Time to get started. Everybody was up and moving early this morning. Breakfast was great. There is a certain comfort in waking up and and finding a familiar breakfast – Dino’s sausage and peppers, (Actually, I think Kristin made them, but they were Dino’s idea) Kristin making scrambled eggs to order, (I would add a picture of Kristin, but she would get mad at me,) Dino’s coffee cake, (Really his this time) and most importantly, the appearance of a couple longtime friends.
Lorenzo has been coming to join us every year since I have started coming along. I even gave him a call earlier this year to talk to a bunch of third-graders when I was telling them about our trip. He got here early enough for breakfast this morning.
JD has been the contractor for Habitat since I started showing up. He knows me well enough that the first thing he did was make fun of my hair. JD’s last words as we departed last year were “Y’all are family.”
Fair enough. I see more of the people down here than I do with some family members. It is good to come back to where the people there think you are family.
Sherri has been the Habitat coordinator for several years. She arrived later today after most of the crew had left for the worksite. After we finish House #49, it looks like we will have one more to work on in Tutwiler, a couple blocks away.
We are on our way. As always, we stopped at Niemerg’s in Effingham, IL. We always stop at Niemerg’s. Effingham is far enough from Chicago that we get down here just about lunch time. I am not going to shoot another picture of Niemerg’s. Every year I shoot a picture of Niemerg’s. Niemerg’s has pretty good food and a fantastic salad bar, so it is a good place to stop. It is also one of the more popular and accessible restaurants in the area, so it is not unusual to find yourself surrounded by a dozen youth baseball teams or this year, a Christian motorcycle club. These bikers did not look at all threatening, sporting large crosses and larger American flags on their leather vests. I am not one to equate faith and nationalism, but we just got a new American pope, so maybe they are celebrating that.
Effingham, both the city and county were named after Thomas Howard, 3rd Earl of Effingham, who resigned his commission in the British Army rather than take up arms against the North American colonists during the American Revolution. It seems the closest he ever got to Illinois was Jamaica, where he died while serving as the royal governor. Or else it was named for the guy who originally surveyed the area. Wikipedia splits the difference and says it was named after General Effingham, a local surveyor. Take your pick. This is definitely Southern Illinois. The town is probably best known for the Cross at the Crossroads, a 198 foot white steel structure. At 198 feet, it is just short of the height at which it would have to have a light on top for navigational purposes. A couple major highways intersect here, giving rise to the Crossroads name, (not to be confused with the more famous Crossroads in Clarksdale, MS, where Robert Johnson purportedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for becoming the original blues legend.)
This is definitely Southern Illinois. Effingham was a Sundown Town until the 60’s, and reportedly black people were not welcome there for some years thereafter. The motorcycle club group was friendly enough, but I am left with the impression that my MANEA baseball cap would not be greeted warmly. Most of our journey down will be in the state of Illinois before we pass through Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, but we are already effectively in the South.
Our good friend and sometime team member Tony Del Gallo generously paid for lunch. Geez, Tony! If you told me that, I would have ordered a steak!
BOOMLAND!!!
Ah, how to describe the wonder that is Boomland? It seems that every time we stop there, I have to add a piece about this amazing cultural/commercial/pyrotechnical establishment. I fear I run out of words after once describing it as the zenith of Southern kitch, but Boomland is remarkable that every visit merits its own account. Located off the interstate in Charleston, MO and stretching the length of a city block, it is a combination of a U.S. Army armory, an exotic grocery, and a Turkish bazaar. It seems as if all of the fireworks from which the establishment gets its name went of at once and scattered every piece of patriotic/religious and tacky merchandise one can imagine, with some actual quality items mixed in.
Want to buy a skull with an American flag on it?Free puppies! Will soon be big enough to ride.
Outside the store, a young couple were giving away puppies. They are cute! Of course they are. They are puppies. But at the age of eleven weeks, these offspring of a Grand Pyrenees and White German Shepard are already as big or bigger than most dog you might find strolling the streets of Chicago. When someone asked who big they would grow, I said, “Think ponies.” The lady giving them away replied, “That’s about right. About up to my hip.” Like the people giving them away, the puppies appear calm and gentle, but I would not want to be an intruder in whatever home they wind up in. The couple managed to find four of the six they brought there is a little over an hour. They are keeping two others. Kindhearted souls, no doubt, but no surprise that at Boomland, even the things you can get for free are big!
