IT was her 101 Birthday, and Perdy May Shaw was giving thanks to God.

“Amen, hallelujah, thank you Jesus!” Sharpe shouted when she was wished happy birthday by friends and family members on April 2.

“Thank you Jesus, hallelujah!” she repeated. “I am happy to be alive. I am on the side of God so I’m just happy in Jesus’ name.”

Shaw, who is a member of the Bible Church of God of Prophesy in Rose Hall, Linstead, recalled the day that she gave her life to the Lord and stated that she has never looked back since.

“It was when I was a big woman that I gave my life to the Lord,” she said. “I went to church one day and when I was in the church a missionary give altar call. And she said she waiting on one somebody, but she never call any name. And I heard a voice say to me ‘is you’. When I went up she stop, and I heard someone behind me say, ‘Wait, is Mabel she was talking’, because they called me Mabel. And praise the Lord, from that I don’t turn back. Satan want me to turn back, you know. But I don’t turn back. I live up. I live up, praise God, until mi 101! Praise God!” she said with joy.

Shaw was born in the community of Hampshire, on the outskirts of Linstead, St Catherine, and grew up with her mother, stepfather, two sisters and one brother until she was almost 15. However, she left home and went to St Thomas after “refusing to do what my stepfather wanted me to do”.

“Mi stepfather never like me,” Shaw stated. “Because wah him want me to do mi wasn’t doing it. Him did want me to keep him and mi wouldn’t do it, so him never like me. And my mother have some children for him and when mi mother tell the children them to call me sister, him tell them no, not to call me nuh sister. He told them they must just call mi May. And from that is May they call mi,” she said.

“She told me that her stepfather never treated her good and he didn’t want her sisters to have anything to do with her because

he could not get to do what he wanted to do with her,” the centenarian’s great-granddaughter Shawna Brown interjected. “So she leave home at an early age, and she never had a good relationship with her mother because her mother take the father side,” Brown said.

As a result, the young teen went to St Thomas to live with her aunt, but moved back to Linstead looking for work when she was too old for elementary school.

“I grew in Hampshire until I turned big girl,” Shaw explained. “Then my aunt let me go to St Thomas and when mi go St Thomas I went to school there until the teacher them tell me that mi age up. So I went to St Thomas at school age, before mi was 15. Then I come Linstead to look work. That time I was a big woman. I did domestic work with a lady and a gentleman see me and ask if I can read and write and I said no. So I asked myself the question ‘Why him ask me that?’ So him take me now to sell the newspaper. And from that I start to sell newspapers,” the centenarian told the Sunday Observer from her home in Venetia district.

But despite the way that she was treated by her mother, Shaw ran to her side the moment she got news that she was sick and needed care.

“Look at it now, her mother never stand by her side at all, and then when she was in Linstead selling, she got a phone call that her mother up there (Hampshire) sick and out of all the children, and being the one her mother forsake, she went to take care of her,” Brown said.

“Because by right she chose her man and her other children over granny. And when they send call her she leave her job and nurse her mommy for how much years,” Brown went on.

This, Brown said, could be the very reason her great-grandmother has lived for over 100 years.

“She honour her mother,” Brown said. “Because anybody who go through such a rough life and you mother forsake you would say ‘Ask you children them that you did prefer, I am not coming anywhere’. But she did it,” Brown said.

“I leave Linstead and go care my mother until my mother dead,” Shaw added. “I don’t really remember how many years but a nuff years.”

Shaw said that by this time, her stepfather had died and the other children were on their own.

“She never have nobody,” Shaw recalled. “My stepfather dead when I was at Linstead, and all the others gone ’bout them business so it was just she alone.”

Shaw gave birth to two children — a boy and girl. However, her son died at the age of 13 after falling from a coconut tree where he was sent by a neighbour to pick the nuts.

Her daughter now lives and cares for her.

“I really didn’t grow with her but for the short time I was with her she was a nice mother,” Shaw’s 78-year-old daughter Elizabeth Murray said. “She was a well-disciplined person. She was very strict,” she went on.

Murray said that she grew up with a woman in Old Harbour but cannot recall the circumstances under which she went there.

“She is all right, only because she can’t walk right now,” Murray said of her mother. “She don’t have any illness, just that she has gas and sometimes her stomach act up. When she was younger, sometimes she never used to eat on time, so I think is that cause it,” she said.

Murray said that her mother stopped selling newspapers in her 70s.

Shaw’s inability to walk started after she fell and broke one of her legs some 20 years ago.

A second fall affected her other leg and after a while, she was left completely crippled.

Along with her inability to walk, Shaw has also lost sight in one eye, which has also affected her vision in the other.

“She told me that her mother was beating her and the stick caught her into her eye,” Shaw’s daughter explained. “From then it was sick. She visited the hospital but it did not get better. Then she visited a private doctor who operated on it, but it still wasn’t better until the doctor decided to sink it so that it would not affect the other one. But it still affected the second eye,” Murray said.

Asked to speak about something she remembered about growing up, Shaw, who was the only child for her father, responded without hesitation.

“Manners. I grow with manners!” she said. “I don’t turn rude girl. I never give my mother any trouble. I grow with my mother but not my father. But I would visit him.

Him used to help me for is only me him did have.”

Shaw said that she was never married because she never met any man she loved enough — not even the man who fathered her two children. In fact, when asked to speak about the relationship that she had with her children’s father, Shaw burst into laughter and declared:

“Oonu ago laugh after mi,” she said, still laughing. “Him come in the room, that time mi gone to bed and him kiss mi.” She laughed again. “That time mi couldn’t manage him, him did big! That’s why mi have you,” she said pointing to her daughter.

Asked to speak about their relationship some more, Shaw dismissed the team by declaring that it was “me and God’s business”.

While seated in front of a large birthday cake made in her honour, she admitted a culinary guilt.

“Mi eat everything, and mi love meat,” she said. “Mi love cow foot, chicken — every meat.”

Murray agreed that her mother indeed eats anything provided for her.

But before ending the interview Shaw declared yet again.

“I am on the righteous side of God. Thank you Jesus!”

“When she praising the Lord she don’t ease up, you know,” Shaw’s daughter concluded.