DEWITT, Ark. — Mary Thompson rubbed her earlobe with a gnarly left hand and frowned. The gift of earrings pinched, so she'd removed them.
She considered a question about the key to her longevity for a long while, then declined to answer it.
"Old folks don't know everything," she said. "I can't keep from talking, but I can keep you from knowing."
Ever since it was established that Thompson may be the oldest person on earth, a lot of people have been asking the obvious: How did this daughter of Mississippi slaves live to reach her 119th birthday?
If she knows, she isn't saying.
The woman everyone calls Mama Mary spent her milestone birthday among friends and staff members of the Crestpark Nursing Home here, sipping Crown Royal whisky and chewing her Juicy Fruit gum. She taped a TV broadcast and expects to receive a card in the mail from President Bush.
That will add to the flurry of letters and gifts she's been receiving from around the country — and the world — since a story by The Associated Press began appearing in newspapers last month declaring her to be the oldest person in the world.
Although she lost a birth certificate and other documents in a fire in the early 1980s, the Social Security Administration has verified that its records show she was born on Aug. 2, 1882, in Shelby, Miss.
That would make her older than Maude Ferris of Michigan, who can document an age of only 114. Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, who claimed that eating chocolate and bicycling to the age of 100 helped her make a record 122nd birthday, died in 1997.
Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., in whose district Thompson lives, is satisfied she holds the record.
"The Social Security Administration doesn't put a birth date on file unless they've seen some documentation" to prove it, said Berry's spokesman, Warwick Sabin.
Thompson, who sits like an oracle in her wheelchair and basks in the attention, says she's a bit overwhelmed by the outpouring of best wishes.
Thompson communicates with strangers with an insistent — but not always coherent — manner of speaking. Extremely hard of hearing, she had nurse Ruth Rone shout questions into her ear during an interview this week. Sometimes she'd respond.
When asked what she hoped to get for birthday presents, she asked why she was being asked.
Jokingly asked by housekeeping staffer Corine Jones if she wanted to go out jitterbugging, she pulled up the hem of her purple dress to reveal the stumps of two amputated legs.
"I ain't able," she said.
Rone said when she first began working with Thompson in 1996 she told more stories of her three husbands, of once seeing President Kennedy, and of the fire that destroyed her home.
Now she's content to sit all day in her bonnet and sweater watching the communal television or the orange-beaked finches in the birdcage next to the nursing station. She eats when she wants to — typically peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — and sips the Crown Royal half-pints a staff member buys when she requests it.
"She's 118 years old. She can do what she wants," nursing home administrator Vicki Brown said of the tippling. "The doctor don't care."