there was, for instance, Pig Foot Mary, huge and deep-voiced, who had trailed her migrant customers to Harlem Early in the fall of 1901, she drifted into New York from the Mississippi Delta penniless, and within a week after her arrival set up a business in front of a popular San Juan Hill saloon.
Mary, whose real name was Lillian Harris, after earning five dollars as a domestic, spent three for a dilapidated baby carriage and a large wash-boiler, and invested the balance in pigs' feet.
Concern about her old age vanished when she moved to Harlem, opened her business at 135th Street on Lenox Avenue, and three weeks later married John Dean, owner of an adjoining newsstand.
Everybody who knows the corner of Lenox Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street knows "Mary" and her stand and has been tempted by the smell of her pigsfeet [sic] fried chicken and hot corn, even if he has not been a customer.
[5]As Johnson notes, Dean invested her food stand profits in real estate and attained a considerable fortune, "several hundred thousand dollars" according to landmark information from the City of New York's Department of Planning.
[6] Ottley provides further detail, stating that John Dean encouraged his wife to invest: He persuaded her to purchase a $44,000 apartment-house building, which she sold six years later to a Negro "underground specialist" (undertaker) for $72,000.
Adjusted for inflation, these sums record a remarkable history of accomplishment for a woman who arrived in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, alone, illiterate and completely impoverished.