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Willy Bearden: the last episode from rolling fork...for now
Willy Bearden: The last episode from Rolling Fork, for now
By Willy Bearden, Guest Columnist Published: April 02, 2023 4:00 AM CT
I wasn’t sure what I would be waking up to this past Saturday morning, March 25. I turned on the Weather Channel and saw video from a drone sailing smoothly over a flat landscape under a cool blue Delta sky.
“Where is that?” my wife, Kim, asked. She has been to Rolling Fork with me many times.
I froze. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Through live video, we were looking at my hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, and I could not get my bearings. Instead of the familiar – the visitor’s center, Chuck’s Motel, the mobile home park, Chuck’s Dairy Bar – it was chaos. It was as though some giant had scooped the town up then scattered it all out again in a cruel, smashed jumble of buildings and houses, cars and trucks and trees. And human lives were smashed too.
I had watched this horror unfold the night before as the giant storm that produced the F4-level tornado had crossed the Mississippi River near Lake Providence, Louisiana. I felt anxiety, fear. I grew up in the south Delta, the Deep Delta. I knew what tornadoes can bring.
While I was watching the storm develop, my friend Charles Weissinger was at home in his two-story yellow house that sits alongside Rolling Fork Creek, the sluggish stream that bisects the town. Charlie was chasing his five-year-old grandson, Fisher, through the house. The boy had just gotten out of the tub, where he had been playing with tiny yellow plastic ducks his grandparents had brought him from the Peabody Hotel. Charlie’s wife, Anne, was downstairs. Then they felt the telltale pressure. And heard what was coming. An immense, weighty rumble, exactly like the sound of a freight train.
“Put your pajamas on now,” Charles shouted to his grandson.
He gathered the child in his arms and moved quickly to a stairway that leads to the second floor. The landing, away from the windows at least, seemed like the safest spot. He put the child on the floor and tried to protect him with his own body. “Ann was screaming,” Charles told me. “I yelled, ‘Get down; I’ve got the baby. Get down.’ Then it hit.”
About two minutes after Charles and Anne and Fisher heard the freight train sound, the pressure seemed to crush and expand, all at the same time. Windows shattered. It was loud. Charles held onto the child. Outside, something very heavy hit the ground. It turned out to be the city’s huge water tower on the other side of the creek.
Just as suddenly, all of it was over, replaced by an eerie silence. Then the phone calls began. Among the first was Fisher’s father, known as Little Charlie, calling from Greenville, wanting to know, “Please God, are you all OK?”
By the light of that same Saturday morning, Charles Weissinger discovered that his law office, 200 yards away beside Highway 61, was virtually destroyed. A few hundred yards further north on the east side of the highway, what had been the mobile home park was a ten-acre field of pale-colored and wrinkled sheet metal. Many of the 13 Rolling Fork citizens who died had lived there.
The headline in The New York Times on Monday read “Hoping for a Comeback in a Town with Little to Come Back To.” I’ll put it this way: As bad as it was last Saturday morning, it’s bound to get worse for my hometown. Nothing is working the way it should – water, electricity, gas, food supplies, medical care. It was already a town in the vice grip of extreme poverty. Almost 40% of the town’s residents live below the poverty line, and almost three-quarters of the people who live in my hometown are Black.
But Charles Weissinger sees what might be a silver lining in the cloud that brought this devastation. “It could come back better than before,” he said.
President Joe Biden has already promised all the federal aid possible to help people get their lives back together, then rebuild. The town was already a shell of what it had been, in the days of the cotton economy. Buildings and homes could be built back better than before.
“Could be” are the keywords.
Charles, a former state representative, has worked with FEMA, the federal bureaucracy created to help towns in crisis like Rolling Fork. Charles says that, first, the right people have to be put in place to oversee the rebuilding. And FEMA has to do what it promises. Over the next months and years, we will see how that plays out.
Before I left Rolling Fork to come back to Memphis last week, Charles, Anne and I walked around in their yard looking at the damage. There is a blue tarp covering a hole in the roof. Another storm could bring ever more damage to what’s under the roof. Many windows are missing.
Across the creek, through the stripped-bare trees, we saw houses of the friends I had known growing up there. Many homes are missing roofs or windows or garages. After the destruction of Friday night, Charles and Anne saw a hopeful sign – men with chainsaws, front-end loaders and machinery went door-to-door cutting downed trees, pushing the debris to the street.
In Charles’ and Anne’s yard are a pair of giant pecan trees lying on their sides. By counting the rings, exposed by the chainsaws, Charles estimates they are 600 years old. They were saplings that were growing “before Christopher Columbus came to America,” Charles said.
