“I just want a peach that will taste like a peach used to,” Mama Jo said. She was talking about growing up in Warren County, reminiscing about some experiences in her 91 years.

Her proper name is Josephine Simrall Gilliland, but to family and many friends she is Mama Jo.

She was 7 years old when the 1927 flood occurred, “But I’m telling it as Daddy told me, because I wasn’t at Ballground,” the family plantation where she was born in north Warren County. Her father was Newell Simrall I; her mother died when Josephine was a little girl, so she had gone to Belzoni to live with her grandparents and started to school there.

Sometimes she came home on weekends, sometimes traveling alone on the train, but that trip in 1927 was special — it was the last train from Belzoni for six weeks. There was already water standing in their backyard at Belzoni, and Mama Jo remembers fears that the levee would break at Greenville.

She saw the floodwaters rolling in at Hard Cash Plantation, south of Belzoni. Her step-grandmother came with her on that trip, planing to return home the next day — but she couldn’t even get a boat up the Yazoo for six weeks.

Her father had married his second wife, Mary Barber Gorman, at Christ Church, and the next morning Aunt Tee called — there was a phone connecting the Simrall residence and that of his sister, Tee — and she told the new Mrs. Simrall, “There are two barges coming down the Yazoo to land at Haynes Bluff.” Each barge was filled with refugees, one with whites, the other blacks.

The planned honeymoon to New Orleans was postponed because the refugees had to be fed before they could be taken by truck to camps in Vicksburg.

Though her father had dismissed the cook for a time, thinking she wouldn’t be needed, Mama Jo recalled that he had plenty of everything. Life at Ballground was pretty self-sufficient, only items such as coffee and sugar being purchased.

It would have been a harrowing experience for the new Mrs. Simrall, but Mama Jo said her daddy told her, “Mary, don’t worry about it,” and Mama Jo added, “and she went her whole married life without a worry.”

Mama Jo went to Belhaven and majored in home economics and after graduating did additional studies at the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State. She only taught her major for six weeks, but for 27 years she taught a variety of subjects, mainly English. She had a lifetime teacher’s certificate, so “that’s why I was all over the school — Mississippi History, science, social studies, blah, blah, blah — you name it.”

She taught a year at Jett but decided she could transfer to Redwood, near home, and wouldn’t have to pay room and board and the expenses of travel.

“I never was much on math,” she laughed, but she reasoned that by teaching at Redwood, “I could have my whole check. Even I could figure that out.” She remembers in later years, when she came home from a job interview, her husband asked how much money she was going to make, and she replied that she forgot to ask.

“I’m embarrassed,” she said, “but it wasn’t the money I was teaching for.”

She spent her teaching years in junior high, joking, “I didn’t have sense enough to get out of the seventh grade.” At one time she wrote a course of study for the school, which she described as “a whole lot of rigmarole.” Eventually, she said, she was given out, losing heart, so “I just had to holler, ‘Calf rope!’”

During those years she took time out to work as a home demonstration agent, her real desire in life. She took training in Bolivar County and was at Tunica for a while, but the significant job was in Rolling Fork, for that’s where she met her future husband, which she terms “a story in itself.”

She had gone to the post office, “and was walking across the street reading my mail. Rolling Fork was such a quiet little town, you didn’t have to worry too much about traffic.” One car stopped to let her cross. The driver was Harry Gilliland, and she learned later that he turned to his brother-in-law, who was in the car with him, and said, “Who in the world is that fool walking across the street reading her mail?”

Harry might have also noticed her because “I was wearing a good-looking suit, that I thought I paid too much for.”

Harry’s brother-in-law had met Miss Simrall, and said his wife also knew her. Arrangements were made for all to meet for coffee, but Harry’s niece Lucille didn’t wait — that night she introduced them at the movie.

Harry was from Cleveland, and in World War II he had been a tail gunner in the U.S. Air Force and had completed 80 missions over enemy territory.

A courtship ensued but, before they could get married at Ballground, Harry had to make three attempts to ask Mr. Simrall for permission to marry his daughter.

“There were always a lot of people at the house,” she said, “and he didn’t have a chance to get Daddy aside, to talk to him alone.” For a time they lived in Vicksburg, then moved to the plantation.

Despite her youth spent at Ballground, she took riding lessons in college because even though she grew up on a horse, she said, she didn’t know anything about the English style of riding — or their saddles. Though she rode, when she was young, “ladies didn’t ride horses to herd cattle. And I had to wait for my horse to be brought to me.” She didn’t go to the pasture or the corral to catch it.

Mama Jo recalls the days at Redwood when the ladies met to can tomatoes — baskets of them — and each year sent 100 jars to the Old Ladies Home in Jackson. And the peaches! They, too, were brought in by the basketful, and the ladies, working under a magnolia tree, peeled them and then made peach preserves and pickled peaches.

She continued to live at Ballground until about two years ago. Harry passed away several years back, and she was very much alone, and then one day her daughter, Rosalie Theobald, called her and said, “Mama, we have bought a house.” It’s nearer town, only a mile or two out Old Highway 80, and Mama Jo said, “and when I saw that swing out there on the porch, that did it. I always had to have a porch swing.”

She’s played the piano since she was a child — used to practice two hours a day — and was pianist for Hawkins United Methodist Church when it was first organized and the members met in a house, “but my hands were not made for playing because of my short fingers.” She’s still an active Methodist and goes to Crawford Street.

She drives — has been driving since she was 16 — and says her days are filled with “going hither and thither, going and visiting.” She’s a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Redwood Homemakers, attends those meetings and also her Sunday school classes.

Daughter Rosalie said, “Mama cooks, I clean. Her happiest is when she’s in that kitchen whipping up something. She doesn’t have a speciality. Everything is good.”

She said her mother was raised differently, that she still insists on little niceties. Even when she has finger food, Mama Jo wants a fork. And don’t put a milk carton or a plastic butter tub on her table! And where’s the butter knife?

And another thing Mama Jo made clear: she’s not 92 — she’s still 91 until her birthday, which won’t be until December.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.