As you enter the store, you encounter what appears to be the world’s largest rocking chair, dedicated the late Mr. Land, for whom the store is presumably named. I always thought “Boomtown” sounded better, but if that was the guy’s name, I guess what they came up with is a better choice. And then before your eyes, wonders to behold! First baseball caps, most honoring the military, guns, or Jesus in no particular order. Then racks of clothing. Polynesian dresses, kids stuff, and of course t-shirts. Beyond that are row upon row of figurines – angels, devils, skulls, dragons, bears, and whatever else you might think someone might purchase.
The food section is big enough to fill a small grocery store with all kinds of tempting concoctions. Canned and pickled and preserved just about anything that grows from the ground. I ended up with three jars I found in the reduced-price-beyond-expiration-date section. I could load up on these. The last time we visited, I bought a few. They were good. They were cheap. And where else are you going to find pickled black-eyed pea relish?
As always, my favorite part is the hot sauce section. No idea what they taste like, but names to race the heart and numb the mind. I noticed that there remained only two bottles of Screw the Republicans, and apparently Screw the Democrats was sold out. Well, that is no surprise in our current political environment, and Missouri is not much of a swing state in recent years. The list of names promising violence and destruction is virtually endless. I understand that the really powerful stuff is kept behind the sales counter. I chose something gentler sounding: Hippy Dippy Green. Its label displays a turtle in an apparently altered state of consciousness, with a peace sign on his shell. Seems harmless enough. Of course, it was produced by the Angry Goat Pepper Company.
Then of course there are the fireworks. Behind a separate set of doors on the far end of the building, a good distance from the gas pumps, are the fireworks in a space about the size of your typical grocery store. Unless you are an expert on such things, it is difficult to tell exactly what it is they do, besides shooting high in the air and going boom, but again, my favorite part is the names.
The apocalyptic ones: A series entitled Atomic Bomb, Hydrogen Bomb, Neutron Bomb, and Cobalt Bomb, (Is there such a thing as a Cobalt Bomb? I don’t think I want to know.) Last Man Standing, Atomic Rain, Day Zero
The mysogynistic ones: One Bad Mother-in-Law, Trophy Wife, Alpha Male
The ones intended to appeal to a certain demographic: Baby Boomers! , Psychodelic
The ones that are just plain weird: Psycho Circus, Loyal to None, Western Green Mamba, Dirty Little Secret (It is not likely to remain secret for too long if it lights up the sky and goes boom!)
Kristin contributed some photos that she shot during the week. They will provide a different perspective of the week.
I am decidedly not a morning person, but Kristin is, so she got this beautiful sunrise picture because she was the only one up early enough to see it.
She also got this one of the sunset. Nice wide agle shot.
Here are pics of the Sumner courthouse where the Emmett Till trial was held. The courthouse is still in use until they finish building a new one, at which time it will be operated by the National Park Service. The courtroom is basically unchanged since the Till trial.
Here are some pictures of the crew and family at work.
I am not sure exactly what is going on here, but it is near the railroad tracks that run through Tutwiler, though the trains rarely come through town now.
Tutwiler was at one point, if not a booming town, at least a bigger and more active one. The story is that W.C. Handy discovered the blues while sitting in the Tutwiler depot waiting for a train and listening to an old man play a guitar while running a bottle neck up and down the strings. He was singing about where the Southern crosses the dog, referring to where the Southern Railroad crossed the Yazoo and Delta, known informally as the Yellow Dog. There are pictures in the community center of Tutwiler in its heyday and some of the buildings from that era are still standing – barely. The interiors have mostly fallen in.
I already posted a version of this picture, but this one is better.
After years of these trips, we inevitably find ourselves repeating certain themes. Enroute to our destination, we pass a truly remarkable center of commerce, BOOMLAND!
Yes, it deserves those capital letters. In an earlier blog post, I described it as the acme of Southern kitsch. Perhaps I was unfair. Well, no I wasn’t. It is that. But that fails to do it justice. It is difficult to describe the sheer scale of the place, dedicated as it is to the American ethos that too much of everything is just not enough.
The building stretches to for about what in Chicago would be a city block. Inside there are wonders to behold! At the main entrance, there is an enormous rocking chair big enough to hold at least two people dedicated to G. Leon Land. I presume he is the founder of this enterprise, and that is why it is called Boomland and not Boomtown.
The outside promises Specialty Food! (Mostly pizza and hamburgers,)Gifts and Collectibles! (depends on what you want to collect, I guess.) Home Decor! (If you want to do your home in contemporary American tacky.) And of course, FIREWORKS!!!
