, her maternal grandparents who were raised on Chatham County farms. The 100-acre Kirby farm was inherited by