A new post office worker stopped at Edwina Williams’ home recently. He handed her the mail, paused and asked her if he knew her from somewhere.
Williams asked him the same question.
He did. He remembered her from Franklin Elementary School, where she had visited years ago as Mother Goose.
He was in his 30s.
In Columbus, Mother Goose isn’t a character from a nursery rhyme. She’s Edwina Williams, who has spent half her life creating a character that has become part of the town itself.
“She is always Mother Goose, always in character,” said Barbara Bigelow, longtime friend and director of Main Street Columbus. “Very rarely have I seen her just be ‘Edwina Williams.’ Even when I drop something off at her home, she comes out singing ‘Hellllloooooo’ or a short, impromptu ditty.”
On Jan. 3, she will turn 90, and Columbus will celebrate 45 years of Mother Goose.
Around the town, reminders of her celebrity are everywhere.
There’s a Mother Goose utility box on Main Street, painted by artist Amy Ballard. In her smiling portrait, Edwina is sitting at a baby grand piano – her favorite – in her Miz Claus outfit. “The magic of Edwina Williams,” it reads, as the cow jumps over the moon behind her.
It’s not unusual for her to walk into a building, hand in the air, singing.
“Every time we’re out for like lunch with my parents, and Mother Goose like shows up to a restaurant, like she’s gonna start singing from across the restaurant at them,” said Emily Oaks, whose dad is a close friend of Edwina. “And then they’re gonna be like, ‘All right, come sit down with us.’”
When she walks down the street, traffic stops, literally. April Robbins posted a photo on Facebook of her child holding Mother Goose’s hand through the backseat window, both smiling as she leans in.
“Look who we saw! And yes I stopped traffic,” April wrote, with plenty of laughing emojis. “And the whole line of traffic waited patiently, nobody made a peep, they all understood the assignment.”
During Spring Pilgrimage, if you walk through the right home at the right time, the sound of a piano greets you. There Mother Goose will be, seated at the bench, playing her favorites.
“She loves to play her piano and, though she plays beautifully, has never had a lesson and cannot read music,” Barbara said. “She plays by ear and can bang out anything you like.”
In February she hosts her annual Victorian Valentine tea party at the library. The young attendees arrive dressed to the nines – some in tiny suits and floor-length dresses, others in costumes as ballerinas or even an alligator, as happened one year. She uses a puppet with atrocious manners, Sally Lou, to teach the kids etiquette.
“It is the social event of the season … for 3, 4 and 5-year-olds,” Mother Goose said with a smile.
At Halloween she transforms herself into The Good Witch, visiting schools and offering tips on having a safe holiday. At Easter, she is Miz Easter Bunny.
During Christmas, she is Miz Claus. Wrapped in a red cloak, bonnet on her head, she carefully listens to each child’s Christmas wishes at Wassailfest and then waves to the crowds from the bucket of the fire truck during the Christmas parade.
“I tear up every Christmas that she’s up on the fire truck as Miz Claus,” said Randi Robison, president of the Columbus-Lowndes Library Board.
This winter, she’ll serve as grand marshal for the Columbus Christmas Parade – not for the first time. She was the grand marshal in 2015. Still, the announcement thrilled locals on Facebook.
“Well deserved,” Angii Ivey Stephens commented on The Dispatch’s Facebook post. “I worked with her in the children’s library when I was in college. I was blessed years later to take my niece to see her often for storytime. Great memories!”
Edwina Williams is so enmeshed with Mother Goose that formal mentions of her name in the paper are followed with “Mother Goose” in parentheses. Otherwise, it would create confusion.
She jokes that even she “forgets her own name.”
“My granddaughter calls me Mother Goose,” she said. “And one daughter calls me MG.”
The cat and the fiddle
Visiting Mother Goose in her office for the first time is a delightful, slightly surreal experience. She’s surrounded by shelves full of stuffed animals and puppets – each tied to one story or another. Little Goose sits at her right hand. Memorabilia and fan art adorn her walls.
Handwritten letters are tucked everywhere. Taped on her window is a note from one of her storytime attendees, the child’s handwriting barely legible. The child’s mother has written a clear translation under each word.
“Mother Goose,” it begins. “I am sorry for being grumpy and not using my manners… ”
Mother Goose sits at her desk, surrounded by her books and characters. She smiles as she shares her story.
Edwina was named after her father, she said. You pronounce her name as if saying “Edwin, but add an ‘a’ at the end.” Born in the Delta, she moved with her family to Columbus when she was 2 years old.
She graduated from Lee High and then attended Mississippi University for Women. She began her career as a first-grade teacher.
In 1958, she married Alexander “Bam” Williams. They left Columbus twice during their marriage, once for a short year in New Orleans and then a much longer 10 years in St. Petersburg, Florida. By the time they arrived back in Columbus in the mid-70s, they had two young daughters, Lane and Lee.
Edwina was a stay-at-home mom, and Bam was getting his veterinary practice off the ground, but she missed the years she had spent teaching first grade. Soon after returning to Columbus, Williams began to substitute teach and visit elementary schools to read and tell stories.
