One by one, 6 feet apart, the many granddaughters and friends of Marie Hill climbed the three brick steps of her porch in mid-February to pay their respects. They waved through the front door of the Suffolk home where Hill had lived for more than 80 years.
“Happy birthday to you. Happy 100th birthday to you,” sang one well-wisher — before adding, almost to himself, “I hope I live that long.”
“You’re a queen,” gushed another. Hill wore a tiara to match, above a regal purple sweater. A garden’s worth of flowers rested on her porch, next to where the Rev. Isaac Baker, from nearby Metropolitan Baptist Church, played a celebratory calfskin drum until his hands got too cold to continue, a Black Lives Matter mask covering the lower half of his face.
They had come to celebrate a century of life for “Queen Mother Marie Hill” — a woman who’d fought for her children to be among the first to integrate local schools, before finally getting her own GED at age 92.
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