This is Emma
Emma Robinson Clark Stackhouse
Emma Clark Stackhouse has stories to tell!
Emma grew up in rural poverty in South Carolina, moved to New York, married a music promoter, and got to know Bo Diddley and other greats.
Now 83, she remembers what it’s like to be hungry, so she provides home-cooked food to those in need in Mt. Vernon, NY.
Emma Robinson Clark Stackhouse
Emma Mae Robinson was born in Clarendon County, which is in South Carolina, on January 28, 1941. She was the oldest child of Leroy and Mary Jane (Burris) Robinson.
Her sisters were Sarah, Eloise, Betty and Elizabeth; the brothers were Charlie Lee and Alfred. Another brother, Wayne Barrett, was adopted and lived with their family after his mother died.
Mary Jane was born December 19, 1919; her parents were Eugene and Christine Burris Wilson.
The family lived in poverty. Emma and her siblings shared beds or slept on the floor. Emma didn’t know for sure, but it seems likely that her ancestors were at one time enslaved on the property, which was owned by a White man, Howard Jones. The other families on the land were Black and just as poor as the Robinsons. They all worked in the fields, harvesting corn and cotton as tenant farmers.
South Carolina had more than 2,000 plantations before the Civil War, defined as large parcels of land on which most of the work was done by enslaved people.
After Emancipation, many formerly enslaved people continued to work for their former owners. Their lives were essentially the same or even worse, with subsistence wages barely covering the costs of the rent and food supplied by their former owners.
That’s what life was like for the Robinsons. Emma, her parents and her siblings worked in the fields starting when they were very young and often in extreme heat. Parents would take their babies with them while they worked.
“Some people in the fields, I’ve seen them just die there with foam coming from their mouth,” Emma said. “They would just die of heatstroke. Then the man would come and get them on the back of a wagon with horses. And he’d have some of the other people dig a hole and put them in. When you died, they just took you over to that cemetery and put you in there.”
Emma remembered bringing lunch to her parents before she was old enough for school: a little bread and some sugar water, poured into a tin can because they didn’t have drinking glasses.
There was a well on the property, surrounded by boards that were never fixed or replaced. One day, the rotten boards gave way as a child was pulling up a water-filled bucket. The child fell into the well and died.
Emma knew it could have been her. “To this day, I thank God that I didn't fall in the well, because when you put the bucket in there, you’re leaning on those boards to pull it up and it’s heavy, and the boards can give way,” she said.
Another time, her house was set on fire, with everybody inside. “I remember my momma coming and saying to us, ‘Wake up,” and the house was full of smoke,” Emma said.
“It started under the house by the kitchen. We saw where somebody had gotten sticks and stuff and started the fire. To this time, I wonder who did it. I don’t know who hated us and why they would start a fire with a family of small children in there. Can you imagine if Mamma didn’t wake us up?”
The family put the fire out with well water, and placed burlap sacks and sheets on the side of the house until Emma’s father installed new boards.
Emma also remembered the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in front of their church.
Though the family worked hard, they couldn’t seem to get ahead.
“I remember one time when I was a little girl, I went with Daddy to, they used to call it The House. Daddy needed some money for something. So Daddy went up there to get some money from Mr. Howard Jones. And you know what he told him?
He said, ‘No, you don't get any money because I gave you money to buy coats and shoes for your children. You don't get any money because I gave you that money already. And I remember that.”
“I just held on to his hand, and me and him went on back. He was crying. I was crying.”
The family was so poor that Emma’s clothes were mostly hand-me-downs that were held in place with “about 100 safety pins.” The soles of her shoes had been replaced with cardboard.
Emma’s mother would stretch food stamps by buying food that was well past its prime. “The meat would be green, or it would be slimy. My mom always had baking soda, and she would clean up the meat and just put some water on it and cook it,” Emma said.
“When they killed a chicken, they would give us the foot and neck. And when they had pigs, they would give us the inside of the pig, the chitlins and the foot and stuff like that. We didn’t know that it was garbage, we were just happy to get it. That’s why as Black people now we have chitlins and we have pig feet and pig tails.”
Food was cooked in a big pot over the fire. “We didn’t have plates so we used some lids that the man had given to us. Sometimes we had to wait for the food to cool down so we could eat it with our hands. But it was good. My momma could take dirt and make it taste good.”
