Pamela and Maurice Hill will never forget that day last November.

Pamela Hill had just left Makeda’s Homemade Butter Cookies on Airways Boulevard, the cookie bakery the couple has owned since 1999, headed to their Downtown location. A few minutes later, Maurice Hill arrived at the Airways store.

National Black Restaurant Week launches in Memphis

In that span, rapper Young Dolph was shot and killed, just after he’d placed an order for his favorite chocolate chip cookies.

“Maurice walked in and he saw him,” Pamela said of Adolph Thornton Jr., aka Young Dolph. “He was lying over there in that corner, dead. We don’t think about it every time we walk through the doors, but we think about it every day.”

Despite an outpouring of support from the local community and from Young Dolph fans from all over, the Hills said at the time that they wouldn’t reopen the bakery. They have another location Downtown; they could get by without Airways.

But ultimately, that didn’t sit well.

“It bothered us. Maurice kept saying, ‘The story can’t end like this,’” Pamela said.

So it didn’t; they reopened Sept. 17. But before the tragedy, there was already a Makeda’s story.

‘Tiptoed around tenderly’

They weren’t always bakers and they didn’t set out to be cookie makers. The Hills worked in labs at Regional One Health, which they still call The Med. It so happened at one point they ended up working out of the same lab, and well, there was an attraction.

“We tiptoed around tenderly because he’s 11 years younger than me,” Pamela said. “I didn’t want people saying I was robbing the cradle, even though that’s what was going on.”

In 1996, they got married; not long after that, Maurice started talking about cookies. Specifically, the butter cookies that everyone remembered from the old days at Memphis City Schools. And he had an in:

His grandmother, Harvey Lee Suggars, spent 22 years working in the school system’s cafeterias, though the Hills said the recipe they use is Suggars’ own, tweaked here and there, and is not the same as the one the school system used.

Whatever the case, Maurice, 52, had his grandmother’s recipe and he was ready to roll.

“This was all his bright idea,” Pamela, 63, said. “So he bought this mixer, a KitchenAid, and started selling cookies at work.

“You could call The Med our original test market.”

MSCS to honor Young Dolph, three others, at Alumni Hall of Fame Gala

As a phlebotomist, Maurice would go to hospital rooms to draw blood from patients. When nurses needed him, they’d page him.

“It got to be that when they’d page me, I’d have to call and ask ‘Hey, do y’all want blood drawn or do you want cookies?’ ” Maurice said. “I had to know what I needed to bring.”

That appreciation for the cookies buoyed his confidence that he could be out on his own, although he said he loved his job.

“Believe it or not, I was lab person of the year two times,” he said. “When I showed up, people were glad. I don’t mean to brag, but I was good at my job. I could get blood from anyone, could get blood from a turnip.”

And he was impressive, Pamela said.

“He’d take his lab coats to the cleaners,” she said. “You should’ve seen him, walking around there. We were both that way, really. We’d walk around there looking like doctors.”

‘Don’t tell ‘em that’

In 1999, the Hills, Maurice’s brother Morris and his brother-in-law opened a little bakery in a run-down shop at Semmes Street and Lamar Avenue, where they stayed for about six months before they found the Airways location.

They named the bakery Makeda’s for Morris’ daughter, who died at age 6 of leukemia in 1997. Her smiling face, framed by pigtails beneath a baker’s hat, is on every package of Makeda’s cookies, and her story is on the back of the packages.

Pamela paraphrases it: “She was at St. Jude and she was sick. One day her mother and I were there, and she asked why everyone kept bringing her presents. She said, ‘They think I’m going to die, don’t they? Well, I’m not going anywhere.’

“ ‘But don’t tell ’em that.’ ”

When the bakery opened, everyone kept their full-time jobs and cooked around them. After about two years, the partners dropped out, and Maurice was working nearly around the clock.

Sanford: Memphis is better than the deadly violence that steals our joy

Something had to give.

“He was running around with red eyes, getting two hours of sleep a night. He told me one day he fell asleep at a red light, and I gave him permission to quit. I figured we could get by on what I was making,” Pamela said.

So thus ended the career of Maurice the phlebotomist. He quit and from that day has devoted himself fully to Makeda’s.

It wasn’t so easy for Pamela.

“I stayed on because I was like, man, we ain’t gonna make it. We’re going to lose our house selling cookies,” Pamela said. “Ooh, we argued so much about me quitting my job. He needed my help but I was scared to do it.”

They had children — one together, two of hers, one of his, and a godson they’ve raised — and she needed security. Also, she liked her job. But she kept an open mind and decided she’d just pray about it, listen for advice, look for a sign.

“People were sad when we said we weren’t going to open back up. We knew that. They told us that. It really bothered Maurice to be closed, and I believe Young Dolph would’ve wanted us to open back up.”

Pamela Hill
Makeda’s co-owner

“I was here one day in the store, and I asked God to show me a sign, tell me if I should quit my job,” she said. “I look up and there’s a line of five or six people and I figured that was my sign that we would be all right.”

So she quit, though it wasn’t long before her nerves got the better of her; she went back for a short time before quitting again in 2004.

“That time they said, ‘Well, look, we’re not hiring you back another time. We’re going to let you take your blessing this time,’ so I retired my license and that was it. I knew I could get it back, but it would take some time.”

And when she was in, she was all in.

‘Like we’re in Germantown’

In 2005, Makeda’s made the local news after this food writer had a cookie at a party.

