Memorial
Gloria Mae Coleman was born on April 12, 1953, in Greenwood, Mississippi, the seventh of nine children in a sharecropping family that measured its wealth in Sunday singing and full plates. She grew up in the Delta on cotton rows and church pews, learned to carry an alto line beside her mother at Mount Calvary Baptist, and learned to stretch a pot of greens to feed whoever showed up hungry. Both of those gifts stayed with her for the rest of her life.
In 1971 she became the first person in her family to finish high school. A year later she packed one suitcase and took the road north to Memphis, looking for work and a life of her own. She found both. At a New Hope Missionary Baptist social in 1974 she met Nathaniel Coleman, a city bus driver with a slow smile, and they married that same year. Together they raised four children, Anthony, Deborah, Marcus, and Renee, in a shotgun house in South Memphis where the porch light was always on and the door was never really locked.
For thirty-four years Gloria worked in the cafeteria at Rosewood Elementary, where the children knew her simply as the cafeteria mama. She learned every child's name. She kept an extra plate for the ones who came to school with nothing at home, and she never once let a child know it was charity. Generations of South Memphis grew up fed by her hands. When she retired in 2019, the school lined the halls, and cards came in from grown men and women who still remembered that she had seen them.
Everybody has a Gloria story, and most of them happen around a table. Her peach cobbler was famous three streets over. Her Sunday dinners fed twenty without warning. She kept a garden of tomatoes, okra, and collards, pieced quilts out of old church-dress scraps, carried a red patent-leather purse to every occasion, and wrote the names of everyone she prayed for in the margins of her Bible until the pages ran out of room.
She became Gigi in 2001 with the birth of her first grandchild, and in the years that followed she gathered nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren into her arms. She lost her Nate in 2016 and kept going the way she always had, with a full stove and an open door. Gloria passed peacefully at home on February 9, 2025, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, with gospel playing low and a pan of cobbler on the counter. There was always a plate for you at her table, and there always will be in the memory of her.
If you would like to honor Gloria, one lasting way is to .
Arranged and delivered by a local florist, with a note in your words. A quiet way to let Gloria’s family know you are thinking of them.
Pages recently shared on LoveKept
Leave a memory or a message for the family
In twenty-two years of education I have never met anyone who understood children better than Gloria Coleman, and she did it three hundred lunches at a time. The day she retired, we couldn't fit all the thank-you cards on one table. A school is a family, and she was ours.
Gloria took me in at seventeen when I had nowhere to go and never once made me feel like a burden. She called me her play daughter, but she loved me like the real thing. Everything I know about being a mother, I learned in her kitchen.
She was five years ahead of me and thought that made her my second mama, and honestly it did. We picked cotton together, we sang together, we buried our people together. Now she's gone on ahead of me too. Save me a seat, Glo, and keep it warm.
Thirty-two years next door to Gloria Coleman. She kept me in tomatoes every summer and cobbler every holiday, and she checked on me after my wife passed more than my own kin did. The block isn't the same. Nobody's porch light will ever match hers.
Miss Gloria fed me lunch and breakfast both, back when there wasn't much at home, and she made sure I never felt ashamed of it. I'm a labor and delivery nurse now. Every child I hand to a mother, I think of the woman who made sure I was cared for. Thank you doesn't cover it.
In twenty-two years of education I have never met anyone who understood children better than Gloria Coleman, and she did it three hundred lunches at a time. The day she retired, we couldn't fit all the thank-you cards on one table. A school is a family, and she was ours.
Gloria took me in at seventeen when I had nowhere to go and never once made me feel like a burden. She called me her play daughter, but she loved me like the real thing. Everything I know about being a mother, I learned in her kitchen.
She was five years ahead of me and thought that made her my second mama, and honestly it did. We picked cotton together, we sang together, we buried our people together. Now she's gone on ahead of me too. Save me a seat, Glo, and keep it warm.
Thirty-two years next door to Gloria Coleman. She kept me in tomatoes every summer and cobbler every holiday, and she checked on me after my wife passed more than my own kin did. The block isn't the same. Nobody's porch light will ever match hers.
Miss Gloria fed me lunch and breakfast both, back when there wasn't much at home, and she made sure I never felt ashamed of it. I'm a labor and delivery nurse now. Every child I hand to a mother, I think of the woman who made sure I was cared for. Thank you doesn't cover it.