The teachers – and Bam – encouraged her to adopt a character for those reading visits.
“So I thought about it,” she said. “I thought, well, everybody knows Mother Goose.”
In 1985, Mother Goose joined the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library at the invitation of then-director Chebie Bateman. Edwina hesitated, telling Chebie that she didn’t have a formal library science degree, but Chebie insisted she was perfect for the role.
By this point in the interview, Mother Goose is singing the story.
“She said, ‘Be on boooard, come be on board with us!’” she harmonizes, arms held wide. “So I said, ‘Fine.’”
Bam died after a short illness in December 1998 on their 40th wedding anniversary.
“I just realized I had to keep on going,” she says. “And the only way I could keep going was to keep on going the way I was going. Mother Goose is going, so I have to keep up with her.”
She still uses an instrument he made for her, a “boomba,” she calls it. The boomba lives in her car and made an appearance at a September parade in Caledonia.
“Her family is very special to her,” said Barbara. “Sometimes you will see her around town in ‘Mr. Truck,’ her 1990 Dodge Ram, a treasure left by her late husband.”
As the years passed, Edwina and Mother Goose became harder to separate.
“When I leave my house in the morning, I am Mother Goose,” Edwina says. “Whether I’m wearing my hat and apron or not, it just comes out. I step through doorways just singing.”
As it nears 10 a.m., she pokes her head out of her office. Children have begun to arrive for storytime.
“Let me go on and get out there,” she says. With a look back she adds, “Being Mother Goose does wonders for me. It lifts my spirits and I love to do it.”
The cow jumped over the moon
Mother Goose’s Thursday storytimes are a fixture at the library. These days, she works 20 hours a week.
“Paaart-timeee,” she sang. “Paid every twooo weeeks!”
At storytime, she is clearly in her element. This hour of music, reading and social time is the core of what she does. Mother Goose looks like entertainment, but she’s teaching.
“I try to do several things for children, and they think it’s fun,” she said. “And the three main things I try to incorporate are the listening skills, reading skills and the social skills. Doing all of these together with song and stories, they don’t know that I’m teaching them something.”
As she walks out to greet everyone, children who were clinging to their parents’ legs run to her, arms wrapping tightly around her pinafore. She brings out the extrovert in even the shyest kids.
“You’re looking mighty cute today!” she says to each of them, hugging them back.
She takes the time to compliment something unique about each: their hair, their smile, their outfits, their eyes, their smarts – Mother Goose notices all of it. And she is sure to tell them how incredible she believes they are.
But for all her encouraging compliments and gracious guidance, there is one thing Mother Goose doesn’t budge on: manners.
Every child that sits crisscross applesauce on her rug is reminded to “listen closely now.”
It’s partially how she’s able to maintain order among such a large group of easily distracted children.
Her corrections come gently, often with humor. Even when someone has to be reminded to sit down three or four times, her patience never cracks and her smile never fades.
“Give your brain a kiss!” she tells them after each moment of learning.
Mother Goose works hard to get everyone to think. Throughout the hour she purposefully sneaks in vocabulary words like “introduction” and “audience.”
She recruits a dad to help her manage show and tell, and judging by how quickly he rises to the occasion, it’s clear that the parents love her too. Most of them sing along with her songs.
Local mother Kimberly Mixon came to storytime with her own mother, Doris Mixon, and her son Timothy Vanderford. Kimberly said her grandmother – Doris’ mother – attended Lee High with Mother Goose. Then, as Kimberly grew up, Doris brought her to storytime.
“As a kid, it was magical,” she said. “She stepped out of the page and became the reader, and it was awesome. Even being a child with complex ADHD and dyslexia, it really encouraged me to become a reader and to understand the words within the books.”
Now, Kimberly said, there are no words for what it means to bring her own son.
“To be the mother and getting this opportunity to bring my son and experience what my own mom experienced when she brought me,” she said, smiling at her mom. “It’s just magical.”
After storytime ends, Mother Goose chats with parents while kids disperse to play areas, computer stations and library shelves. She asks how they’re doing and checks on the mothers holding new babies.
She’s curious about the people around her, and she knows how to keep the conversation going.
If you let it slip that you cook, she gives you a curious look and asks, “What do you cook?” Famously, Mother Goose does not cook, but she still wants to know more about people who do.
Later, when asked what she thinks has changed for children in the last 45 years, she takes a moment to consider the question. She’s watched children become adults and bring in their own children. She’s watched technology and institutions change. And she’s certainly watched children change.
“The children have access to more technology, websites and social media,” she said. “We weren’t too keen on those kinds of things back then. Kids are just more observant as to things around them and the parents try to keep them informed on all things that are going on TV.”
She doesn’t think it’s for the better or worse.
“I think it’s just a change,” she said. “You cannot do anything with change. You have to accept it.”
For someone who has seen so much change, there is something reassuring about how much Mother Goose has stayed the same.
Words by ASHLYND KING
STORY Photos by BIRNEY IMES AND CATFISH ALLEY MAGAZINE FILE PHOTOS