The grand marshal of Raleigh’s Christmas Parade? You might recognize her Helping Hand.
For 40 years, Sylvia Wiggins has strutted down Fayetteville Street in a sparkling uniform, pumping her fist and shaking to a drumbeat that rattles off skyscrapers — a Christmas parade highlight to outshine Santa.
As leader of the Helping Hand Mission band, she delivers an annual showstopper with high-stepping drum majors in Mardi Gras masks who can do the splits on asphalt.
Not to mention majorettes who move like Beyoncé backup dancers in knee-high boots and gold sequined shorts.
Not to mention 11-year-old drummer Buddy Henderson, who just had a liver transplant and lifts his shirt to show the scar before giving a fist bump.
But this year, Wiggins will ride the downtown route perched on the back of a convertible, the parade’s grand marshal, waving like the queen of Raleigh finally given her due.
Her reaction:
“I said ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ I said, ‘Lord have mercy. Lord Jesus.’ And they asked me if I want to walk or ride. I said ‘Hell no, I ain’t walking. Picture grandma walking.’ ”
At 72, Wiggins holds court inside the Rock Quarry Road mission she founded in 1973, where Raleigh’s coldest families get overcoats and space heaters and its hungriest walk away with a hot dinner.
The band she formed 10 years later practices in the same driveway where people drop off washing machines and mattresses, where the homeless find a new pair of boots and kids get bicycles in years Santa doesn’t come.
As they rehearsed for Saturday’s parade last week, a dozen cats wandered around the drummers’ legs.
Inside Helping Hand, Wiggins practices the same “God provides” code that has carried thousands through recession, pandemic, apartment fires, mass layoffs and gentrification that keeps creeping closer. Last week, the grand marshal of Raleigh’s Christmas Parade was puzzling over how to distribute a tractor-trailer full of donated hand sanitizer.
“This is a good place to get my picture,” she said, surrounded by a clutter of wall clocks, electrical cords and a portrait of Jesus. “Here amid all my squalor.”
Her own mother died when she was three weeks old, and she never met her father, so Wiggins knows what it’s like to have $5 to your name. She remains the sort of person who will drive to Florida on a moment’s notice with a car full of emergency supplies, as she did for Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
She still jokes about the time a donor delivered an oversize box with instructions that only she should open it, causing her to nearly faint when a live turkey sprang out and gobbled around the mission.
And she still remembers being a little girl who dreamed of being a majorette, which is why she persists in the idea that anybody can join the band at Helping Hand, regardless of skin tone or uniform size.
Raleigh’s parade queen, however, can sense the end of her reign.
“I’ve seen mayors, heads of state, come and go,” she said. “This might be the last year. This is it! Michael Jackson said, ‘This is it!’ You know what made me want to shift gears? I asked this little boy who was president. Do you know what he said? Dean Smith! Dean Smith!”
So wave as Wiggins passes in her grand marshal car Saturday, wave at her shimmering presence — the closest thing to Raleigh royalty.