Emma and her siblings went to a one-room school with the children of other families living on the plantation. The schoolteacher was White, and they were not divided by grade. “You were over here with your Dick and Jane book, and somebody was over there with a book that was a little more advanced,” said Emma.
Because Emma was the oldest of her siblings, she would take her sisters and brothers to school with her when it was too hot for them to be in the field.
When Emma was 11 or 12, the family moved to a house in Sumter, South Carolina, that had a pump, so they didn’t have to draw from the well anymore. (They still had an outhouse.)
“Momma had a tub and we would put the water out in the sun to heat up, and then she would bring it inside,” Emma said. “But the thing was, all of us washed up in the same water and used the same towel.”
Wayne Barrett joined the family when he was about four and Emma was in high school.
“His mother and my mother were friends,” said Emma. When Wayne’s mother got sick with a kidney inflammation known as Bright’s disease, “she came to our house and asked my mom if she could stay there.” When she died, Wayne lived with the Robinsons until he got married.
Food for Weddings, and For the Homeless
Emma’s mother, Mary Jane, was a member of the Hospitality Ministry in her church, the Jehovah Missionary Baptist Church in Sumter. For weddings and other events, she would prepare food for as many as 500 people at a time.
Her love of cooking and of feeding people has been an inspiration and model for Emma.
“She would do meatballs or she would roast a chicken or do turkeys,” Emma said of her mother. “One time they wanted a whole roasted pig. She had this friend who had a packing house, and he got her a pig. And then she had somebody put it over a fire, and she had that all set up. And everybody went around and pulled off the meat. That's what they wanted for their reception.”
Mary Jane would take leftover food to a park in Sumter and give it to people who were homeless. “She knew what it was like to not have food and to be hungry,” said Emma. “She would cook in her house and take the food in the back of a truck with a table and served those people. That’s what she did until she got sick. She did that even though she had pancreatic cancer.”
Mary Jane was 87 when she died Oct. 12, 2007.
For years, she had made cookies and candies for the local hospital staff to give out for Christmas. “When she died in October, they had already put in the orders,” said Emma. She took it upon herself to fill about 100 orders, working nearly around the clock to roast pecans with a little butter, then dip the clumped nuts in milk chocolate and put them in pretty boxes.
When one person started to place an order for the following year, Emma told them, “Miss Mary’s kitchen is closed.”
At Christmas, Emma collected socks and soaps like her mother would do, and gave them to people in the park. When Emma told them that Mary Jane had passed away, they cried. “I cried with them because they were out there sleeping in the cold,” Emma said.
Dannie, New York and Leon
When Emma was 15, she had a son, Dannie, born September 16, 1955. When she told her parents she was pregnant, they said, “It’s done now, you can’t take it back.”
Emma had known Dannie’s father for years. “We lived on the same plantation, and then when we moved from down there to Sumter, they had moved to Sumter too. That’s how he and I got together.
Emma went to Sumter Beauty College, where she received a certificate as a hairstylist for all types of hair. People would come to the house, and she’d also go to nursing homes. “That’s how I learned that all White people’s hair was not straight,” Emma said. “Some had hair that was thick and kinky.”
When Emma was in her early 20’s and Dannie was six or seven, she got a job through an employment agency as a live-in housekeeper in Westbury, New York, on Long Island. It paid better than housekeeping jobs in South Carolina, she said, allowing her to send money home to her family.
Dannie stayed in Sumter, where he was in school. He remembered calling his grandmother Mom, and calling his mother Emma. His grandfather, Leroy, had moved to Charleston, South Carolina. “They didn’t divorce back then,” he said.
“It was sad being away from everybody,” Emma said. “But my momma taught us, you have to do what you have to do in order to survive. And you can’t steal and you can’t lie.”
Emma didn’t like that job. The husband was nice, she said, but the wife was not. “She had that slave mentality thing, and I’d had enough of that,” she said.
“My mama taught us in South Carolina, ‘You see that little girl over there,’ meaning a little White girl, ‘the only difference between you and her is that she's wearing a different colored dress. God didn’t make nobody on this earth better than you.’ That's how she taught us even though we were poor.”
One night when the wife was sleeping, the husband drove Emma to a new and better job, caring for his mother in nearby Garden City. “She liked for me to comb her hair, and she showed me how to make donuts.”