We visited the one in Charleston, MO (up to this point, I was never sure which location we were visiting. There are two of them, because one just is not enough.) Just beyond the rocking chair, one is greeted with a huge variety of baseball caps. One of the employees greeted me with enthusiasm when I walked in the door. I had forgotten that I was wearing one that I had purchased a few years ago. This is decidedly red territory, so unsurprisingly, the hats tend to celebrate religion, conservative politics, or both. I do not know if I would have been as cheerfully greeted if I wore my “Make America Not Embarrassing Again” hat. A couple years back, Andy purchased a “Bikers for Jesus” hat, but it is a pretty good guess that the locals are not attuned to irony.
Beyond that, there is just loads and loads of STUFF! I am no arbiter of women’s fashion, but a woman could purchase an entire wardrobe here. Then there are the knickknacks and the like. It is like if you gathered every truck stop and tourist trap in the state, loaded it up with fireworks, then just set the whole thing off. STUFF EVERYWHERE!
Bears, trolls, dragons, angels, just about any other kind of figurine you can figure, a selection of children-sized t-shirts big enough to outfit several kindergartens and a section of junk food big enough to keep them all on a sugar high for weeks, signs, crosses, an entire section of furniture.
Who doesn’t love elephants? Well, Democrats maybe.
Almost inevitably with all that stuff, some of it is actually pretty nice. There is a lovely antique amoire for sale, and a beautiful antique piano in the dining area. Even the enormous rocking chair, though too big for anyone to comfortably sit in is a fine piece of furniture. Unfortunately that stuff gets lost in ocean of merchandise.
But my favorite section is always the hot sauce! I do not know what these different concoctions taste like, and I am not brave enough to try and find out, but the names are just amazing. There is an entire brand of varieties named after uncomfortable bodily functions. Butt Pucker, Sphincter Shrinker, Anal Angst, Flaming Flatulence! The theme is carried on by other producers as well. Blow Out, Backfire, Colon Cleaner, Xtreme Regret! Wait, this is supposed to make you want to buy the stuff?
Beyond the ones promising gastrointestinal suffering are others promising destruction of one kind or another. Vicious Viper, Widow No Survivors, Lethal Gator, Bad to the Bone, Extreme Damage, A Little Nuke, Hellfire, Lucifer’s Last Blast, Road Kill, Mustard Gas.
Lunch, served in a dining room/airplane hanger and featuring a menagerie of deceased animals, was tolerable, if not outstanding. There are plenty of alternatives. The pork cutlet sandwich that I had was pretty good. Jim reports the cornbread muffin he had was terrible. I did not try any of the hot sauce.
I do NOT want to eat with this creature staring down at me!
I did pick up a couple jars of freshly canned stuff because it looked interesting and it was on sale. This is the kind of thinking pursuades one to purchase a two-pound bag of ground glass because it’s cheap and is bound to come in handy some day, but jars of tomato preserves and blackeyed pea relish sound interesting , and did not require much of an investment.
But the drawing card of course is the fireworks.
Again, the sheer scale of the place is intimidating. It is the size of a large supermarket with lots of signs proclaiming “No Smoking,” (to which I want to reply, “No $#1+”)
And once again, the most interesting thing is not the product being offered as much as the names. The names of the various products do not much descibe what they do, exactly. Presumably purchasers have the idea that you light them and they are going to send a lot of flaming stuff in the air and make noise.
Here are a couple of my favorites. Dance in the Rain seems positively pleasant, but would seem to create some problems if you want to set off fireworks. I have no idea where Pickled Parrot came from.
The names seem to change from year to year, though some themes seem to be constant. Lots of reference to patriotism and the military of course. And then various provocative names. Sexually suggestive names seem to be in vogue this year. Sassy with a label of long feminine legs, Sexy Rider, Trophy Wife, Dirty Little Secret, and one with a pirate on it called Chasing Booty. (Booty! Get it?)
There is no subtlety in what this one is trying to appeal to, now is there?
Can someone explain this one to me?
Certainly no shortage of things that make bright sparks and go boom. But when we were last here, things were just opening up again after the Covid Pandemic, supplies of lots of things were short, and Boomland’s shelves were half empty. For better or worse, it is good to see the country return to something resembling normal. It might even make the idea of exploding poop seem like a good idea.
We cannot put up a picture of us installing the end-of-the-week plaque this year Andy did not start on it until Friday and nobody pushed him, so by Friday, he had a rough idea of what he wanted to do. He got a board, blocked out a small portion of it on the bottom for all of us to sign, and will take it home and finish it, then send it to JD. JD has promised to install it on the below the other ones we have on that wall. Watch this space for a picture of how it looks when it gets put up.