The men with the chainsaws and machinery refused to accept money for their work. They were taking the first steps toward rebuilding. Acting like good neighbors.
I will be back in Rolling Fork again soon. I have no chainsaw, but I can try to tell what’s going on as my hometown tries to come back.
Charles’ and Anne’s grandson left a bit shaken, telling his grandfather he wasn’t sure if he wanted to spend the night there again. But he is resilient. Years from now he will remember that night and how he, his grandfather and grandmother survived it together.
GUEST COLUMNIST
Willy Bearden
Willy Bearden is a filmmaker, photographer, author and producer. His documentary films include Visualizing the Blues, The Story of Cotton, A History of Memphis Garage Bands, Overton Park, Elmwood Cemetery and many others.
dispatch from rolling fork
From The Daily Memphian, April 2, 20 23
Willy Bearden: Dispatch from Rolling Fork
By Willy Bearden, Guest Columnist Updated: April 02, 2023 4:00 AM CT | Published: April 02, 2023 4:00 AM CT
We drove the three hours from Memphis down the storied Highway 61 last week, dreading the moment we would have to see the reality of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, my hometown, which had been nearly destroyed Friday night by an F4 tornado.
With me were George Larrimore and Ron Buck, two friends who reached out to help me tell this very personal, yet universal, story. Between the three of us, we were hoping to shoot video footage and talk to residents, friends and volunteers to form a baseline from which to tell a story that will surely go on for years.
I was dreading seeing my childhood home, thinking it might have been destroyed. It was not.
But Chuck’s Dairy Bar, where generations of high school kids hung out after school and deer hunters from across the state stopped in for a meal of fried this or that, was an unrecognizable heap of twisted metal and splintered two-by-fours.
We witnessed an incredible number of volunteers from places near and far, working chainsaws and front-end loaders, utility company crews setting poles and miles of power lines, roofers trying to save houses from the rainstorm that was forecast, barbecue smokers and crawfish gumbo crews handing out food for the dazed residents. It was a truly overwhelming and chaotic scene.
Rolling Fork is the county seat of Sharkey County, one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation. There are no industries in the area. Jobs are few and far between for the 1,800 residents. The racial makeup of Rolling Fork is about 75% Black, and about 37% of the population lives below the poverty line. It is easy to understand how this new tragedy compounds the everyday struggles of the people here.
In true team fashion, George Larrimore – Memphis resident, former NBC producer and frequent Rolling Fork visitor – talked with Natalie Perkins about the ongoing trials to bring Rolling Fork back from this disaster.
In addition to being the editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot — Rolling Fork’s weekly paper established in 1884 — Perkins is the Sharkey County assistant emergency management director. “This is my fourth disaster,” she said, counting a flood, the COVID-19 pandemic and another tornado that struck the town of Anguilla.
Perkins has been working steadily since the tornado struck Friday, March 24, and the morning I talked to her, Natalie had retreated to her home where she was starting to put together the first issue of the newspaper since the disaster struck. Friends were helping to gather information, and she’s laying out the pages. “I don’t know how I will physically do that,” she said, “but we will make it happen.”
And there was much news to report from the town that was so devastated. The Sharkey-Issaquena County Hospital suffered a “fair amount of damage” and was still not operational. “It will be a while before it’s open,” Perkins said. Meanwhile, a field hospital has been set up at the Rolling Fork Armory where the town’s three doctors, along with other health care workers and volunteers, were seeing patients.
After the tornado struck around 8 p.m., the hospital was operating on power from a generator. But the generator was powered by natural gas, and all the gas in town had to be shut off after the storm shattered the gas mains. “You could hear gas hissing everywhere,” Natalie said. The injured from the storm were taken to hospitals in Greenville, Jackson and Vicksburg.
As of the middle of last week, the latest number of dead in Rolling Fork from the storm was 13. A mobile morgue unit was brought in to handle that work, and as of midweek, the victims, once they’d been identified, were being turned over to local funeral homes.
It’s still unclear as to how many of the town’s approximately 1,800 residents are without power. But when we visited last week, the streets of the town were crowded with power crews and cranes as they try to get lines re-connected.
We saw so many startling scenes. Miraculously, there are houses and buildings that are untouched. But the mobile home park on Highway 61, where most of those who were killed had lived, looks like ten acres of crushed and scattered boxes. Trees are stripped bare, metal wrapped around branches where leaves once were. Many very old and established trees, including a pair of 600-year-old pecan trees in one family’s yard, are lain on their sides, sawed into parts.
