Mama Dip’s Legacy

Chapel Hill laid to rest one of its better-known and much-revered residents yesterday. Mildred Council died May 20 at age 89. Unexpectedly, perhaps because she was an icon, and we all thought that Mama Dip would always be there.

She always was there, for anyone in the community who could use a meal or two to tide them over. She nurtured, fed and gave a hand up to those who needed it. She persevered through whatever life served up, and the menu included plenty of hard times.

The baby in a family of seven children, Mama Dip was only a toddler when her mother died, leaving her father, a sharecropper on a farm in Chatham County, to raise them just as the Depression hit. Meals came from whatever the kids could harvest or hunt and often was stretched to feed stragglers — boys who had run away from abusive homes or been thrown out by their families. Her father taught them to cook, and when she was 9, he taught her, too.

Mama Dip was a quick study.

Her father moved the family to Chapel Hill when she was in her teens. After an unsuccessful attempt at becoming a beautician, she began to cook for a living, first for local families, and then for fraternities and sororities, and restaurants that in segregated Chapel Hill wouldn’t have allowed her in as a customer.

She had married young, had eight children, and when she finished her workday, she came home and cooked for her family, and anyone else who was hungry. Frequently, she’d cook meals and deliver them to families she knew didn’t have a stove.

When her youngest turned 18, she left the marriage that had become violent. In her late 40s, she opened a restaurant at the behest of a local real estate broker who was looking for a tenant to take over the lease of a vacant café.

She invested $64 in 1976 to buy food to cook for breakfast. The money she earned from breakfast bought food to make lunch. Customers flocked to her 18-seat Mama Dip’s Kitchen. She hired people fresh out of prison and others down on their luck.

In 1999, she moved across the street to a much large place that seats 189. She wrote a cookbook, was invited by President George W. Bush to the White House, had been a guest on Good Morning America and featured in Southern Living. The food critic of The New York Times ventured south and gave her a favorable review. A community activist before that term had been coined, she started the annual Community Dinner some 20 years ago.

But when we’ve tucked away that last pork chop or plate of fried chicken livers, when we’ve finished our peach cobbler or pecan pie, what do we remember most about Mildred Council? That by the way she lived her life, she made the world a better place. She didn’t need wealth or connections or a degree from a well-known university. She did what she knew how to do and did it well, seasoned with compassion and a penchant for justice. Would that we all follow her example.
— Nancy Oates