We usually have a list of jobs for people to sign up for all week. This week we pretty much skipped that. A few of us signed up for morning devotions. Andy provided more than his share of meals, as he typically does. Everybody else just sort of filled in as needed. We were a relatively small group this year and we did not make much of a mess. Dino started the week by making his traditional Italian sausage and peppers for breakfast and we ate leftovers of those for much of the week. Kristin made eggs to order for breakfast. People pretty much stepped in to wash dishes.
Now it is time to pack up and go home. There is a little bit of cleaning to be done, but in recent years, Habitat has hired someone to come in and clean after groups leave, so we do not need to leave the place spotless like we used to. Getting all the stuff we brought back into the cars we came in can be a bit more challenging, especially when people have bought all kinds of stuff to take home, but there was not too much of that this year. Still we have some items of business to transact. JD, Sherri, and Lorenzo all came by to see us off. Goodbyes and hugs can take a while.
Dave buys a t-shirtJim bids JD goodbye
So we have completed our work for another year. In twelve years, I have worked on thirteen houses, helped put a roof on the Bargain Barn, and spent a day or two making improvements and repairs on the house where the sisters lived, and written thousands of words, some of them wise. Our group has probably worked on about twenty. We have seen lots of historical and cultural sites and gained an understanding of the people and the places around here. We have built a community of friends here in Mississippi and surely among our group. In addition to our long time regulars, dozens of people have joined us for a year or two.
All of this began when one newly graduated medical student came looking for a place to work. Thousands have followed her over the years. Some of those have died, retired, or otherwise moved on, and some have proven impossible to replace. Progress in Tutwiler can be painfully slow, often short lived, the setbacks can be tragic. But in those years, houses have been built. Many people are healthier and happier, lots of children have been given chances to learn and grow.
In her devotion Friday, Nicole spoke about how we have just celebrated Pentecost and that the Holy Spirit has endowed all of us with different gifts. We have seen the Spirit working in this community and in our own. We hope to be a blessing to the people we have served here in Tutwiler. Surely we have been blessed in the process.
I have written many times about this lovely couple who bought and rehabbed the scary run down bar across from the community center and turned it into High Cotton Gallery.
They run Art classes for kids, planted a community garden, and High Cotton serves as a place for kids and adults to drop in and hang out. But right now, they are busy taking care of a couple of foster kids. The five-year-old girl takes a break from games on her tablet to look at my camera. I ask her if she wants to try it out and she shyly runs and hides behind Jay, grabbing one of his legs.
Stephanie works as a nurse for a number of schools in the area. One of the teachers asked her to take a look at one of the kids. Underneath the mask she wore she found bruises. An physical examination revealed some more. “I’ve worked in a prison. Most of my career I spent working in emergency rooms. I have worked in a lot of schools. I have never seen anything that disturbed me as much as that.”
The two children wound up with the couple. “We just took them on an emergency basis. There was no place else for them to go,” said Stephanie.” Jay laughs, “I was telling her, ‘Steph, they’re not puppies. You can’t just take them home with you.’ ” That was in February. The couple is still trying to get licensed as foster parents, but until then, they are receiving nothing from the state. Once they get licensed, the state is not going to pay anything for the past three months. Their big concern is whether the court will move the kids now that they are settled. “She’s little. She’s just five.” Referring to slightly older brother, she said, “He’s quiet. He stops and thinks about things a lot. They have settled in. They just know that they are safe and clean.”
“I was planning of retiring,” said Stephanie. “We were not planning on raising kids at our age.” I reminded he of the joke about How to Make God Laugh – Make plans.
While we talked, I did a little editing to this blog and used their wifi connection. Like most straight out of the box routers, the network has an entirely unrecognizable name and the password is a bunch of random numbers. I told Jay I could set it up for them so that the network was easier to find and the password was easier to remember. “No, I don’t want it to be easy to find. The drug dealers are always looking for stuff like that.”
We had our community dinner at a former house/restaurant right behind the community center. We finished dinner just before sunset, at which time sleepy little Tutwiler was becoming a whole lot more lively. Directly across the street from the community center are two nondescript cinderblock buildings with no windows. They look like they may be abandoned. They are not. They are booming businesses. Those are two of the town bars, right next door to each other, both directly across the street from the police station. It is getting dark, and parts of Tutwiler come to life. Wise people find somewhere else to be.