The sound of Rolling Fork was the sharp drone of chainsaws as volunteers with equipment went house-to-house, cutting and dragging debris out to where it could be picked up. The other common sound was of birds, roosting in bare trees, singing their songs of spring.
GUEST COLUMNIST
Willy Bearden
Willy Bearden is a filmmaker, photographer, author and producer. His documentary films include Visualizing the Blues, The Story of Cotton, A History of Memphis Garage Bands, Overton Park, Elmwood Cemetery and many others.
Of small towns and tragedies: Memories of Rolling Fork
FILMMAKER WILLY BEARDEN ON HIS HOMETOWN: “TO SAY IT OUT LOUD IS TO KEEP IT ALIVE.”
From The Daily Memphian, March 28, 2023
Last week, I drove to Oakland, Tennessee, a small town half an hour east of Memphis. I’d been invited there to do a talk at the Senior Activity Center. Oakland is one of those towns poised for some big changes in the very near future.
Ford Motor Company’s Blue Oval City will be opening in a couple of years and will be pushing electric pickup trucks out the door at an unprecedented rate. With tens of thousands of jobs available, it’s easy to figure Oakland will be hard-pressed to hold onto its small-town ways. Proximity is the operant term here, and Oakland, like many other formerly sleepy bergs, will have business and property tax monies rolling in.
I have nothing to do with any of this, but I do know a thing or two about small towns. A couple of times a month I get the opportunity to lug my computer to a senior residence, civic club, or ladies auxiliary, and talk about Memphis, and history.
I love the energy and the smiles, and I love to hear the stories people share with me when I’m finished with my talk. I always make sure to tell them a little about myself before we get to the stories of Mr. Handy, or Tom Lee, or the Civil War spy Ginny Moon. I also make sure to tell them where I’m from.
I’m from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in what I like to call the Deep Delta. It is the place that made me. It is the place that gave me the confidence to do all the things I’ve dreamed of and accomplished. From listening to gossip in the beauty shop where my mother worked, to the pool hall where I studied at the feet of a shady pack of ne’er-do-wells and learned what not to do, Rolling Fork nurtured me in ways I still don’t fully understand, and that’s why I feel the deep responsibility to sing its praises.
Before yesterday, few Americans had ever heard, much less uttered those two words together: Rolling Fork. You may have heard about Teddy Roosevelt not shooting the bear in 1902, or bluesman Muddy Waters’ birthplace. Yep, Rolling Fork. And so many characters, stories and personalities that are fascinating and equally important to the place. Once, a grocer from our town was a guest on the popular 1950s show, I’ve Got A Secret. His name was Mr. Pickle, first name Dill, I kid you not.
Last Friday night about 8 p.m., a massive tornado tore through my little town, destroying homes, businesses and lives. After only a few minutes, which must have seemed like an eternity to those huddled in bathtubs and closets, not much was left standing. In the dark, with the rain pounding the earth, people — stunned and frightened — ventured out to check on their neighbors and their town. What they found was surreal and horrific. Almost everything was gone.
Since Friday, the nation — from CNN to the New York Times, CBS to You Tube — has been telling the heartbreaking story of the little town of 1,800, and every time I hear a newsperson say, “Rolling Fork,” I think to myself, It doesn’t roll off the tongue like it should.
If they only knew.
But they won’t know because tomorrow or the next day they will be on to something else, some other tragedy in another place we’ve never heard of. Rolling Fork will still be there, however, struggling back from the apocalypse. The only upside may be that the people around there are doers. They are farmers who know how to tackle the biggest jobs imaginable. They have tractors, front-end loaders, trucks and winches and every tool there is. They are not quitters.
In the past days, I have received phone calls and texts from people around the country, people who have never been to Rolling Fork, but know it is my hometown. That’s a powerful and humbling fact. I feel the need to do something, but I’m not sure what a 72-year-old man can do. I know I can document the destruction. I can interview those who deserve to have their stories told. I can make sure this place is remembered.
Yesterday, my friend, the judge who also owns the liquor store, lamented that Rolling Fork would never be the same. I know he’s right, but that won’t keep me from talking about the characters I knew when I was growing up in the best hometown a person could ask for. That would be Rolling Fork. To say it out loud is to keep it alive.
GUEST COLUMNIST
Willy Bearden
Willy Bearden is a filmmaker, photographer, author and producer. His documentary films include Visualizing the Blues, The Story of Cotton, A History of Memphis Garage Bands, Overton Park, Elmwood Cemetery and many others.