By Cecil Egbele | Contributing Writer | California Local News Fellow
On Easter Sunday morning, Vassie Lee Jackson, believed to be Bakersfield’s oldest living resident, took her leave. She was 105 years old, just three months shy of 106.
By her pastor’s account, she had been ready for some time.
“She told me, ‘I’m ready. I’m ready to be with Jesus,” recalled Pastor Janice Newsome of Bread of Life Church of God in Christ, where Jackson had worshipped for decades.
When news of her passing came, Newsome said she felt something beyond grief.
Jackson was born Vassie Lee Gibson on July 17, 1920, in Bristol, Oklahoma, the eldest of 12 children, according to a biography provided by her family. When the Great Depression reached the family’s doorstep, they relocated to New Mexico in search of better opportunities.
In 1939, she met Henry J. Jackson in Blythe, California. He was a widower with four small children. She had one child of her own. Three weeks after meeting, they married in Quartzsite, Arizona, paying the $2.50 officiating fee. On that same wedding day, the newly blended family of seven drove to Bakersfield for a new life.
They arrived with five children and five dollars.
“They came to California with these little children and virtually no money. That would be impossible today,” said Denise Jones, a granddaughter Jackson raised after her mother’s death when she was five. “But listening to her tell that story, she was so passionate. It gave you inspiration that you can overcome anything if you put your faith in God.”
Jackson and her husband worked the fields as farm laborers, picking cotton and fruit, according to the family biography. Jackson later took on domestic work–what she simply called “day work,” cleaning homes across Bakersfield. Between 1941 and 1954, the couple added eight more children to the five they had arrived with, raising 13 in all inside a household that became known throughout East Bakersfield, one of the few neighborhoods in the city where Black families were permitted to buy and settle during that era, as a place where no one went hungry.
“She never met a stranger,” Jones said. “If you came to that door and said you were hungry, she would make you some beans and lemonade. She might not have money to give you, but she had love, and she would give you whatever she had.”
Long after her husband Henry, whom Jackson called “Honey,” passed away in December 1985, long after the children had grown and left home, her doors stayed open. Those who knew her say she never changed, not in warmth, not in spirit, not in faith.
Her faith was the center of everything.
A lifelong Pentecostal, Jackson would not be kept from church. At around 80 years old, when no one was available to give her a ride, Jones recalled, she simply walked. She would arrive, change into her good shoes at the door, take her seat near the front, and praise with everything she had.
Pastor Newsome still remembers how Jackson would shout during worship and dance in a way the younger congregants found both baffling and joyful. “She would be at the front, dressed up with her jewelry, silk clothes on, pretty long hair curled up, and she would praise God like it was the last time. She would do the running man and the kids thought it was funny,” Newsome said.
Jackson’s counsel to anyone who would listen, as Newsome remembers it: “Hold on. Don’t give up. God’s going to fix it.”
She never gave up. As a young woman in her 20s, Newsome said, Jackson survived a heart attack that doctors said should have been fatal. She went on to outlive her husband, 10 of her 13 children, every one of her siblings except one in Fresno, who is in his early 60s and all of her peers.
Jones credited her grandmother’s longevity to a clean, principled life. “All of her siblings drank and smoked. She did not,” Jones said. “And her faith in God was real strong.”
Jackson also never drove a car– a fact Jones noted with some amusement. “It wasn’t a handicap to her. When there was a will, there was a way. She just never cared to.” As the world lurched forward into the digital age, Jones recalled that her grandmother watched with a measured eye and never fully warmed to it. “She was hesitant about using the microwave. She said it made people lazy,” Jones said.
In July 2024, on her 104th birthday, she received a Certificate of Recognition from the White House, signed by President Joe Biden, as well as recognition from Kern County and State Senator Shannon Grove, according to the family biography. A year later, at 105, Bakersfield Mayor Karen Goh presented her with another.
Jackson’s health had been deteriorating over the last seven years. Another granddaughter, Johnetta O’Neal, who spent hours in conversation with Jackson in her later years, said her memory stayed sharp to the very end. “She would critique my cooking, telling me if I needed a little more of this or that,” O’Neal recalled warmly. On April 4, the day before she died, O’Neal visited and told her grandmother she loved her. “I said, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand,” O’Neal said. “She squeezed my hand.”
She came to Bakersfield with five dollars and a family of seven, but built a legacy that now spans six generations. She departed on Easter Sunday, which Pastor Newsome believes is symbolic. “She left on Resurrection Sunday. She’s going to get up again. This is not the end.”
Jackson’s life will be celebrated at a funeral service scheduled for 10 a.m. on April 24, 2026, at People’s Missionary Baptist Church, 1451 Madison St. in Bakersfield. Family members encourage attendees to wear different shades of pink and white in honor of her vibrant spirit and legacy.