Remembering the Jones family, victims of the 2019 Beauregard tornado

Jimmy Lee Jones and Mary Louise Jones had been married for 64 years.

He a deacon and she a former Sunday school teacher, they were firm in their faith in God and raised their 10 children in the church pews in Lee County, Alabama.

They had attended Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church on March 3, 2019, and returned home shortly before an E-4 tornado ripped through the house on Lee County Road 39.

Along with their 53-year-old son Emmaniel, they were among 23 people killed that day in Beauregard, where winds up to 170 mph caused extensive damage, uprooting trees and destroying homes within its mile-wide path.

Cora Jones saw her parents and brother that morning, when she fixed her mother’s hair as she did every Sunday. She had promised to come back later and cook her mother supper: peas and sweet potatoes, Mary’s favorite.

Remembering life

Besides being one of the church’s oldest attendees, Mary, 83, was an avid soap opera fan who particularly liked “General Hospital” and “All My Children,” Cora said.

And she loved flowers.

“She’d go around back and talk to her flowers, give them plant food and talk to them,” Cora said. “She had a lot of ferns. Every year everybody gave her a fern for Mother’s Day, and she took care of them.”

Mary did housework until she was 65, when her hips started giving her trouble, Cora said.

One of eight sisters, she lived in and around Lee County all her life. Her “favorite” sister’s daughter, Maggie Delight Robinson, 57, also was killed in the March 3 tornadoes.

Other members of the extended family died that day too, including Florel Tate Stenson, 63; Henry Lewis Stenson, 65; Eric Jamaal Stenson, 38; James Henry Tate, 86; Teresa Robinson, 62; and Raymond Robinson Jr., 63.

Jimmy, 89, was a lifelong farmer, and worked for F.B. Smith T in Opelika, farming cotton until he retired.

Cora remembered picking cotton with her siblings, and being thankful for the rainy days that meant she wouldn’t have to.

When Jimmy retired, he had his own garden, growing collard greens, corn and watermelon.

“He’d sit out there in his garden and go to sleep in a chair,” Cora said.

His sisters nicknamed him “Shag.” He loved to tell jokes. He knew the Bible and loved the Lord, Cora said.

Her brother Emmaniel was a “momma’s boy.”

“He’d cut grass in the summertime, get up in the morning time and make sure Momma had her breakfast and her medicine, leave, come back to get lunch and make sure she had her pills and something to eat, and go back out there and cut grass again,” Cora said. “And he’d sit out on the porch with Momma.”

He loved football and basketball, cheering especially hard for the University of Alabama. His headstone is adorned with the Crimson Tide “A.”

Another of Mary and Jimmy’s sons, Benjamin, also was at home when the tornado hit. He survived, with a severe head injury, but for two days was unaccounted for, having been taken to Piedmont Columbus Regional and admitted under another name.

He still suffers from memory loss, Cora said.

After the storm

Cora was at her home when the rain came, and though she planned to follow her brother Emmaniel back to her parent’s house, she decided to wait until the storm slacked off.

“If I would have followed him back, I would have been a goner, so God wasn’t ready for me I guess,” she said.

She was on the phone with Benjamin when the tornado hit, and the phone line went dead.

“That’s when me and my son jumped in the truck and started trying to get over there,” Cora said.

The scene that met her, she’ll never forget.

“Wasn’t nobody asking no question about who was who, everybody was jumping out of their trucks with chainsaws and cutting trees, moving them out the road,” she said. “The house was gone. There wasn’t no houses left. I was standing at the end of the road trying to get up there because trees was everywhere.... My friend and me just started walking. My sister called me on the phone and said ‘Mom and them gone.’”

Cora thought maybe they’d gone somewhere after church, not realizing her sister meant they were dead.

She reached the house and found her dad. She eventually would identify her mother too, but her brother’s condition prevented her from seeing him. He would be identified by his fingerprints.

Cora remembered the chaos.

“Didn’t nobody sleep that Sunday night. Didn’t nobody sleep that Monday night. Everybody was just on their phone, talking and texting,” she said. “We had to stay with my nephew for a few days until we got lights back.”

Accepting the loss

In the months that followed, Cora and her remaining siblings were met with her father’s birthday in April, Mother’s Day in May, Father’s Day in June, Emmaniel’s birthday in August and her mother’s birthday in September. It hardly feels like a year has gone by, she said.

“I haven’t even grieved yet. I can’t cry and I can’t sleep. I still haven’t processed it yet, because I had just left them,” Cora said. “Everybody over here was just getting back from church, just getting in their houses, everybody was still in their Sunday clothes.”

Now, she and Benjamin live in a home given to him by Samaritan’s Purse, on Lee Road 39. She takes care of him as he deals with his injury. At first they had said they wouldn’t be going back, because of the bad memories. But they also remembered the good.

“This is where we all did holidays, this is where everybody had came for the last 10 years.... Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays,” Cora said. “They had plenty of shade trees over here. We’d sit up under the shade tree and talk and barbecue.”

Those shade trees were downed by the deadly winds, like so many up and down Lee Roads 38 and 39.

These days, Cora and Benjamin sit in their quiet home, and wait to grieve.