Church Army Captain Mary Edna Thompson “The Soup Lady”
Three stockpots burble away on a makeshift stove; brightly-colored homemade banners flutter here and there; and Mary Edna Thompson, aka the Soup Lady, occupies the temporary kitchen/dining/music area made up from a handful of tents in Felts Park. Thompson, from Hillsville, created and has manned the Soup Kitchen during every Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention “for about 40 years,” she says.
The Kitchen (not to be confused with the permanent God’s Storehouse Soup Kitchen at Rooftop) is what happens when the miracles of kindness that spring up in the Twin Counties in general meet the specific magic of the fiddlers’ convention in August.
She’s wearing a big hat, a big rhinestone buckle on her bright blue shirt, looking out through big sunglasses and holding a big spoon. She’s laughing about something. She does that a lot.
The air smells appetizingly of seasonings and cooking food. In the next tent, someone’s practicing the fiddle.
She explains the nature of the Soup Kitchen thusly: “It doesn’t even open up until the stage show’s over and the vendors are shut down, and runs until daybreak. It’s for the musicians and their friends. It’s for the family down here.”
Somehow over the years, the whole neighborhood has gotten absorbed into the soup kitchen one way or another, bringing food, donating time, sharing equipment. They tend to get playful titles like “Auxiliary Souper.”
“It’s not about me. It’s about God,” she says firmly. “It’s something God does. It’s God working through community. I’m just a facilitator.”
The Soup Kitchen started, appropriately enough, when Thompson was at Fiddlers, hanging out in the now gone stables with others, and was hungry. “It was about three in the morning — it started as an answer to prayer. Because it was, ‘Oh, God, I have hurt myself.’ Because I had not eaten, had played all day, I was just so excited to be learning about music and meeting new people and partying, and you know, I had my share of beer.”
She continues, “So I hadn’t eaten, was dehydrated, and sitting there thinking. My prayer actually was ‘You know what, Lord?’ — I don’t know if you’ve ever started a prayer like that,” she chuckles. “Anyway, I said, ‘If somebody just had a pot of soup or a pot of beans or something, it would probably help a lot of people right now, including me.’
“And it was the first time in my prayer life I had heard God chuckle. And it was so loving. It wasn’t condemning or anything. And I heard so strong in my spirit, and it was ‘Mary Edna, I know that, and you know it, so what are you going to do?’ And the next night I put out a Coleman stove with a pot on it, and put what I had in it, and the people around me put what they had in it, and that was the birth.”
The Soup Kitchen has gained a lot of traction since then; there’s a dry erase board with the day’s needs written on it, if anyone should stop by on their way to the store and offer to shop for the Kitchen, a prayer service on Monday for anyone who wants to attend (you don’t have to do so in order to get fed later). It has its own culture, most of which is deliberately silly and lots of fun. Every year on Saturday of Fiddlers, at 3:33 p.m., the Kitchen holds the Annual International Kazoo Championship, with rules like “all bands will be their own judges” and “all contestants are encouraged to bribe the judges.” The sign is made from bits of the old stalls that used to be in Felts Park, where Thompson received her revelation.
The contest winner is the “kabassador” (kazoo ambassador) and will lead a parade throughout Felts Park, only avoiding the stage area to keep from disrupting the official music competition.
“We wanted to produce something not up there,” she gestures to the stage, “and everybody gets a trophy. The very first year it was a bag of Galax mud.” She now spends winters crafting colorful baubles to serve as each year’s trophies, all different from the previous year’s.
This homegrown fun and generosity has seen generations pass through; Thompson adores kids, who sometimes come by to haul water or scrub potatoes. One person pops by to say that someone left an instrument in the kitchen last night; while that conversation is going on, the owner comes to claim it, and all three chat for a bit before separating.
“Isn’t it amazing?” asks Thompson. “If you had told me 40 years ago that I was going to be doing this, I would have said, ‘I don’t think so!’ I just couldn’t imagine it. I kept coming, and the community just started forming around it. It’s so wonderful to watch.
“I know I’ve had ‘em from Israel. I’ve had Australia, these young men with Joe Troop, [the American-Argentinian band] Che Apalache, that was where they were last year, and they were a big help. They put the Christmas lights up, they helped get water, they helped put the canopies up. It takes an army. And like I said, it’s not about me. It’s about community, and how God works through community for purpose.”
She gestures to the tent with the sounds of fiddle practice. Peep around the corner and Troop and Pau Barjau of Che Apalache are playing and hanging out with friends. Take a tour of the park in the midafternoon heat — there’s a little picking; mostly it’s people sipping something cold or taking a nap—and come back an hour later, you find all of Che Apalache gathered around the small kitchen table, talking and chopping vegetables for that night’s soup, which is venison and vegetable, to offset the veggie chili someone else brought. Thompson smiles. “You asked me if it’s a church thing? What’s the church? It’s about that right there—taking care of each other.”
Shannon Watkins is a reporter with Galax Gazette. Mary Edna Thompson is a member of Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Roanoke, VA. Originally published in the Galax Gazette. Copyright 2018, Reprinted with permission