After the mother passed, Emma moved to Mamaroneck, New York, for another live-in housekeeping job, for a family with two daughters. Emma was paid $20 a week to get the girls ready for school, make their lunches, clean the house, help them with homework, and prepare and clean up dinner.
She met Leon Clark Stackhouse, who lived in Mount Vernon, New York, through a friend, when Emma was selling tickets for her sister, Sarah, who lived in New York and was in a beauty pageant.
“I tried to sell him a ticket, and he was friendly,” she said. “His family was from Tabor City, North Carolina, and I was from South Carolina, so we talked about growing up in the South.” At the time, he was working as a custodian at a local synagogue, Emma said, and they hit it off right away.
“He was a wonderful person,” she said of Leon. “I thought he was good-looking. They used to say that he looked like Barry White.”
Emma would stay with Leon on Mondays, her day off, but it was all innocent, she said. She told him he’d have to propose if he wanted to take the relationship to the next level.
Emma and Leon got married in a South Carolina courthouse on July 22, 1967. Emma moved in with Leon, to the first floor of a three-family house at 112 S. 7th Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York. It was a friendly community, with neighbors who got together for backyard cookouts of spare ribs hamburgers and hot dogs.
Every June, Emma and Leon would drive South to get Dannie and bring him to Mount Vernon for the summer.
Leon was outgoing and entrepreneurial. He played guitar and was a good photographer. He ran a cab company with a yellow taxi and a stretch limousine. “He was charming,” Dannie said. “He was a jack of all trades, and he could talk the shirt off of your back.”
Leon was also a music promoter, booking shows and serving as road manager for musicians as famous as Bo Diddley, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Mickey Murray, known for his 1967 Southern soul version of Redding’s 1962 song, Shout Bamalama.
As Emma explained it, Leon started by getting to know musicians at local clubs and offering to find them gigs. “Then he’d go around to different places and ask the club owners if they needed entertainers and they would say yes. My husband would give a list of who he was promoting, and he’d get a fee.”
Sometimes Leon would jump on stage with the artists, goofing around and using the stage name of “Al and His Wooden Guitar.”
When the artists came to New York, they would stay with Leon and Emma because they liked Emma’s cooking. “All the musicians called me Little Mamma,” she said. “I would get up and make breakfast. We had an ironing board and they would iron their clothes and put them on for the next night.”
Emma was never star-struck, she said, and she never asked for autographs. “They were just people to me,” she said. “They’d come to my house and sit on my toilet just like anybody else. It wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t into all that about status. My parents taught me I was just as important as the next person.”
Most important to Emma was that Leon was a good and caring person. Emma’s niece, Vanessa Meg, moved in with Emma and Leon when she was nine months old, while Emma’s sister Sarah attended school in New York for modeling. When Sarah died, they took in her daughters and encouraged them to get college educations.
“They didn't want to go,” Emma said. “I said, ‘One day you may marry a man who can't take care of you or won't take care of you. You need to be educated so you can take care of yourself. With my constant words of encouragement, they all obtained their Masters degrees.”
In those years, Emma had a job inspecting wires for an electronics company in Mount Vernon. “I was the first inspector to make sure all the wires were soldered together and were in the right place,” she said. “I gave to the next person and they would make it ready to be sent out to put into TVs and radios. I got a lot of solder on me. I got blisters. But it was a good job and paid well. I could sit down.”
Dannie moved to Mount Vernon in 1975, after graduating from high school in South Carolina. He had been in the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corp.) in high school, and had college scholarships, but he didn’t want to go. “My husband and I said if he didn’t want to go, we wouldn’t force him because he wouldn’t have been happy and would have been wasting money,” said Emma.
A friend who lived on the second floor of their building said to take him to the Department of Social Services, Emma remembered. “I said, ‘Are they giving jobs?’ She said, ‘No, they’re giving money, they’ll give it to him every month.’ I said, ‘What for?’ He can’t take money from people; he has to work.”
Another friend was working at a company that made luggage and other leather goods, and helped Dannie get a job there. He later got certified as a nursing assistant and worked with patients suffering from dementia. He liked forging relationships and making jokes with the people in his care.
His daughter, Danielle Grant, is a home health aide who lives in New York.
