It’s hard to imagine, but 107-year-old Bronx resident Louise (Big Momma) Mitchell can remember going to pick cotton in Georgia when she was 5, with “not a penny to show for it.” The New York Daily News honored her latest birthday.

Mitchell now lives in Morris Heights with house-call medical care. Instead of completing school past the third grade, Mitchell went to work. After the cotton fields, it was washing clothes for a wealthy landowner, the Daily News reports.

Eventually, she relocated to New Jersey to work as a housekeeper, and then did the same wealthy Jewish households in Manhattan, but lived in Harlem and in the South Bronx.

She said young people “should pray to God their life isn’t hard like mine.”