In the South in the springtime, the sound of wind chimes can rattle your nerves.

This is Dixie Alley, tornado country, and what's in the clouds can be a threat.

On the night of March 24th, 2023, that threat became real for the small town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

There was this little red cell coming across Louisiana.

It was really tight and fire cracked red, and I told my employee, I said, "That's bad news right there."

It was like no warning.

It was just one minute notice.

I heard the freight train.

I said, "Oh no, I know what this is."

I thought it was making its way down my trailer.

I thought it was just eating up my trailer, getting to us, and I just started saying, "Lord, please protect my family.

Lord, please protect my family."

At that moment, you're just thinking about, "Am I going to live?

Am I going to survive?"

It's quiet, and it was dark, and it was so quiet and hard to be here with people calling for help.

This man walked up to me and said, "There's two dead bodies behind family dollar."

I'm Willie Bearden, Rolling Fork in the South Delta is my hometown.

I'm a writer and filmmaker, a storyteller.

This is where I heard and told my first stories.

This story is about what happened that Friday night and about what's happened since as Rolling Fork tries to rise up again from the disaster.

It was a Friday night, a few minutes after sunset, when the wedge of an F4 tornado with winds of 170 miles an hour touched down in a bean field west of town.

At the same time, Clark Secoy was working in his liquor store.

He said it was an average Friday night at first.

When I turned it over and said, "The guy's already talking, he said, Rolling Fork, you got two minutes."

And so the employee and myself and a customer went back in the back of the store and rode it out.

It just sounds crazy, but if you've ever driven through an automatic car wash and you go in and it starts and gets a little louder and a little louder and a little louder, then all of a sudden it's just going crazy and then it kind of backs off and backs off and it's got like driving out the carwash.

I never got afraid.

I guess, you know, it's going to be all right.

Levi Robinson was watching the news too.

I was on the phone talking to my pop and mama and I was watching the news on the TV and they said it was a big, dangerous tornado seven miles west of Rolling Fork.

And I called Pop and I said, "Pop, it's something serious ahead of y'all way."

And Pop said, "Yeah, it's going to blow like it always do."

I said, "No, Pop."

I said, "They said it's dangerous."

So when it got about three miles, I said, "Pop, you and mama are going to get in the bath tub."

And Pop said, Pop was standing at the door, And Pop said, "I don't see nothing."

And I said, "Then I heard mama say, "James, come get in the bath tub."

And then all of a sudden I heard mom and Pop hollering and he told me mom was stuck in the tub.

He couldn't get her out.

And then all of a sudden the phone went dead.

That was the longest 17 minutes of my life.

Tracy Hardin was at work that night at Chuck's Dairy Bar, the local landmark that she and her husband own on Highway 61.

And in that one minute time after that message, the lights blinked.

And luckily we had all headed to the back of the building because they were telling me that her mom had called.

I was letting them know my message from a daughter.

The lights blinked and I said, "Cooler."

My husband yanked the door and started throwing us in.

The lights went out.

We were being tossed in a little bit here and there.

And that was a scary moment and it just lasted a very short time.

But I feel like it was forever.

Charles Weissinger combed through the rubble of his law office one day when we were there.

That night, Charles had just finished giving his five-year-old grandson, Fisher, a bath.

Got him out of the tub right about eight o'clock.

And then I was trying to get his pajamas on.

And he was not interested at all.

He was running around naked laughing, and then something.

And then all of a sudden I heard this terrible noise and I started feeling real clammy.

And I knew something bad was happening.

Charles took his grandson to the safest place he could find, the stairway landing.

So I got him and got out on the landing, which was protected on three sides, and laid down on him.

And it blew through.

And Anne came in, came running to the foot of the stairs.

I told her, screaming.

I said, "Get down.

I got the baby.

Get down."

This was once the foundation of Undray Williams' home.

He represents Ward 4 on the town's board of aldermen.

It was directly in the path of the tornado.

In a matter of seconds, they were right up on me.

No warning, no nothing.

And next thing I know.

I heard boards flying.

I was like, it was like angels lifted me up off the ground and slowly, it was like slow motion.

And the next thing I know I was in the tub.

Natalie Perkins is the editor of Rolling Fork's weekly newspaper, the Deer Creek Pilot.

She's also second in command of the county's emergency management team.