By the 1980s, Leon’s health was failing. He had diabetes and heart problems, and could no longer work. Emma was the family breadwinner as a home health aide, working nights. When she came home in the mornings, she’d get Leon up and dressed and bring him to the porch with a television and urinal. “It was a lot, but I did that for six or seven years, until he passed away,” she said. Leon died in 1988.
By April 2024, just Emma, Betty Robinson Woods, Elizabeth Johnson and Wayne Barrett were still alive of the siblings.
Charlie Lee died when he was a teenager. “One of his friends stabbed him, fooling around with a knife,” said Emma’s son, Dannie. At the time, Dannie was 7 or 8, living in South Carolina with his grandparents and nieces and nephews. Emma had married Leon and was living in Mount Vernon, New York.
Emma and Leon happened to be visiting, said Dannie, and were driving from Sumter to Tabor City, North Carolina, where Leon’s parents lived, when they got the news and came back.
“I remember him coming home that night,” Dannie said of Charlie. “He came to the front door and said hello and my grandmother, Mary Jane, said ‘Why don’t you get something to eat?’ He said, ‘I’ll be back, I’m just going down the street.’ He went to a club, and about 20 minutes later, somebody came running up the step to say he got stabbed, Charlie Lee got stabbed.”
Sarah Jackson Robinson died in 1970, said Dannie; Alfred died December 4, 2020 in Asheville, North Carolina; and Elouise Dingle died April 23, 2024, in Sumter.
The Joy of Feeding People
Emma retired from home health care work in 2007, though she continued to put in long hours in the food distribution center and soup kitchen of the First Reformed Church in Mount Vernon.
Emma joined the church in 1984 and was an active member from the start. She served as a deacon and an elder, and in 2024 was president of the Board of Directors. The church had about 50 congregants in the 1980s, but was about half that size in 2024, partly because congregants had stopped attending during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Melissa Cleveland had been a member of the church since 1980. She and Emma became very close friends right away when Emma joined the church in 1984. “We adopted each other, she became my Godmother,” Melissa said. “She was warm, she was inviting, and our personalities and passion to serve in the church clicked right away.”
They would talk for hours, sometimes in the car after Melissa drove Emma the few blocks from church to her home. “One Sunday, I drove her home and a car pulled up beside us and the woman said, ‘Do you know you have a pan of food on top of your car?’” Melissa recalled.
Like her late mother, Emma devotes much of her time and energy to making sure people have enough food. It started when the late Rev. Winston M. Clarke, a chaplain for Westchester Correctional Officers, hosted a sermon at the church, Emma said.
There was food left over, so Emma saved it to serve to people the following day. “On my way to work, everybody I saw, I told them we’re having food at the Reform Church,” she said.
The meal was popular, so she decided to serve people every Monday. “That’s how it got started, with me walking around and telling people we had food,” she said.
For about 40 years, Emma has done the cooking for the Monday meals, with help from Dannie, Danielle, and members of the church. She makes meatloaf and spaghetti; she bakes chickens and roasts turkeys.
Emma learned about safe food preparation and clean-up at Iona College, located New Rochelle, New York, including how to season food without salt for people with diabetes and high blood pressure.
Food for The First Reformed Church soup kitchen comes from private donors. Emma cooks it all on-site. She arrives at 9 or 9:30 in the morning and opens the doors at 3:45 to serve as many as 70 members of the community, including people referred by the Department of Social Services.
Then she makes sure they get food from the distribution center every 3rd or 4th Wednesday. The food comes from Feeding Westchester. Volunteers clean up, and Emma is usually home by 5.
In 2016, Emma was among 58 Westchester County residents inducted into the Senior Citizens Hall of Fame.
Emma has had two strokes. The first was on May 25, 2022. “I was at the food pantry, handing out food, and I felt funny,” she said. “I realized I couldn’t talk.” One hand was moving around, so she held it still with the other hand. She sat down and started praying and after a while she felt better. She didn’t go to a doctor.
The second was on November 17, 2023. She stayed at Mount Vernon Hospital for a week, then went to Sleepy Hollow for rehabilitation before going home January 7, 2024. She went right back to working in the soup kitchen in February.
Melissa recalled that Rev. Winston M. Clarke, who passed away in 2021, would tell Emma that God has a kitchen in heaven for her. “Everybody just gravitates to her,” Melissa said.