Pamela (Pam) Marie Jabour Mayfield
Vicksburg
Pam Mayfield was born on December 4, 1946, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Each four of her grandparents were born in the Mount Lebanon region of Syria, immigrating to the United States through various points, including through Ellis Island in New York, and into Texas via Mexico. Some of her family remained in Texas, others pressed on into Mississippi, and others turned south and settled in South America.
Her paternal grandfather peddled “clothes and thread and fabric,” Pam said, eventually opening a dry goods store in downtown Vicksburg. Her father and his brothers later each owned their own men’s clothing stores in Vicksburg, all within close proximity to one another, named the Hub, the Toggery, Jabour Brothers, and Karl’s.
Pam’s parents, Mike Jabour and Azizie Thomas Jabour, met at a Cedars of Lebanon Ladies Club New Years Eve party in Vicksburg. Both of her parents, and Pam herself, were active in St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church. Her mother was a member of the Ladies of St. George and was one of the founders of the Lebanese Dinner, an annual St. George fundraiser, which is in its fifty-ninth year in 2019.
As a child and teenager, Pam attended Bowmar Avenue Elementary School, Carr Junior High School, and H. V. Cooper High School, all in Vicksburg, and later attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1969, Pam moved to Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, to teach at Coahoma County Junior College. It was there that she met Jerry Mayfield, from Marks, Mississippi. They married in 1970 and moved to Marks, where she taught at County Day School (today called Delta Academy). Pam and Jerry later relocated to Vicksburg, where Pam, after having worked in her father’s clothing store for some time, opened a store of her own—a women’s clothing store above the Hub, called Top of the Hub.
Pam and her daughter, Courtney, live in Vicksburg.
This interview took place at the home of Pam Mayfield in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 14, 2017.
AUDIO (Click to listen):
“My grandfather came, and he was a peddler up in the Delta. That much I know. He would peddle clothes and thread and fabric, and then he would spend the night with some of [his customers] and would give them, you know, take it out in trade. Then he’d go to the next town the next morning. When he got enough money, he opened a store.”
“When my grandparents first came [to] Vicksburg, and my grandfather Jabour had to eat with the blacks. There was a black section and a white section. I just remember my daddy telling about it, but it was just the fact. It wasn’t that it was a problem. It was just a fact.”
“I did go through rush at Ole Miss, and that did not turn out well. It was a long way home. My parents came and picked me up. It was a long way home.”
—Pam Mayfield
VIDEO (Click to play):
In this video, Pam Mayfield discusses her family’s journey to America and their early years in Mississippi.
PHOTOS (Click to enlarge):
The photographs in this collection include the 1925 naturalization certificate for Caleel Jabour, Pamela’s paternal grandfather; the certificate of marriage for Caleel and Marie Jabour (1903); a family portrait (Pamela is young girl on far left, standing next to her father); the “Picture of the Week” in the September 14, 1953, issue of Life magazine, with Pamela, her brother, mother, and father on vacation in Washington, D.C.; and a portrait of Pam’s parents, Azizie and Mike Jabour.