That Friday night, Natalie was at her daughter's prom.

One of the parents came in and said that a tornado had hit Rolling Fork and his son was trapped in his house.

And I looked at my daughter and said, "I have to go to work."

And I didn't see her for two days after that.

Perkins immediately raced back to Rolling Fork, checked on the newspaper office, and retrieved her emergency radio.

- Standing there in that parking lot and listening to the gas hissing, I mean, it was just a roar of gas hissing, and people and trucks, and this man walked up to me and said, there's two dead bodies behind Family Dollar.

And I think at that moment, it just, it really hit me that my town was gone, devastated.

In the harsh light of sunrise on Saturday, the damage was clear.

13 people were dead, most of them in the mobile home park right behind Chuck's.

Another died later.

Everything was disrupted, including electrical power and gas.

The giant white water tower in the middle of town had been knocked down by the tornado, dumping 150,000 gallons of water.

This is the front of the house.

Right there where that hole is would be our front steps.

Randy Scott is Rolling Fork's Public Works director.

He's responsible for the city's water and sewer systems.

That night, he was at home with an eye on the threatening weather.

I had on sleeping pajamas a t-shirt and Crocs.

Scott decided to make the quick drive to check on his 84-year-old mother.

The moment I turn into the driveway, it begins to really swirl bad.

And I'm thinking I might try getting out and getting inside.

I wouldn't have made it because it hit like a second later.

At that moment, you're just thinking about, am I going to live?

Am I going to survive?

Scott immediately turned back to his own home.

This time, the drive took almost an hour.

I started trying to come back through town.

Every light pole in town was down.

Every tree was across the road.

And I make it all the way to where I usually check the water tower and the tower's gone.

He was able to reach his wife, Lisa.

I slept about two hours that night, got back up.

And then that's when I started trying to assess where the city was with the water and the sewer because you don't know really how bad things are if you can even fix it good enough for people to stay.

Except for generators, the power was out.

Gas had been shut off.

With the help of a friend and the Mississippi Rural Water Association, they went to work on restoring the water supply.

We got that side of town with water at least running in their faucets.

There was no tank to pump to.

But we had isolated the tank.

And so we had water, some water pressure, the next day after lunch.

With every kind of other catastrophe, like a ice storm or whatever, you pretty much can know what you've got to fix.

With a tornado, you just got to get there and see what's left and try to work with the pieces and parts, the puzzle that's left.

It's not like you get to choose what you're getting up.

Those six lift stations and those three wells are essential to people being able to keep water pressure and not have sewage back up in their house.

That Friday night, Randy Scott had understood he had to make a choice, try and salvage his family's belongings or help his community.

You don't know that ever in your life you're going to be put in that position.

But when it happens, you know it's you.

You know you're the only one.

You're the only one that can do the job that has got to be done.

Monday morning, I gathered my gear named South down Highway 61.

I had to see it for myself.

I know Rolling Fork like the back of my hand, but I was not prepared for the reality.

And look, just a trailer back there just rolled up.

God.

Half the houses in town were damaged to the point that now they're gone.

The police department, the post office, city hall, the library, and on and on.

The courthouse and the hospital had to close temporarily.

The Episcopal Church, the Chapel of the Cross, was shattered.

It was a centerpiece in the community for almost 100 years.

This is downtown Rolling Fork, or what's left of it.

Not long after the storm, the old buildings around the courthouse were demolished.

There wasn't much business in this part of town anyway.

And many of the buildings were crumbling.

Not long ago, I came across some old home movies from 1962 and 63.

I was in this crowd.

Watching as the high school band and the car carrying the homecoming queen passed through the square.

These movies are window not just into the past, but into a different world.

That Rolling Fork was a place where I knew almost everybody and they knew me.

Everything was a bicycle ride away.

The high school football team back then called the Colonels, was a powerhouse in the Delta when I played.

But change was taking place.

School integration had begun and by 1969 the high school football team had two black players.

By the late 60s many African Americans had already begun to leave the Delta for good and not just Rolling Fork.

Economics was part of it.

Agriculture was changing.

In the cotton and soybean fields machines were replacing farm hands.

Many Black people found more opportunity elsewhere.

And the racism they faced in the Delta was always a factor.

In Rolling Fork, as in the rest of Mississippi, black and white continued to live side by side but not together.

