‘Old house’ where Macon woman has lived for 87 years leaks, needs repairs

Editor’s note: To donate to Cora Davis, the subject of today’s Reindeer Gang fundraiser feature — part of the Telegraph’s annual profiles of people and families in need at Christmas — call Rebuilding Macon at 744-9808 or visit RebuildingMacon.org.

The white house with yellow trim needs help.

Cora Davis has lived in it, overlooking Kitchens Street south of Shurling Drive in east Macon, for all of her 87 years.

The house was built in 1900. But now its roof leaks on and off. It has been patched, but water still seeps through. The kitchen ceiling sags.

“Everybody always just says, ‘That’s an old house,’” Davis says.

She uses aluminum-foil pans to catch what rainwater she can. Even so, the floor is rotting. Her stove is sinking. And so is the table that holds her microwave.

“Sooo,” says Davis, who spent her career as a housekeeper all over the city, “that’s the way the mop flops.”

Though she is a little hard of hearing, her voice is anything but frail. It is clear and deep, and she is as witty as you please.

When a newspaper photographer asks to take her picture for this story, Davis scoffs: “Pictures of me? You don’t want your camera tore up, do you?”

After she and her grandson, Keith, step outside for photos, Davis points toward her backyard. It is well-tended, and it isn’t hard to envision what it must have been like half a century ago. There are camellias, some pecan trees, an ancient sugarberry and an apple tree.

“Mama had just made me a little skirt,” Davis says, thinking back to her childhood, “and I climbed up in that apple tree and I fell.”

She recalls a hay barn and cows, and how her pocket of the city’s east side back then was crisscrossed by dirt roads.

“Folks used to have horses. ... We didn’t know what it was to see a car,” Davis says.

Sure, she says her mother had a car once, but that her late father took it when he ran off with another woman. They never saw him much after that. Even so, life went on at their tiny farmhouse.

“We never had to buy no fruit because we raised ours,” Davis says. “Mama used to sell milk and butter.”

When the photographer finishes snapping photos, Davis has a question before he leaves.

“What are y’all gonna do with them ugly pictures?” she says. “I think if you buried them, ain’t no telling what would come up.”

This story was originally published November 27, 2017 at 3:32 PM with the headline "‘Old house’ where Macon woman has lived for 87 years leaks, needs repairs."