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.

May 25, 2024

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 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. 

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 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+”)

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?)

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.

No, probably not.

May 25, 2024

So here we are after another year’s work.

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. 

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. 

May 24, 2024

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.

https://www.facebook.com/StephanieM.Kassem60/

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.

It also has people like Jay and Stephanie.

May 24, 2024

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.

May 24, 2024

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.

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.”

May 24, 2024

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.”

May 24, 2024

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.

Our next stop was at the B.B. King Museum. They have many displays of B.B.’s amazing success as a blues guitarist.

May 24, 2024

Clarksdale, MS is about fifteen miles away from Tutwiler. It is the location of the Delta Blues Museum and a bunch of blues clubs. One of the locals once told me that what Clarksdale needs is a place to eat and drink WITHOUT live music. Every year we wind up at Ground Zero Blues Club.

https://www.groundzerobluesclub.com/

Thursday is often Open Stage night, so predictably the level of talent varies. The first couple of performers we saw were not ready for prime time, but then some of the local regulars took the stage.

And this guy showed up on the stage as well.

I tried to embed this, but the program will not let me, probably because I signed up for the cheap WordPress plan. Oh, well. If you want to see what we saw, here it is.

https://www.facebook.com/johnthegoatherder/videos/646513681002989

Morgan Freeman lives in Clarksdale and is a part-owner of the club.

There are flags from all over the world hanging from the ceiling. I shot pictures of some of them, but apparently deleted them, so you will just have to take my word for it. The one that I did not delete is the recently adopted flag of the state of Mississippi.

After years of controversy and a great deal of public pressure, Mississippi finally decided to get rid of its former flag that had the Confederate battle flag in the canton. The flag was designed in 1896 and the designer claimed that the thirteen stars stood for the original thirteen states, but nobody believed that. I remember being taken aback during my early trips down here seeing it flying above public buildings. There was a referendum in 2001 that would have removed the Confederate battle flag from the canton and replace it with a circle of stars on a blue field. It failed with about two thirds of the vote being in favor of keeping the old flag.

By the turn of the century, the Confederate battle flag was being seen more and more as a symbol of racism, and public pressure mounted to change the flag. Neighboring Georgia dropped the Confederate symbol from its flag and after the racially motivated massacre at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, pressure began to mount to change the flag.

In 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota at the hands of white police officers, the controversy flared up again. Demonstrations took place outside the state capitol. But perhaps more significantly, the Southeast Conference and later the NCAA determined that no post-season athletic events would be held in Mississippi until the flag was changed. In June of that year, the legislature passed a law removing the old flag and establishing a referendum to adopt an new on in November. In that short time, hundreds of designs were submitted, the list was narrowed to 147, then five, then two before the current flag was submitted to the referendum. It passed with about 75% of the vote.

Being someone who likes flags, I am impressed with what they came up with. I think it is one of the more attractive state flags and better than many of the proposed options over the years. And they did it in about six months. So change is possible, if often difficult and seemingly unlikely.

May 23, 2024

It started raining last night after we had all returned to the dorm and did not let up until this morning, then it started again.

So just about any work we do today is going to be inside. We typically take a half day some day during the week and go exploring the local cultural attractions, so the plan is to do some of that this afternoon. Tonight we will likely head into Clarksdale and catch some music.

But we have gotten stuff done this morning. JD examined my rotating sanders and declared that they have gone to sander heaven, so I have left them to him to canabalize and then told Ariel that it is all her fault. I will have to rely on the flat one for the remainder of the week. That has worked OK so far, and here is what I accomplished this morning.

OK, it does not look like much, but until someone comes up with a VR method of letting you feel stuff in a blog, you will just have to take my word for it. The walls are nice and smooth.

On House 49, they are finishing up the siding, but only in the area of the front porch. It is pouring outside right now.

Food once again is great. Wednesday is usually the day that Andy whips up one of his feasts, so last night he made green curry with all sorts of stuff that goes in it with brown or vermicelli rice. It might be a not quite up to Andy’s usual standards, as he forgot to bring coconut milk, and oddly enough, the local Dollar General did not have any. But it tasted good. This morning, Kristin made avacado toast and we still had lots of fruit left. Yum!