We all have a part to play.

And no matter how large or how small, it's still a part.

And so for the rebirth and revival of Rolling Fork is gonna require everybody making his or her contribution to that effort.

- Congressman Benny Thompson knows the Delta about as well as anyone.

He's represented the area in Washington for more than 30 years.

I talked with the Congressman via Zoom from his office in the Capitol.

He went to Rolling Fork immediately that Friday night and he prevailed on President Biden to visit and to make a commitment to Rolling Fork.

- So we walked the streets with the president.

We talked to some people.

We talked to local elected officials.

We talked to first responders.

And so with that came an enhanced response.

- In early April, the Congressman held a meeting to hear directly from his constituents.

- But for those nine individuals who lived in the trailer area, they were there because they couldn't afford any other place to go.

- I guess what you're telling me is that with the federal money comes a lot of things that you just can't snap your fingers and fix.

- You know, you have all these resident experts who've not talked with a soul, but they know everything.

- Yeah.

- Because they say, well, I talked to FEMA or I talked to somebody in the Governor's office.

Well, I'm not doubting it.

It's just that those are not the people who are managing this disaster.

And so the paperwork is enormous.

You have to really bring in organizations or individuals who do this for a living.

Every member of the board of alderman has been on the firing line from the public standpoint because we have residents, the people who are living in Greenville, there are people living in Vicksburg and they want to come home and you can't blame them.

Their children need to go to school, but there's nowhere... you can't bring them when you don't have the housing.

Or we can access the temporary housing, but we need to have it in a place that meets the standards for FEMA, not the standards for Rolling Fork.

You could put it anywhere and you meet the standards of Rolling Fork cause the standards didn't exist.

What is the future for a small town like Rolling Fork?

Well, the future is that that is a federal government who's committed to building that community back, building it back better than what it was before the storm.

After that, it's up to the local leadership to decide what Rolling Fork will look like after they've redone the hospital, after they've redone the school, they elevated water tank, all the other public buildings and the housing infrastructure.

The challenge is Rolling Fork will never have the robust manufacturing that they long for, because given a choice, manufacturing will go to Greenville or Vickburg, but Rolling Fork can still be a nice place to live.

If you have a good school system, a good healthcare system, there's no reason that we can't have adequate streets, adequate housing, adequate healthcare, adequate education to go along with it.

As you know, Rolling Fork was really hit, and you've been there and all of the things you remember about it, for the most part, 75% of it is gone.

And so I tell the mayor and the alderman and the supervisors, but you can build back better.

So we can rebuild a fire station, we can rebuild the city hall, the police station, the library, the post office, everything.

We can put certain things back in a better situation.

And as we do it, we can hire local people to do a lot of the work.

But at some point, when we pass the the keys back to you, Rolling Fork it will be in a better place.

But then it becomes the city father's and mother's responsibility from that day forward.

- After the tornado, help began to pour in immediately.

By Saturday morning, television crews began showing the world what had happened.

Another group was organized by the Farm Bureau Insurance Company, which put out a call for volunteers in the Jackson office.

We put out a sign up list on Friday at about four o'clock in ten minutes for 30 slots to be filled.

So people are really excited and eager to help in any kind of way.

The gym at the Sharky Issaquena Academy quickly became a distribution point.

We have groups that are making different boxes.

So they're making food boxes, hygiene boxes, cleaning supplies, bathroom supplies, all those things.

Between 400 and 800 people were displaced.

Many were forced to live temporarily in hotels across the lower Delta.

Alderman Undray Williams was one of them.

In Greenville, we drove with him to meet with his constituents, Michelle Larry and her Aunt Andrea and Uncle MJ Chris.

59 days after that conversation, we went back and visited with Michelle's aunt, Andrea, and her hotel neighbor, Cheryl Andrews.

By this time, they were frustrated and struggling.

We walked out with nothing but what we had on the bare feet.

I prayed our way out of that thing.

God took us through this storm, but He didn't bring us in this storm and let us live to be sabotaged.

We have nowhere to go.

I would love to be a resident of Rolling Fork, but it's nowhere for me to go.

Nowhere.

There's no houses to rent.

We don't qualify for a FEMA home, We don't qualify for a Samaritan's Purse.

Cheryl Andrews and Andrea are longtime friends.

After the tornado, they found themselves two doors down in the motel.

