East Biloxi remembers icon Inez Thomas, restaurant owner and pillar of the Black community
At Inez Lounge & Cafe in East Biloxi, owner Inez Thomas did the cooking and set the rules.
For decades, regulars filled her restaurant at the corner of Main and Division Streets for early-morning coffee and conversation. In the evenings, customers would stop by for hamburgers, and to see who was there and find out what was going on.
Ms. Inez, as everyone called her, was part of the draw. She enforced her rules (no sagging pants, for example) with such wit that friends told her she would win a comedy competition with Kevin Hart.
Her restaurant was the kind of community gathering place that kept people connected to each other.
“Somewhere to sit, and be able to be yourself, and talk amongst those that you associated with over the course of years,” her daughter Jennifer Johnson said. “Somewhere to sit and enjoy, reminisce, laugh, shout at one another, but still be able to come back the very next day and do the very same thing. She offered that to them.”
Thomas passed away Oct. 13 at the age of 82. Her survivors include her life partner, her twin brother and a sister, five children, 18 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren, seven great-great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and friends and admirers across Biloxi and the Coast.
Inez Lounge & Cafe withstood for many years the slow decline of small business in East Biloxi. It survived Hurricane Katrina, which Thomas and her partner Vireece Proby rode out in their home until they had to swim to higher ground.
Her friend Alice Reddix said they became close after the storm, when they both lived in FEMA trailers on one of Thomas’s properties. Thomas told her Katrina survival story with her trademark sense of humor.
“The way she was telling it, it was just hilarious,” Reddix said. “And I told her, ‘I bet you wasn’t laughing then.’ And she said, ‘I bet you I wasn’t either.’ That’s the kind of person she was.”
While the neighborhood’s population never rebounded after Katrina, Thomas kept serving those who stayed. When she shut her doors in 2017, Inez Lounge & Cafe was one of the last restaurants in East Biloxi.
Arriving in Biloxi as a teenager
Thomas grew up in Jackson as one of 10 children born to Isaac and Louise Eddington.
One day when she was about 15 or 16, Thomas put a cornbread in the oven and left instructions with her younger sister Barbara.
“She told her, ‘When the timer go off, take a toothpick and stick in it, and if it come out dry it’s good and if it come out wet, you need to put the cornbread back in the oven for about five more minutes,’” Thomas’s son Charles Eddington, Sr. said. “She left the house then.”
When Thomas’s parents got home, they asked where she was. Barbara said she didn’t know.
Thomas had gone down to the Coast, where she had one older sister living in Ocean Springs and another in Biloxi.
“When her mind was made up to do something, she’s going to do it,” Johnson said.
When Thomas arrived as a teenager in the late 1950s or early 1960s, East Biloxi was already well established as the heart of the city’s Black community.
At the turn of the century, the lumber industry had drawn African American men to the mills around the Back Bay. Their families bought property, built homes and opened businesses, turning East Biloxi into a thriving Black neighborhood “back-of-town,” separated from the white beachfront neighborhoods by the railroad tracks.
Thomas worked at laundries and dry cleaners in the city, as well as a lens company in Ocean Springs.
She raised her five kids in East Biloxi. They were so close to the Magee family next door that their three kids were like children to Thomas, and Johnson said the Magees felt the same about her siblings.
North of the railroad tracks, Main Street was lined with jazz and blues clubs, grocery stores, a movie theater and barber shops.
Opening her business
Thomas worked at some of the neighborhood’s restaurants and clubs, including the Kitty Kat and the Little Apple, her children said. When a commercial space became available, she opened her first restaurant, the Southern Kitchen.
“She got tired of working for someone else,” Johnson said. “She knew that she could cook.”
By 1984, she had leased 294 Main Street and opened Inez Lounge. The site was already historic: Bo Diddley, Bobby Rush and Al Green had played at a lounge upstairs called Paradise Garden.
Six days a week, well into her 70s, Thomas woke up before dawn to open the restaurant and start cooking the day’s meals.
The weekly menu was written on a chalkboard, and Charles still has it memorized. Monday: Fried chicken, ham hocks, red beans and rice and collard greens. Tuesday: smothered pork chops, rice and gravy. Wednesday: macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, butter beans and field peas. Thursday: turkey necks, rice and gravy, and black eyed peas. Friday: barbecue chicken and ribs, potato salad and bread.
A community pillar
Thomas used her businesses to serve the community. She sponsored the Biloxi High School basketball team and let members eat for free.
She and Reddix attended every game together.
On Thanksgiving, she served a meal for anyone who wanted it.
Her friend Deborah Blake liked to drop by the restaurant early in the morning. They’d drink coffee and talk about everything.
Sometimes, early in the morning when they knew Thomas would be there, people in need would come in to ask for food or money. Blake saw Thomas give them what they asked for.
For Thomas’s 75th birthday, Blake wrote her a poem. “You don’t just come into Inez’s Café in the wrong way / If you dare to step out of line . . . / You’d better be ready to call it a day,” it read.
“For you see I’ve witnessed firsthand her giving
To the lesser of those who are in need
She does so looking for nothing in return
And that models what God wants of us all indeed.”
Thomas also became something of a powerbroker in Biloxi politics, though she stayed away from formal positions on boards or committees to focus on her business.
Mayor Fofo Gilich, former Mayor Pete Halat, and Ward 2 Councilman Felix Gines all spoke at her funeral.
For white politicians seeking the support of Black voters, a good relationship with Ms. Inez was essential.
“If you wanted to get to the Black community, to the Black vote, you go to Tyrone’s Barber Shop [owned by Tyrone Burton] and you go to Ms. Inez’s cafe,” Reddix said.
Thomas appeared in one of Gilich’s campaign commercials.
“I am Biloxi,” she said, smiling at the camera.
“Ms. Inez was a Biloxi institution,” Gilich said in a statement to the Sun Herald. “Her care, compassion and dedication to life and community service is an example for everyone. She truly was Biloxi.”
Watching East Biloxi change
Thomas watched as most of the other businesses on Main Street closed one by one.
It was a story common to American downtowns, but especially to historic Black commercial districts. Integration expanded opportunities for Black consumers, but didn’t provide Black entrepreneurs and business owners with equitable access to capital and other forms of government support. Many Black-owned retailers, banks, and insurance companies have disappeared over the last 30 years.
Some businesses never came back after Katrina, which damaged or destroyed thousands of East Biloxi homes as well.
Then the city’s massive infrastructure project tore up every road in the neighborhood, turning it into a mud pit or a dust storm depending on the day. Thomas’s children said that project made it hard for her to attract customers.
Thomas served her last customers in 2017.
Earlier this year, friends from growing up in Ward 2 formed a group called Daily Flowers of Love to recognize people who have contributed to the East Biloxi community. The members chose Thomas as the second honoree, and presented her with flowers and a certificate.
“You have made a big impact in the community,” said group member Debra Foster as she handed the bouquet to Thomas.
Foster, 47, grew up around the corner from Thomas’s house. Adults in the neighborhood kept an eye out for everyone’s kids.
“We are who we are because of people like them,” she said.
In late summer, community members began a mural project on the exterior walls of the building that housed her restaurant.
Thanks to the mural, designed and painted by East Biloxi-born artist Demetrius Gayden, a larger-than-life Ms. Inez beams out over Main and Division Streets.
Thomas never got to see the completed mural, but her family thinks she would have loved it.
A balloon release in her honor was held outside the building on Oct. 22.
For Thomas’s children, the way the community showed up for her balloon release and service last weekend illustrated something else they had always known: That East Biloxi loved Ms. Inez, and Ms. Inez loved East Biloxi.
This story was originally published November 1, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
