As a child, Jesse Patty sat on the kitchen floor and watched his mom, Melvine Patty Gray, make her sweet potato pie. It was her signature dessert for holidays and church gatherings. And she held onto the recipe for most of her life.
Patty and his family were sharecroppers in Clio, Ala. in the late 1950s. He remembers picking cotton with his older brother, racing to see who would fill their sack the quickest — and his mom teaching them how to harvest without cutting their hands.
"We were young, so it was fun," said Patty.
But his family couldn't own anything, and they had to maintain the property in order to stay, "so it wasn't a fabulous life," Patty recalled.
"Then some of my relatives, my uncles came down telling my dad about some of the jobs they got in Tampa," he said, "And my dad said, 'okay, we're going to Florida.'"
Patty and his brother went to school while his parents worked. They eventually separated, leaving Melvine to raise the two boys on her own.
She cooked and washed dishes in the commissary at MacDill Air Force Base. And when her two sons got home from school, she always had a meal on the table.
"She was disciplined, always dressed to the nines," Patty said, laughing, "She did a great job raising us, and we gave her all the respect. When I think back on it now, I don't know how she did it."
Her work ethic set an example, said Patty. The two brothers worked summers, cutting the spacious yards along Bayshore Boulevard for $6 a day so that they could buy their own school clothes.
When Patty graduated, he left home and went to work in shipyards all over the country, sandblasting and painting various types of cargo and Navy ships. He was frequently the only Black machinist on the crew.
And after 30 years of travel, Patty was tired and came back home to Tampa to his wife, mom and the rest of his family.
He eventually became his mom's caretaker, bringing her to weekly doctor appointments and the grocery store. Even in her old age, she cooked for them, Patty said, because that's what she liked to do.
As Melvine got up into her 80s, the family dinners started taking place at Patty's house and he would bring her over. She baked her sweet potato pie. But soon, Patty had to take that over too.
Her arthritis made it hard to stir the potatoes so, one day, Patty asked for the recipe.
"I think really she kept it so long because she liked for us to ask her to do them for us," said Patty, who admitted he never baked before.
"I didn't know that I was going to one day be making her pie...You don't ever plan on ever seeing that your mom's going to leave you one day."
It was at a doctor's appointment that Patty learned his mom was dying. She was 88.
"I broke down, but when I looked at her for her reaction, she just smiled," said Patty.
More than 10 years have gone by since his mother passed away, and Patty is still baking the sweet potato pie. He makes at least four or five for the holidays, so that there's enough to go around for his extended family.
"Sometimes I feel like something is missing," he said. "I'm always reaching for that same exact taste when we had her pie. I'm like, 'I'm almost there, I'm almost there.' I think I've finally reached it though."