Next to the police station there is a crumbling wall and a burned spot from what was once a gas station and more recently a liquor store. It burned down. Tutwiler has a volunteer fire department and a truck, but the only person who had a key was in Greenwood, about an hour away. The one fireman in town did his best to settle things down and then informed the police station that the roof of the building next to them was on fire. The police said they thought that was out already.
Tutwiler has 2400 people and more than its share of ones who are up to no good. It has thieves, gangbangers, drug dealers, and other miscreants, as well as some people who are just unhappy with life.
Jon wanted to know how many years Lorenzo has been working with us, so I asked him. He had no idea. I first met Lorenzo my first year down. JD brought him by the site and Dino in particular was thrilled to see him. He showed up every year since, getting bigger and more confident and comfortable to us every year.
At this point, Lorenzo has each of our numbers on his phone and looks forward to our arrival each year.
Lorenzo is a part of the team that we can rely on being here every year. He works with us, shares meals, signs the plaque at the end of the week, and usually appears in our group photo. He stuck around to get in the picture this year and would still be here watching us pack up, but he wanted to hurry home before the rain started.
He might make it over tomorrow to see us off, but whether he can make it or not, he will expect us to text him when we get home to assure him we made it safely. The world is a better place for him and for us because of our friendship.
A few of us went to the clinic for a tour. Well, it was not much of a tour. Cindy the office manager showed us a few rooms and then regaled us for an hour or so with stories of Sister Anne.
Just about everything we are doing and that most anybody is doing around here began when Dr. Sr. Anne Brooks, DO, SNJM came down to the clinic. Sister Anne’s story began well before she entered medical school at the age of 40 or so, but that is a story for another day. She needed to find an underserved community to work in to pay off her government loans, which is not that big a stretch for a nun. Most such people stay a year or two. She stayed 35.
Sr. Anne wrote to lots of small towns in the delta and only Tutwiler replied. She showed up and found that the town had a clinic. She told us once, “They didn’t tell me they had a clinic and I didn’t tell them I was a nun.” In a short time, one small room of the clinic became the community center, with after school care in the afternoon, followed by adult literacy classes at night. Those started when Sr. Anne discovered that some of her patients could not read the labels on the medication she gave them. The Habitat program began after a woman arrived at the clinic with a serious leg injury when she fell through her livingroom floor.
All of these activities kept one nun way too busy, so Sr. Anne invited her friend Sr. Maureen down. Sr. Maureen was another force of nature and got lots of things moving at the community center. Then one day a 60 Minutes TV crew came down. I asked Cindy what brought them there.
“Nobody knows! We have tried to figure that out and nobody seems to know. But after 60 Minutes, the donations started rolling in. They had to hire seven temporary workers at the post office. They we bringing piles of mail over, with money falling out. Kids sent their lunch money. Some people sent a dollar. Some people sent fifty thousand dollars.”
I took a picture of Cindy at the clinic, but I will be nice and use this one from the clinic website instead.
Thus began the Tutwiler Quilters and the other things that the TCEC provided. The TCEC has expanded. 60 Minutes did a show comemorating one of its anniversaries and showed a clip of the previous piece and an update. More donations rolled in. There were lots of activities for young people. A sign on the wall listed consequences for bad behavior, ultimately leading to a talk with Sr. Maureen. Those of us who are veterans of Catholic education know that was not something to be taken lightly.
Since Sr. Maureen left to become the head of her order, management has changed multiple times, and recent conflicts with the board of directors lead to the departure of the last director. Different people have different ideas about whose fault that was, but for the present, the center does not have a director or much programming.
Things go up and down here, but much has improved since Sr. Anne first arrived in 1983. She used to meet with us nearly every year when we made the trip, and told us once that the first thing she did when she took over was to close the Colored waiting room. “That’s right,” Cindy confirmed. “The bathrooms too.” She also told us that some of the houses did not have running water. Mississippi did not require it at the time. When the state finally required indoor plumbing (stand pipes, not sinks) waterborne diseases declined by about 90%. Sr. Anne used to tell us that building houses was health care work. “When people have a house, they think they are worth something. They start taking better care of themselves.”
By the time I made my first trip here, Sr. Anne was nearing or at retirement age, but kept working. Originally the town rented the clinic to her for a dollar a year, but eventually the bookkeeping got to be a nuisance, so they just gave it to her. She kept looking far and wide for someone who would take over the clinic and run it to her expectations. Finally the director of the Tallahatchie General Hospital expressed interest and showed up to a board meeting.
