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Hayward Allen Jr. remembers his mother often lamented that her own mother had died at an early age. “She always said she was a young girl when her mother died and she often wished she had had her mother longer,” Hayward Jr. said. He said his mother, Leola Harris Allen, and her siblings had been reared by their father and that Leola had to pitch in and help with the other four boys and four girls.
And while his mother may not have had her mother for a long time, Leola’s children lived their mother’s wish. They had their mother for a very long time; long enough for her to see 15 grandchildren, 38 great-grand children and 40 great-great grandchildren.
Leola died on July 4, at the age of 102, six months before her 103rd birthday, having outlived her parents, eight siblings, husband and four of her nine children. “Only the three sons and the baby girl are left,” Hayward Jr. said. One son, Lionel, lives in Lake Charles, La. and Hayward Jr., Ernest and “the baby girl,” Judy Ann Allen Ruffin, live in Houma.
Hayward Jr. described his mother as easy going. “Unless you made her mad,” he said. One of the things that would make her mad was if he or any of her children stopped going to church. All of her life Leola Allen was a church-going woman. As her children got older, Hayward Jr. said, some of them drifted from the church; but “she would always make us come back. She really kept God on her mind.”
“She was a familiar figure in church, in her white dress and chapel piece, sitting in the front on the deaconess bench,” said Phillip Ruffin, a fourth-generation cousin of the Allens. She was an active member of Beautiful Zion Baptist Church in Houma, a church she and her family helped establish. Ruffin said it was Leola’s father who purchased the bricks for the original church building on Railroad Avenue in Houma. Today, the church stands on Hialeah Avenue in Houma.
“She was a sweet, kind, Christian, god-fearing lady,” is how Ruffin described Leola. “She was also very prompt, very proper in her speech, a pillar of the church and of her family.”
As the matriarch of the family, she was the one sought out by younger members when they wanted to know anything about the family’s roots and background, he said.
Hayward Jr. said his boyhood memory of his mother was that she was an “all around loving person,” who loved her family and took care of him and his siblings. “She and my father worked hard to take care of us.” He said his mother also worked outside the home in the sugar cane fields and as a domestic. “Dad was a nice guy, but Mom was always the chief.”
Leola often had to walk to church, he said, and weather was never a deterrent to her attendance. “It didn’t’ matter if it was raining or cold, she wasn’t going to miss church.”