“That made a such a big difference,” Pamela said. “We had people in here all the time. Maurice said, ‘It’s like we’re in Germantown. Look at all these people.’ ”

She got excited. She wanted more.

“I opened another store in Raleigh, then one in Hickory Ridge. Maurice didn’t like it, but I argued with him, told him he wanted me to help and that’s what I was doing.

“He said, ‘I said help, not take over.’ I almost ruined us, I guess.

Council members question Young Dolph’s legacy but rename street anyway

“I was going around bragging about my husband making all the cookie dough, and he said he was trying to figure out where he was going to sleep because he was going to leave me,” Pamela said.

He wasn’t going to leave her; their devotion is apparent with every word they exchange. This is a playful banter that springs from a secure marriage of 26 years.

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.

“We couldn’t keep up with it all,” Pamela said. “I told him we had a lease and he said fine, we’d pay the lease, but we couldn’t bake enough. We had to stay at Airways, so that’s what we did.”

But they started packaging cookies and selling them in local shops and ended up with a retail deal with Kroger.

Penny Hardaway on Young Dolph’s killing: ‘We have to do better’

They also started shipping cookies and, in 2015, they got a sweet deal through MemShop that allowed them to open a Makeda’s Downtown, which they kept for five years. That bakery is now Butterific and is run by Tamika Heard, Pamela’s daughter.

And the Hills found they liked being Downtown.

‘11 days later’

They leased a spot at 301 Jefferson Ave. and spent time and money getting a store-front bakery together.

“It took us nine months to get that building up and going,” Pamela said. “It has everything we need, and we’re making all the dough there and baking the cookies for the groceries and to ship. We still bring dough over here to bake fresh for (the Airways store).”

They had their grand opening Nov. 6, 2021.

“We were so excited about two locations, the packaging line, everything,” Maurice said. “And it was 11 days later when Young Dolph was gunned down here. So we closed this store.”

On Nov. 17, Maurice’s nephew and two of his employees were working at Makeda’s when Young Dolph came in. They knew him; he’d been coming in for 10 or more years, always ordering chocolate chip.

“He had placed his order and he took a phone call, so he walked over there and stood over in the corner to talk,” Maurice said. “That’s where they got him. My nephew and them fell to the floor, but mostly the bullets all went in that corner anyway.”

Maurice arrived just after it happened.

“When I pulled up, my nephew said they were just raising up from ducking bullets,” he said.

He called Pamela and told her someone had been shot in the store and the police were coming.

“Then he called me back to tell me who it was. He said, ‘Baby, it’s Young Dolph.’ He told me everything was blocked off. Police wouldn’t let me near here, so I sat out there about four hours, having to sit there with the rest of the spectators,” Pamela said.

Rapper Young Dolph fatally shot; police chief urges people to ‘stay home’

They boarded up the store. People came from all around to leave gifts and paint the boards in honor of the rapper, who was from Memphis and in town to visit his aunt when he was killed.

The Hills lost heart. It wasn’t money, because so many people ordered cookies online that they couldn’t keep up with the orders and PayPal froze their account.

“They thought we were doing something illegal because there was so much more money coming in than what normally came through,” Maurice said. “They held it for about two months.”

It was just too much. The killing came after a year and a half of COVID, and though it was a time of growth for them because takeout business was robust, the fatigue was real nonetheless.

After a few months, they started talking about whether they should reopen. It was where it all started, the touchstone of their business.

Music industry, athletes, fans react to death of Young Dolph

“People were sad when we said we weren’t going to open back up,” Pamela said. “We knew that. They told us that. It really bothered Maurice to be closed, and I believe Young Dolph would’ve wanted us to open back up.

“He was the nicest thing. I used to call him Li’l Dolph all the time because I thought that was his name, and not once did he correct me.”

So they reopened last month. 

“We had lines out the door here and Downtown that day,” Maurice said. “People were so glad to see us back here, back home.”

It took a lot of work to get it cleaned up — the damage was mostly confined to the corner — but it was heavy.

Strickland calls Young Dolph slaying ‘horribly tragic’

And the people are still coming back. Maurice is once again running cookies out to the sanitation workers who come to pick up the garbage. Kids are coming in for cookies; new customers are there, and old ones, too.

Kevin Fox stopped in this week, his first visit since the bakery reopened. He went for the iced oatmeal cookies first.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “They’re the truth. Get you some nice ice-cold milk, and nothing beats it.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been here because I live on the other side of town, and I didn’t really come during the pandemic.”

But he was greeted like he’d just been in yesterday, and he and Maurice fell into an easy conversation about old cars.

Memphians offer support to Makeda’s Cookies

“You still got that suicide door Lincoln?” he asked, and Maurice said he’d always have it.

It’s a 1966 Lincoln with “kissing doors,” one where the front door and the back door both open from the middle like French doors. Maurice has had it for 25 years and restored it; along with his grandkids and his old vinyl collection, it’s his passion.

“Pamela has been giving me the blues about that car so long, but she loves it, too,” he said.

She shook her head, but grabbed her phone to find a photo of the car.

“You wouldn’t believe him and that car,” she said. “Me and him, we’re about to get a divorce over that car. And those old records. I tell him all the time that he must be 85, because he likes old cars, old records and old women.

“But every time I ride in that car, I fall asleep. It rides so smooth. I feel like the queen.”

Maurice nodded and smiled:

“She is the queen.”