“He had just returned from a mission trip with his teenage children. He sat right there in that red chair. She had looked all over for someone to take the clinic over. Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, all sorts of people. As he spoke you could just see her light up. She finally found someone who would take over the clinic and have it run the way she wanted. “
The clinic is now run by a non-profit trust under the direction of the hospital. Cindy claims that finding doctors is not difficult. “They actually like it. They come in and we supply the patients. We do all the paperwork and file all the insurance. Anything that is not covered by insurance the clinic covers.”
Donations paid for several expansions of the clinic, but the building has just about reached its limits. As a result of a sizeable bequest, a new clinic is being built nearby. The old building will probably eventually revert to the town.
Sister Anne hung on about as long as she could. As soon as the hospital took over the clinic, she retired to her order’s retirement home in upstate New York. Jan Nowak, one of our former regulars is a pathologist and developed a good working relationship with her over the years. Shortly after she retired, Jan accepted a position at Rochester University, which put him and his wife close to where Sister Anne was living. They came for a visit. She had declined significantly and could hardly recognize them.
“She’s suffering from dementia. There are two things she knows. She knows that she is a doctor. And she knows that she is a bride of Jesus.”
Sherri has been the interim director of the West Tallahatchie Habitat chapter since her predecessor, her daughter, left for nursing school. She stepped in until they could find someone full-time and has been there since. It helps that she is a volunteer and Habitat does not have to pay her. She filled me in on what is going on with West Tallahatchie Habitat.
Ariel and family are putting in plenty of work on her house, more than we have typically seen in our trips down here.
Just before Covid, we were one of the last groups to work on House #46, then volunteers quit showing up and the family finished most of the house themselves.
Volunteer groups are starting to pick back up. We were the first group to come down here after the Covid pandemic, and several more are coming down this year. The crowd from Urbana High School are due in June. We’ll say more about them later when we talk about allocating wall space for plaques.
“Maybe the people at the community college in Clarksdale (Coahoma Community College) will come. That would be good. And it would be good for the students. They are learning construction. They can get some experience.”
Right now West Tallahatchie Habitat owns the land the houses are on. Once the last two houses are finished, the land can be turned over to the town of Tutwiler.
“Then we can get some services from the city. Water service, sewer service, trash service. Right now we can’t get the city to do anything and the county can’t do anything without the town’s permission. We tried to get them to put down more gravel in the roads and they can’t do it.”
Once the subdivision is done, the Habitat chapter will move on to other things. Habitat International wants to do a project with all the chapters to honor Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter.
They are looking for land in the area and are aiming at the town of Webb, which is about seven miles away.
“We have lots of requests for us to do rehab work, or asking us if we know someone who does it. We would like to branch out, but we just don’t have the money. We are looking for grants but we don’t have money to hire a grant writer. “
“When I moved here, there was a factory right down the road, another across the highway, another on the other side of town. Those are all gone. People had to move. There were no jobs.”
But things continue to go on and Sherri is not planning to leave any time soon.
The Habitat chapter got started when Sister Maureen followed Sister Anne Brooks down here. Sister Maureen was the driving force behind the community center and a tough act to follow.
“She lets me know when she is coming down here. I tell her I am just trying to complete her vision. When we finish the last two houses, we will have some sort of celebration. I don’t know if Sister Anne can come. We’ll have to have a picture of her or something. But Sister Anne and Sister Maureen, they were the ones who had a vision for this town. I am just trying to complete thier vision.”
I do most of the writing and provide most of the pictures for this blog, but I always like to get the other team members involved and let them provide their own individual insights and experiences. Most of the crew took a trip to see some of the local sites yesterday. I skipped the trip. I have seen them in past years and enjoyed just taking a break. But this provides a great opportunity to hear from someone else.
We got a good start installing siding on the last house. We were going gangbusters and hoping to get lots done today. Then the rains came. Thunder and lightning was as all around and the ground turned into muck. So we moved indoors and worked on mudding the drywalls in preparation for painting.
After lunch, some of us went on a field trip to discover history of the area. Our first stop was in Sumner, where the two white men who killed Emmett Till were sent to trial and found not guilty by a jury of 12 white men. They later admitted that they were guilty.
The old courtroom is still in use, and is now a historic landmark under the US Park System.
Then we visited the private Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora. Emmett was killed here and the center has displays explaining what happened.
Our next stop was at the B.B. King Museum. They have many displays of B.B.’s amazing success as a blues guitarist.
B.B.’s gravesite is at the museum.
We ended the day with a visit to Clarksdale to Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club. It was amateur night so we heard lots of acts — some better than others.
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