I have no choice.

My home is there.

Yeah, I mean, we have a home that's been placed there.

So yeah, we will be going back.

It's a hard choice.

I said I didn't want to go, but I talked to the Lord and I told Him, "Lord, whatever your will is for me, I'll do it.

So for Samaritan's Purse to donate us a mobile home in that exact same spot, that was my answer.

So I'm going to be obedient and go back, even though I don't want to, but I'm going to trust the process.

I was a renter.

That's the only thing I can say.

Sixty-something percent of people in Rolling Fork were renters.

That's all I can say.

I was a renter.

So if you don't own a house and you don't have anything to come back and rebuild with, you don't have anything.

If you don't have renter insurance or whatever, the property insurance on the stuff inside of your home is just like you're just left out in the cold.

Did you have insurance of any sort?

No insurance at all.

None.

Back in Rolling Fork, residents were impatient and angry over the slow pace of recovery, the shortage of replacement housing, and a lack of communication.

A crowd of protesters showed up on a Tuesday at the temporary City Hall, demanding answers from Mayor Eldridge Walker.

I'm here today because I'm tired of nothing happening with our city buildings.

Our city buildings are horrible and it seems like no progress.

And this meeting today, the board should have met today and it's a no-show.

They canceled it again.

We don't have anything.

We never received anything from the city.

They never came and check on us at the motel.

They don't care.

So if they don't care, we're going to make sure that we're heard.

Rebuilding the City of Rolling Fork, it is a partnership with all of us.

Later that same week, the mayor addressed a meeting at the Anguilla Middle School, along with the head of the hospital, the emergency management team and others.

Residents asked the important questions.

What about the schools and housing?

We talked with Janet Barnes, who had been so irate earlier in the week outside City Hall.

Well, it was very informative on some level, but they didn't give out the right information as to what the city's doing.

The mayor said that Rolling Fork is being what he's doing in Rolling Fork, but yet still, we don't see what he's doing.

And I think the audience realizes it's going to take time.

It's going to take time for every little project or program to take effect.

And we all just got to sit tight.

We're doing all we can to make these things happen.

Everybody's working.

And the community, now I think they see that.

So where's Rolling Fork now, months after the storm?

And I know I understand their frustration that everybody's having.

I'm frustrated.

Undray Williams represents Ward 4 on the Rolling Fork Board of Aldermen.

This is some first that devastated our city.

And we're not pros at this.

We never had to deal with the first two weeks it was mayhem here because everybody was in shock and traumatized.

Even us.

We're humans.

We had three of us, three Aldermen, we lost everything.

Completely destroyed.

I'm still optimistic that it's going to work out in the long run.

It's just not as quick as I want it to be.

Charles Weissinger is the county prosecutor, and he served in the state legislature.

He looks at the community hospital as the essential component to any comeback.

I think that we'll have a rebuilt hospital, but without it, turn out the light.

I mean, that 140 jobs that you were in there, some of the better paid jobs in the community would be gone.

God is going to restore what I have.

God is going to restore what my neighbor have.

Michelle Larry was one of those displaced by the tornado.

We all need to come together, black and white, all colors, us coming together to be able to make Roling Fork great again.

Because if not, it's going to fall and it's going to go.

It's going to be just a place that's just remembered as.

"Oh, this used to be Rolling Fork."

I don't want it to be like that.

Our people are resilient and strong for the most part, and I know that a lot of them are determined to build back.

Natalie Perkins is the newspaper editor.

My biggest concern now is that we will lose people and we'll lose businesses.

And we're already so small that we can't.

I'm afraid of what five years down the road holds for Rolling Fork.

I mean, honestly, I am.

And I think that's a concern that everybody has.

There are no easy answers for Rolling Fork.

People's hopes and prayers, their differing perceptions of the same information they hear, and their prejudices, all dictate how they feel about what's happened and what's going to happen.

Tragedies like this are all too common now.

They're in and out of the news in a matter of days.

But the people who have to live through the realities of either building back or simply going somewhere else have some hard decisions to make.

And that begs the question, what makes a place home?

In part two of our story, we'll explore what's working and what isn't.

But these are stories of real people operating under some tough circumstances.

And maybe, just maybe, we'll come away with a better understanding of each other and why this little town, this speck on the map, is important not just to the people who live here, but to the world.