While fellow classmates in grade school were outside playing or in the house watching television, Martha Williams had one activity that she could do endlessly — watch her mother sew.

Williams would watch from different angles, and by the time she reached eighth grade she knew the profession she would pursue: seamstress.

“If you only knew how many hours I spent [watching my mother]. … No one ever taught me how to sew,” remembered Williams. “I learned from watching my family. I would stand at someone’s elbow or sit across from the [sewing] machine and watch.”

Her mother further fueled the passion when she purchased fabric for her daughter. Young Martha went to work making a “Vogue” suit that was featured in the magazine of the same name.

“I’m sure [the suit] had a whole bunch of horrors,” said Williams, laughing. “My mother invested in me some orange wool, and I made a matching hat. My mother let me wear it to school, and you couldn’t tell me nothing.”

Williams has since created custom coats, costumes, clothing, curtains, and puppets — and she has even sewn a mascot for the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She takes on jobs for individual clients, too, as well as larger jobs for groups like bridal parties. Her most famous stint was as six months as a seamstress for R&B icon Anita Baker.

Magic City Roots

Family matters brought Williams to the Magic City. Her mother, Frances, a Birmingham native living in Chicago, Illinois, returned to her hometown in 1972 to take care of her father, Bob Williams.

Mr. Williams had garnered quite the reputation as owner of the popular Little Savoy Cafe, or Bob’s Savoy, a restaurant located in Birmingham’s 4th Avenue Historic District, “the center of [the city’s] Black social and commercial activity and professional achievement from 1908 to 1941,” according to a 1982 National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form. Mr. Williams drew on the famed Savoy Ballroom — a legendary Harlem, New York, hot spot — for the name of the venue, which featured an upstairs restaurant that offered chicken and steaks, along with dinner specials and short orders, and a downstairs bar that served as a gathering place for the African American elite.

Among the patrons at Bob’s Savoy were musicians, Birmingham Black Barons players, and out-of-town visitors. The business closed after a fire in 1958. Martha Williams doesn’t remember anything about the venue because she was around 4 years old when it ceased operations.

Martha Williams attended Talladega College for two years before leaving school “because my mother became sick,” she said, adding that her mother passed away in 1982 — something Martha took pretty hard.

Williams, 71, said her mother was a smart woman and “made decisions that helped me and my children.” One of those decisions allowed Martha to inherit her mom’s home in Birmingham, but all was not well, said Williams, a mother of four, who had a growing family at the time.

Williams delivered her first child when she was in the 11th grade in Chicago.

“My firstborn is a daughter, Robin Harrison; and my son, Robert Preston Williams, is 39. Then I have two more girls: 31-year-old Blessing Williams and 30-year-old Christal Harvel,” said Williams, who also has eight grandchildren.

Addicted

“I think at some point I had a nervous breakdown, but all my bills were paid and I really didn’t have to worry about anything [financially],” said Williams.

She encountered other challenges, though.

“In making a choice to try and help friends by allowing them to stay with me, I would be introduced to the world of drugs,” she said. “I first used crack cocaine on May 20, 1987, at my son’s first birthday party. My attraction to it was that [it let me] stay awake a long time.”

At the time, Williams was working at Parisian at The Galleria in Hoover, Alabama. With the drug use, Williams said she could stay up after she got off and sew more clothing. But the addiction stuck for 10 years.

Williams juggled working her jobs and many were unaware that she struggled with drugs — a 10-year uphill battle to overcome addiction that came, not surprisingly, with many lows.

During her addiction, Williams eventually started her own business as a seamstress, while working as a bookkeeper at a gas station and then at a luggage and leather repair shop as a seamstress.

Anita Baker

While dealing with her addiction, Williams also worked with R&B singer Anita Baker, who she met through a friend of Brenda Hong, founder of Brenda’s Brown Bosom Buddies and breast cancer survivor. Hong and the songstress are both from Detroit, Michigan. After the meeting, Baker asked Williams to come on the road with her.

Hong said, “Martha is a seamstress and a tailor all wrapped up in one. She is talented and creative.”

Williams got the job because she filled in in a pinch, said Hong: “She was a great designer, and she replicated, [recreated by sewing], a robe for Baker that was based on the style of Hollywood actress Loretta Young,” who had a weekly show/drama series called “The Loretta Young Show” from 1953 to 1961.

“It’s simple elegance,” recalled Hong. “Martha created it, and Anita fell in love with it.”

Hong, who’d been diagnosed with breast cancer while working with Baker, saw Williams as being not only a seamstress but also someone who could fill in as sort of a personal assistant.

Asked about working with Baker, Williams described it as “interesting work” and added, “Don’t forget, I was in full-blown addiction when I took this job with Baker, but she was a difficult client because she was very demanding.”

Williams said the singer liked her straightforward and honest style, along with her southern hospitality. She toured with Baker but returned to Birmingham after a fire damaged her home.

“That fire destroyed so many artifacts I was saving to create an exhibit about my family’s history,” including her grandfather’s restaurant, the Little Savoy Cafe, Williams recalled.

This incident would plunge her deeper into drug use because she felt like she had failed her family by losing these artifacts in the fire.

The Turnaround

“I’d gone through rehab seven times, and that final time it stuck,” she said. “My ‘Freedom Day’ was July 19, 1996.”

Pathways, a shelter for women and children in Birmingham, helped her recover.

“I was pregnant with my youngest and they sent me to Pathways. I first met Sister Mary Oliver, who was director of Pathways at the time, with a box of food in her hand that she shared with me,” Williams recalled.

Whether attending one of several surgeries for Williams or through job changes or the loss of loved ones, the relationship between Williams and Sister Mary has seen many life moments. Through them all, Sister Mary, who is currently 97, “always had my back,” said Williams.

Williams not only lived in one of the housing units at Pathways, located in Fairfield, Alabama, for 14 years but also eventually worked as residential manager for nine years at Safe Haven, a 10-bed unit for mentally ill and chronically ill children.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

Throughout it all, sewing was never far away. Williams now sews in her office — a room at her church, Agape Missionary Baptist Church, located in Birmingham’s East Lake community. And although her talent for sewing was initially self-taught, she admits that she got tutelage from some masters in the profession. Williams attended Lawson State Community College from 2002 to 2005 and remembers “Bertha James, a professor at Lawson State, who’s still alive.”

“[James] taught me in the basement at Lawson State. Between what I taught myself and what she straightened out, I learned how to correct my wrongs in sewing,” said Williams, who now gives back by teaching her craft to others.

This summer, she’s hosting classes for students in the sixth through 12th grades on the art of sewing at the Bessemer Recreation Center, located at 100 14th Street in Bessemer, Alabama.

“I want to teach what they want to learn, so we will start off simple to have the best impact that I can,” said Williams.