Mable Marie Pierce ’69
My mama Mable Marie Pierce graduated from Tech in 1969. She remembered her time there as “real cool” and suggested that I should attend too. She met some of her best girlfriends at Tech and they went on to be lifelong friends, raising their children and celebrating holidays together. She said people thought she had “big pretty eyes, was independent, the meanest yet sweetest person, nice and truthful.” My mama recalled that she couldn’t help but be mean when people from K-12 would sing rhymes to her name like, “Mable is able to set the table.” In her senior yearbook someone wrote, “To Mable: And I know you’re able! To make a happy future for you and your family…”
One guy in high school learned that my mama was no joke the day he touched her butt in class and she hit him with the desk. My mama said they suspended her for that and said there was a better way to deal with what the guy did, but my mama said, “I bet he will never touch another girl’s butt or at least he will think twice about it!”
Though my mama Mable was serious a lot, she was also very sweet. Guys liked her a lot and it was not long before she got married at 16 while attending high school. She said, “I did not become a mother until I was 22 years old, see ‘cause I got married to get out of my mama’s house and be grown living on my own.” Mable went on to have three children in her 20s: Albert Smith, Anita Morgan and Maurice Cheatum. Mable, or Mabel as many spelled her name, cooked food for the community, gave many kids a place to stay when their parents got hooked on crack-cocaine, and fought breast cancer for 10 years, dying in 1998 at 47 years old.
Some advice my mama Mable Marie Pierce gave me that would asset other Technites goes like this, “Whatever you decide to do in life, good or bad, aim to be the best at it.”