ROLLING FORK, Miss. - Damien Harris dug through the rubble on the lot where his family’s mobile home once stood Sunday morning, desperate to find anything from his old life that he could hold onto.
Two days earlier, his mother had called and told him not to come home. The weather was bad and seemed to only be getting worse. He did what she told him but grew worried when he didn’t hear from her hours later.
He raced back to Rolling Fork around 11 p.m. in the pouring rain, but it was too late. His family’s mobile home was gone and his mother was dead, victims of a powerful tornado that tore through Mississippi, killing 25 people.
“It was a mobile home to a lot of people,” he said, picking up an old baseball mitt of his that he found lying in a puddle. “But it was home.”
On Sidney Alexander Street, where Harris lived, and the neighboring blocks that line Mulberry Street, destruction came quickly. The tornado was exceptionally large, carving a path measuring nearly 60 miles, according to the National Weather Service. Less than 1 percent of tornadoes in the United States travel more than 50 miles.
Before the tornado, the street where Harris and his family lived was lined with mobile homes and low-slung small ranch houses, just a stone’s throw from the county’s courthouse. Now, little is recognizable, buried under fallen branches and power lines, disembodied roofs and twisted cars and trucks.
What happens to Harris’s block, on the mostly Black and lower-income east side of town, will be an important barometer of whether this close-knit, small Mississippi Delta town can recover from the worst disaster to hit the community in nearly a century.
Even before the EF4 tornado sliced through the town Friday night, the community faced immense challenges. For decades now, Rolling Fork and Sharkey County have been hemorrhaging residents. The small town, with a population of 2,000, is surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, soybeans, rice and cotton.
Once prosperous due to its hundreds of miles of rich farmland, today Sharkey County is one of the poorest in the country. The average median household income stands at about $32,650, less than half of the national average and lower than all but 27 of the country’s more than 3,000 counties.
Residents here are accustomed to spates of bad weather. But many along Mulberry Street said they were nonetheless caught off guard.
Around the corner from the Harris’s home, Shay Stamps, 28, said she didn’t hear any sirens Friday night. What she did hear was the wind coming. That’s when she, her father and her 4-year-old daughter ran into the bathroom to take cover. But she quickly remembered that there was a tree on the side of the house.
“I just start yelling, ‘The tree!’ ‘The tree!’ ‘The tree!” she said.
The family ran into a bedroom. Stamps and her father tucked her daughter under a mattress and began to pray as the mobile home swayed violently in the wind.
“I thought we were going to die in the house,” she said. “It seemed like it was never going to stop. I just kept thinking, ‘Please lord, let it stop, I just can’t wait for it to stop.’”
By 8:09 p.m., the worst had passed, she said. She texted her sister: “Something hit our house.” Five minutes later, she texted her sister again: “A tornado hit our house.”
The Stamps’ home is totaled. A tree fell on one end, part of the roof ripped off, and a bedroom is exposed to the street. But like others in Rolling Fork, her family quickly sprung into action to help others as soon as they were safe. Now they are left trying to figure out whether they can afford a new trailer or will have to relocate.
“I’d love to be here, to stay here,” she said Sunday. “This is home. But as you can see, we ain’t got no home.”
A.C. Warfield has lived on Hoyt Street, across the street from the Stamps and just behind Harris’s home, for 18 years. Like Stamps, Warfield said he didn’t hear any sirens Friday night.
“We just heard the wind. I never heard the wind sound like that,” he said. “We just hit the floor.”
For the next 10 to 15 minutes he laid on the floor, what he said felt “like a lifetime,” as the tornado blew through. His only thought: his 19-year-old son, who is confined to a wheelchair. After the storm passed, he found him pinned under the debris of a collapsed ceiling. With the help of some storm chasers, Stamps’s father and other neighbors, Warfield pulled his son from the wreckage more than an hour later.
Credit: The Washington Post
Credit: The Washington Post
On Sunday morning, one of the home’s bedrooms was exposed to Hoyt Street, a mattress and bed frame jutting out the side of the house. The roof, windowpanes and front door are missing, and the walls are collapsed. He was able to salvage two dressers, a couple of bookshelves, a kitchen table and four chairs. But most of Warfield’s four-bedroom, double-wide mobile home has been reduced to debris.
Warfield isn’t sure how, or when, he’s going to recover. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.
As Warfield picked through the detritus scattered around his home, neighbors continued to check in on him. He pointed to the land next to him - where two trailers used to be - and said three people lived there. Now he doesn’t know if they’re dead or alive.
Everybody knows everybody here, he said, pointing to the plot of land behind his home. “This lady here, her husband, we are real good friends, I heard she lost her life.”
Warfield worries about the future of his street and all of Rolling Fork. Without government assistance, he fears the town will never recover. Instead, people might just leave.
“Jobs aren’t plentiful around here,” he said.
Harris isn’t sure whether he’ll stay in Rolling Fork.
When he arrived at his home Friday night, Sidney Alexander Street was a shell of its former self, and his mother and stepfather were nowhere to be found.
His aunt, who lives next door, went outside after the storm passed. Her husband discovered the couple ripped from their home and tossed on the ground.
Harris’s mother was dead. His stepfather was alive, but his back was broken. He remains hospitalized, and his recovery will likely be long.
Harris was born and raised in Rolling Fork. And his future was always synonymous with the town that is home. Perhaps he could relocate to Ridgeland or Madison, suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital city. But that felt like a daunting prospect.
On Sunday morning, he was able to find some of the mementos of his life. He found a laminated certificate with his sister’s name on it - an old school award - and a framed photo of himself from high school. He placed them in a laundry basket he was carrying around the block, collecting anything with a semblance of his home. A green bag sat at the top. That was the bag he and his mother would chuck spare coins in.
Friends thought of her as the “life of the party,” Harris recalled, and he regretted that she was the one who died in the storm, not him.
“I don’t feel nothing. I’m empty,” he said. “I came home to no home. Mom is gone. House is gone. Everything is gone.”
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