Culture & Community | Faith & Spirituality | Arts & Culture | Newhallville | Community Heroes
"Mother" Mary Etta Atkinson Joyner. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Mary Etta Atkinson Joyner held the phone in one hand, tracing the contours of her sister’s voice in the other. On the line, 95-year-old Virginia Griffen wished her many happy returns, a refrain that has never gotten old in 103 years of hearing it. Between them, there were nearly 200 years of history, criss-crossing the country from North Carolina to New Haven, from Newhall and Huntington Streets to downtown and back.
“My baby sister!” she announced with a warm edge to her voice. Her eyes fluttered behind a pair of black shades. “My baby sister.”
Saturday, five generations of siblings, cousins, children and grandchildren crowded into Joyner’s Newhall Street home to celebrate her 103 years on this earth, including over nine decades in New Haven. A fierce and formidable matriarch, Hillhouse High School graduate and part of the family that founded Pitts Chapel, “Mother” Atkinson Joyner is now an integral part of the city’s story, from its houses of worship to the four children and five grandchildren she saw through its schools.
Cousin Sean Hardy and Joyner.
“I don’t feel my age at all,” she said Saturday, from where she sat on a plush leather recliner, greeting a steady stream of well-wishers who crouched down beside her. The Bible Network hummed in the background, alternating between song and sermon. “God blessed me with good brains.”
The story of Joyner, after whom a nearby corner was named in 2022, is one that captures a living piece of New Haven history. Born in Greenville, North Carolina to Bishop Austin Atkinson and Lethia Johnson Atkinson, Joyner came to New Haven when she was just a little girl, part of a 22-family group that migrated North to start Pitts Chapel.
In February 1934, she was there to see the church open its doors at 126 Dixwell Ave., in part of what was then becoming a self-sustaining Black business district (it has since moved to Brewster Street). As the eldest of nine kids, Joyner learned to cook for her family before she was ten, a skill she later passed on to her sisters, children and grandchildren. In the thick of the Great Depression, she was deputized to collect firewood, for which she would make trips downtown with an empty baby carriage.
Gloria Miller, Joyner's eldest daughter.
“Things were hard,” she remembered. “I didn’t come up with the luxuries of life, but I had a strong foundation. I always tried to treat people nice, the way I wanted to be treated.”
When she wasn’t taking care of her siblings, she made time for her education, attending Troup School and later James Hillhouse High School at the same time as peace activist Al Marder and Judge Constance Baker Motley (she and Motley both graduated in the class of 1939). Not long after, she began to build a family of her own, a devoted mother to her children Gloria, Diana, Malcolm and Richard. (Her husbands, the late Alfred Lee Hazard and Malcolm Joyner, have both passed).
Anchored by the church, Joyner dedicated herself not only to her own children, but children in the neighborhood, always ready to lend a hand or drum up resources and a home-cooked meal. At home in Newhallville, she became somewhat famous for keeping the neighborhood clean and tidy.
Top: Cousins Alice Woodson and Dennis Carr. "To reach 103, you have to walk with God," said Carr. Bottom: Geneva Carr Walters, who is 78.
“It was not a fast life, not a wild life,” she said Saturday. She didn’t drink. She’d never attended a school dance. She didn’t see a movie in a theater until she was an adult. Instead, she dedicated herself to service, an extension of her faith that seemed inexhaustible.
She remained a fixture at Pitts Chapel, bringing names that ranged from Mahalia Jackson to The Staple Singers to Sam Cooke as she became an in-house financial secretary and gospel promoter (in a New Haven Register article from 2021, she remembered having Cooke in her home).
All the while, she made her children, and New Haven’s children, her official business. In the early 1960s, Joyner served as the president of the PTA at Troup School—the first Black woman to do so, said her eldest daughter, Gloria Miller. She checked in on kids in the neighborhood, making sure that they had what they needed, and helping fill in the gaps when they didn’t.
Sharon Dolphin, Joyner's granddaughter, and the birthday girl.
When her daughter Diana died tragically in a car accident, she welcomed five grandchildren into her home, and raised them as her kids. Sharon Dolphin, one of those children, now lives with her full time. Saturday, she buzzed between the kitchen, the living room and the yard, making sure everyone had enough to eat.
In preparation for the festivities, she had been cooking for two days, crowd-sized portions of greens, string beans, chicken, and sweet potatoes that made the house smell like Thanksgiving.
“This is beautiful,” Dolphin said, looking around at family members who had flown and drove in from Ohio, Pittsburgh and North Carolina. Growing up with her grandmother—who was always and is still “mom” to her—“we never lacked anything,” she said. There was always plenty to eat at home, and Joyner taught Dolphin her way around the kitchen as she got older.
While “we were raised the old-fashioned way”—church camp, church on Sundays, vacation Bible school at Pitts Chapel and prayers that she still does without fail each morning—she and her siblings had fun, with sleeping bag races down the stairs, frequent family trips down South and enough laughter to go around. In Dolphin, Joyner also instilled a love for food and family that was evident Saturday, with foil-wrapped plates that made their way through the room for people on their way out.
Angel Dolphin and her great-grandmother.
Caring for her now feels like the most natural way to say thank you, she added. When Joyner called her seven years ago, asking for help after a fall took her eyesight, Dolphin returned from where she was living in North Carolina without a second thought. “She did it for me, so I said, I’ve got to take care of her,” she said. Her grandmother is still sharp as a tack, she added: “If she hadn’t lost her sight,” she’d still be taking the bus across town for community events.
“She’s been a mother to so many,” chimed in her cousin Geneva Carr Walters. After moving to New Haven in 1946, Walters remembered how often Joyner would take care of her, from batches of her homemade ice cream to making sure she felt spiritually at home. Saturday, she had come to thank her for being “a mother to me,” dressed up in white-and-purple polka dots and a matching pillbox hat for the occasion.
Alder Troy Streater, a cousin who grew up in Pitts Chapel, called the birthday a blessing. When he won a special election for Newhallville alder last January, Joyner was one of the first people he wanted to tell, he said. “We can’t stop thanking God for her being here,” he said.
As a gentle drizzle fell outside, the party continued beneath a white tent, where gold balloon letters spelled out the number 1-0-3 and bobbed against the bright fabric. A few great-great-grandchildren ran up the wooden back steps, on their way to wish a happy birthday. Giggles drifted from the wide mouth of the tent, where no one seemed to mind a little rain.
Taking in a rare moment of quiet, Joyner’s great-granddaughter, Angel Dolphin, remembered how special it had been to grow up with her great-grandmother closeby, in roles that ranged from de facto historian to faith leader to neighborhood mother to faithful travel companion.
“It feels good” to celebrate 103, she said. “She’s the glue to our family.”