If you want to know why state Supreme Court Justice Janice
Holder of Memphis is tough and crafty enough to have got where she is today,
despite what would seem to be a diminutive stature and a mild manner, just take
a look at whence she sprung.
Her lookalike mother, Sylvia Abraham Holder, a sweetie-pie
herself, is not only, at age 87, still working regularly – as an usher at the
FedEx Forum – but has decided to catch up with her daughter at the art of
karate, a self-defense art at which the esteemed jurist has for years held a
multiply degreed black belt.
Once or twice a week the two Holder ladies are working out
at the Cordova Athletic Club under the tutelage of well-known karate instructor
Patrick Wrenn.
Now it’s up to
Justice Holder to catch up to Mama, a former jazz singer who’s also a freshly
minted author, with a newly published book of poems and recollections – called,
appropriately enough, Poetry & Memoirs.