MARY THOMAS' STORY IS A TALE OF A MOTHER' S WILL
PUBLISHED: December 3, 1989 at 1:00 a.m. |
UPDATED: August 8, 2021 at 5:29 p.m.
In Mary Thomas` Clarendon Hills ranch house, the painters have taken down photos of her nine children, 31 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren and piled them in boxes. But over a couch in the den still hangs a giant oil painting of her youngest child, dressed in a Detroit Pistons uniform. She calls him ”Junior,” but he`s known to the rest of the world as basketball superstar Isiah Thomas.
Isiah likely arrived at his exalted position as much from his mother`s determination to teach her seven sons and two daughters to do the right thing as from talent. Indeed, Mary Thomas` struggle to rear a family in Chicago`s inner city proved so compelling that it was turned into a two-part movie that airs this Sunday and next on ”The Magical World of Disney” (6 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5).
"A Mother`s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story" was filmed in Chicago earlier this fall and stars Emmy-winning actress Alfre Woodard in the title role.
"From the beginning of my career," says Woodard on a car phone somewhere from a Los Angeles freeway, ”I`ve been picky about my roles. That`s because acting for me is 24 hours a day of physically and emotionally being wrapped up with the character. So I can`t bear doing things I don`t like. It`s like trying to get out of wet clothes.
”From the first, Mary`s story appealed to me organically,” she continues, ”and after five minutes of reading the screenplay (by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jason Miller), I was already in character.” Besides, Woodard adds with a bubbly laugh, ”I`m a huge basketball fan. I`ve seen Isiah interviewed and he would always speak rapturously of his mother.”
Born in Vicksburg, Miss., Mary Thomas was put on a train for Chicago by her father when she was 16 after an altercation with another woman. Looking back at that incident, Thomas says, ”My parents were kind-hearted. I wasn`t raised tough, but I knew enough that I couldn`t let anyone hit me without fighting back.”
If the 5-foot-4 Thomas wasn`t physically formidable, she possessed extraordinary mettle. She started her family on the hard luck West Side far from the farmlands she grew up around. She soon developed a kind of tunnel vision to protect her children, with only sporadic support from her husband.
”You`re not going to hear nothing from me about him,” she says emphatically. ”It was up to me to raise my kids. Let`s just say I did it myself.”
Thomas drew most of her income from ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), yet managed to send her brood to Our Lady of Sorrows parochial school by working in its kitchen and gymnasium.
"I had a budget,” she recalls, ”and there were lots of times we`d eat only fair-beans and grits-so my children could go to school. We`d sit around the table and have meetings and talk about why they couldn`t get shoes and they would understand."
House rules were strictly enforced: ”No insulting anyone else, be home before sundown, don`t take things that don`t belong to you. They usually did what I said so I didn`t have to whup them that much,” says the soft-spoken Thomas. ”But I did hit my kids. I don`t believe you can`t spank your children. Still, it was easy for them to open up and talk to me. If they would tell me someone came up to them and asked them to do something not right, I`d tell them, `Don`t follow no one nowhere.”`
Once when gang members threatened her sons, Thomas pulled out a shotgun to chase them away. ”I`m more scared now thinking back on it than I was then,” she says. In the mid-`70s Thomas ran the school`s youth center. ”I`d tell all my kids and other kids to come to the center, not be out on the street fighting.”
Isiah Thomas` home environment served as a model for him, mitigating the chaos of the streets. ”We mostly went to church,” Mary says, ”and the basketball and football games and dances held there. When I went, my kids went and when I didn`t go, they didn`t go. We`d play games together and watch television-they had a lot of good programs on Channel 11 we would watch together-and we`d read books.”
Thomas remembers the family`s Congress/Kedzie/Homan neighborhood as
”pretty nice. We always lived on the next street from the ghetto. And we never lived in the projects. Once my caseworker told me we would have to move to the projects and there was nothing I could do. I went straight to City Hall to see the mayor (Richard J. Daley) and I was crying and crying so the police let me through. They must have thought, `This woman is crazy,` and I got the money. I would do anything for my family.”
Woodard was raised in a middle-class suburb of Tulsa, Okla. ”I grew up in entirely different surroundings than Isiah and Mary`s other children. And even though I don`t have kids, I can still relate. I was mothered very fiercely by my mom. It`s what lots of women do every day when no one`s looking.”
Thomas is now a superstar`s supermom. ”I never dreamed Isiah would become a professional basketball player, although he would go on the court and shoot baskets from the time he was 3,” she says. ”I just told all of my boys that they had to have determination.”
Other Thomas tips for mothering? ”I`m not gonna tell you everything,”
she says, laughing. ”You`ll have to watch my story.”
Woodard says, ”Since all this has happened, people have asked Mary whether she ever thought they`d make a movie of her life. She`s probably too polite to say it-`Movie? Little small me? Make a movie of my life?` She was doing what she had to. It should just be natural, like Mary did it, to protect, defend and nurture your children. Mary`s story reminds us of all the other mothers out there, too.”
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