TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/103089/10308900.057

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.3 KB | 144 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 25

Canton, Mississippi

A New Kind of Moving Day


A determined nun helps the poor by relocating houses

By Daniel S. Levy


    Last year, after fire destroyed their home outside Canton,
Miss., Willie Anderson and seven of her children moved into a
rented shack. The place was a horror, with no electricity or
running water, rotting walls papered with newsprint, and gaping
holes in the tin roof that allowed the rain to pour through.
"Once a snake came up under the stove, and we got big rats in
there all the time," recalled Anderson, 47, a big, strapping
woman in a flowered blouse. "I couldn't wait to get away."

    The family's ordeal finally ended in August, when a trailer
truck carrying a hip-roofed house with yellow shingles pulled
up on the site of Anderson's burned-out home. "This house," she
boasts, "won't have no holes like the other one."

    Anderson's new home was donated by a church in nearby Pearl
to a nonprofit organization called MadCAAP -- short for Madison
Countians Allied Against Poverty -- which helps poor people in
one of the poorest parts of the nation. Financed solely by
donations and grants, MadCAAP takes old wood-frame buildings
that local communities and private owners no longer need and
hauls them to new sites. There volunteers from local churches
and schools join with families that have been aided in the past
to install wiring, put up paneling and dig septic tanks. Over
the past six years MadCAAP has recycled old houses for 70
families in and around Canton (pop. 11,500), a
courthouse-squared town 20 miles north of Jackson. MadCAAP's
aim, according to its unflappable founder and director, Sister
Grace Mary McGuire, 57, is to "try and break the cycle of
poverty by helping one family at a time."

    Among its recipients is Johnnie Murry, who used to live
with her husband and 15 children in a two-room trailer. In 1984
MadCAAP brought a four-bedroom house to Murry's farm. Now white
curtains hang from the windows and stuffed animals, high school
banners and framed graduation pictures decorate the wood-paneled
walls. "We can sleep better now," says Murry. "I am grateful
that I have a place to cook, a table to feed my family at and
a place for me to rest later."

    For Sister Grace, a conservatively dressed woman with
gentle blue eyes and short brown hair, helping the poor has been
a lifelong ambition. As a child growing up in New York City,
she wanted to aid leprosy sufferers in India. She never made it
to Asia, but in 1973 her Philadelphia-based religious order,
Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, sent her to
the Deep South. "I never dreamed that I'd be working with septic
tanks, wiring, let alone moving houses," she says, "but when
people are poor and depressed, you want to do anything you can
to uplift them."

    Moving a house is a time-consuming affair. The morning that
Willie Anderson's home is delivered begins with workers
hoisting the house's concrete steps onto a pickup truck while
Anderson and her children pile broken bricks and stack cut wood.
Clearance for the move requires approval from a slew of
bureaucrats, and Walter Malone, 52, a professional house mover
who has completed 30 jobs for Sister Grace, still has a few
final forms to sign and fees to pay. "The biggest difficulty is
the paperwork," he says, pointing to a glove compartment crammed
full of documents. "I got so much paperwork on this thing that
if anyone stops me, it will take me 15 minutes just to find it."

    After a trip to Pearl city hall to write one last check,
Malone heads back to the site. The Mississippi Power & Light man
is already there, and a Pearl police officer stops by to inform
Malone that the move will be delayed until after a funeral
passes through town. Malone looks annoyed. He kicks some sod,
readjusts his blue Malone House Moving cap and struts over to
the rig to recheck the house's support system.

    At 11 a.m. the police return, and Malone slowly trucks the
house from the site, pulling past the Pearl Grocery Mart and
onto Route 80. The police escort halts traffic as Malone's son
Greg leads the caravan in an attention-grabbing red-bannered
pickup. Next come the police, a Mississippi Power & Light crew
and Sister Grace, who occasionally slows down to take a picture.
Bringing up the rear is Otis Towner at the wheel of the pickup
carrying the steps. With hazard lights blinking, the procession
crawls past the local U-Haul dealership, gas stations and the
post office. Impatient drivers trail behind, and kids on
bicycles stop to gaze at the rolling house.

    As the line snakes out of Pearl, the row of cars picks up
speed, and the cab's chimney spouts black smoke that swirls
around the head of Steve Harris, who is kneeling on the house's
gray-green roof and raising low-hanging telephone wires. The
town is left behind, and the landscape shifts to fields of
cotton and soybean. As he approaches the Ross R. Barnett
Reservoir, Malone pulls a lever on the floor, cranking a cable
that raises the house an extra foot so it just barely clears the
side railings. "I've been doing this for 20 years, so I know
what will go and where it will go," he boasts. The house fills
both lanes and knocks into a speed-limit sign, shattering two
back windowpanes. Shelton Kelly walks ahead, bending back or
briefly yanking out a few signs in order to make room for the
wide load. Oncoming traffic generally gives way, yet one van
driver insists on trying to squeeze by.

    "Move out of the way. Damn fool!" Malone hollers out the
window. "Don't you see I'm moving a house?"

    The other driver yells back over the incessant barking of
his bird dog, "I can't get over any more."

    "Well, we're in a hell of a shape if you can't get over any
more," Malone replies, " 'cause I surely can't."

    Eventually, the driver maneuvers past the house. "He saw me
coming," Malone snarls, as he hunches over the wheel. "These
two-lane highways are mighty aggravating when I got a wide
load."

    Fortunately, traffic around Canton is light, and the drive
through town and up to Anderson's land proceeds without delay.
Malone pulls the truck through an opening in the bushes and
turns the rig around in front of the burned remains of the old
house. "I think you should move it a little more away from the
power line," the Mississippi Power & Light man warns Malone as
he checks the house's positioning. Towner calls Anderson over
to the front. "Do you like it here?" he asks. She looks up and
down the building's length and along its sides and then responds
with a simple yes.

    "This house is one of the best we've gotten," Sister Grace
says as she appraises the building. "It is everyone working
together that makes this happen. That is love of neighbor.
Little by little you take each family and do what you can."

    Now happily settled, Anderson is burbling with joy. "This
house is simply wonderful." She beams. "This is the first time
I ever had a bathroom, and I am going to have a beautiful flower
yard. The children also stay at home now. I don't have to worry
about them being out all the time of night." Because of MadCAAP,
the old yellow house has become a home.