The youngest daughter of seven children, she earned the nickname Dip as a child because her arms were long enough to reach the bottom of the family's water barrel. As an adult, her full height was 6’1”. Her children began calling her Mama Dip.[4]
She was a native of Chatham County, North Carolina and the granddaughter of an enslaved person; her parents were Ed and Effie Edwards Cotton.[1]
She married Joe Council in 1948 and went to work in the Council family restaurant Bill's Barbecue Restaurant.[1] They had eight children, and in the 1970s, they divorced.[5]
A popular story about the founding of Mama Dip's restaurant in November 1976 was that she used $64 from the money she earned as a cook and maid in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.,[5][1]
The then US President George W. Bush invited her to the White House, and she later exchanged letters with President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.[6]
She died due to complications from a stroke a month after her 89th birthday.[7]
Her granddaughter, Tonya, opened Tonya's Cookie Company across from Mama Dip's in Chapel Hill. [8] Another granddaughter, baker and cookbook author Erika Council, owns and operates Bomb Biscuits in Atlanta. [5][9]