The roads are brown with mud of recent rain, the curbs are strewn with trash, the T-shirts are stiff with sweat, and many thousands of knuckles are caulked with dirt, with paint, with blood. Someone who didn’t know better would call it a mess — someone who didn’t know that 36 sets of new keys shine.
Together, those keys give 90 Calhoun County residents a way out of houses that have denied them security, health and rest. They unlock the doors to sturdy, handsome new homes.
Friday ended an event for humanity, the cooperation and significance of which this part of Alabama may never see again.
Consider what happened in a week:
- Almost 3,000 people, 1,200 coming from outside the state, took vacations to labor for strangers.
- A former U.S. president, nearly 80 years old, got as sore and dirty as everyone else.
- An old, dilapidated neighborhood was revitalized as another neighborhood was built from scratch.
- About 5 percent of the county’s substandard housing was eradicated in a kick-start of an effort to eliminate all substandard housing in the area by 2020.
The Jimmy Carter Work Project, the annual gem of Habitat for Humanity’s worldwide affordable homebuilding crusade, did more than import a measure of goodness, and then leave town.
It put a sense of hope in the weak. It put a sense of urgency in the comfortable. It taught secretaries how to hammer and bankers how to stoop. It showed Anniston, whose laundry list of problems has become the material of national media broadcasts and low-blow comedy shows, how to help herself.
“And it won’t end tomorrow,” said Anniston Mayor Chip Howell.
An apple tree
Every day since November, when Misty Howell qualified for a Carter Project home, her 5-year-old Caleb has come home from school holding a similar drawing of how he wants his new house to look. Some are tall and skinny. Some are brick and fat. Some have dogs in the yard.
An apple tree is the only feature of the drawings that has not changed.
Friday afternoon, Caleb saw his new house for the first time. The yard was big and open, and he could not decide where the tree should go. But next week, Habitat workers will plant it. Perhaps in a few years the boy will climb it.
“I’ve never lived in a house,” Caleb’s mother said. They have been staying in a trailer in Ohatchee. “I’m so ready. I cut my phone and my cable off last week.”
The Howells probably will not move into their new home — a white, three-bedroom place — until July. The 35 homes that were built this week in Wellborn Manor are essentially finished, but after the armies of volunteers leave today, the last few steps will take a bit longer.
By Friday morning, four days after building began, every house had a roof, a porch, and siding. Most had painted interiors, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, ceiling fans and fresh sod covering their yards.
Some obstacles to utter completion of the project were unavoidable. Monday night, several of the electric and plumbing contractors who were supposed to work till dawn didn’t show up. Wednesday afternoon, a lot of the linoleum floor installers were absent. And Friday’s rain washed out the possibility of doing any outdoor work.
Still, the adrenaline of the event had been enough to keep Lynn Parris charged throughout the week. The 22-year-old director of construction rested only for a few hours during the project. Monday night, he never slept.
Asked if he would have done anything different, he said, “Yep, would have started a year earlier.”
Carter announced a year and a half ago that Anniston would be the primary site of the 2003 project. Home plans and prep work were not begun until February.
Carter himself went from house to house Friday morning, giving a Bible and a hug to each homeowner.
“He asked me if we accepted the house, if we were satisfied with it,” said LaKeitha Jones, 35. “I told him of course we were.”
Jones watched her house go up from a streetside seat this week. She lived in a nice home when she was a child, but her car has been stolen twice from the place she currently rents. She is single, has one daughter, and is five months pregnant.
“When you grow up in a house that you own, to me that means family,” she said.
Feel like shoutin’
Lucy S. Jemison will not need to keep an umbrella by her stove anymore. When it rained, she used to hold it with one hand and stir her food with the other.
Her western Anniston home was among more than 50 that were renovated this week as part of the Carter Project. She got screens put on her front porch and a new roof over her kitchen.
The neighborhood, which has deteriorated under a steady, 20-plus-year reign of crime and neglect, feels different. Gone are 30 abandoned houses where people used to buy drugs and sex. Gone are the men on Murray Avenue who shouted profanities at Jemison, 85, when she walked to her mailbox. Gone, it seems, are some of the stigmas that surrounded the place.
“I’m so glad that the white people’s helping,” Jemison said. “I’m so proud of them I don’t know what to do.”
The nine-block area — from Cooper to Pine Avenue and from 15th to 18th Street — saw people of all colors and incomes work together to give houses paint, yards greenery and families pride.
“I’m telling you, man,” said Gus Orr, pastor of the refurbished Peace and Goodwill Baptist Church, “I almost feel like shoutin’.”
Fae DeeArman’s house received new vinyl siding, porch columns, windows and floors. As with all the people who got new houses or home improvements this week, Habitat gave DeeArman a no-interest loan for the project. She said the neighborhood needed the work.
“I got grandkids and they can come out here now and play on the street that I was raised on,” she said.
Mud and tears
Friday morning, before breakfast was served, a rainbow arched over the Wellborn Manor site. At lunch time, the sky rumbled and the rain fell. It was dark and mean, but the storm cleared quickly, having added a touch of coolness to an otherwise steamy week, just in time for its closure.
At 3 p.m., the streets that rang all week with the sounds of hammers and saws and beeping trucks fell quiet. Each crew gathered around those they had made into homeowners.
A crew leader with a plastic arm handed Frances Curry a set of keys to her house. She jingled them in the air, then wiped tears from her eyes.
“My mom’s just really happy,” said Rena Curry, 12.
Around the Wellborn Manor neighborhood, in which all of the houses are of similar size and design, marks of individuality already had emerged. One yard had a kidney-shaped flower bed, rimmed with rocks that volunteers had brought from the woods. Another’s porch rails were fanned like a sunny horizon. A muddy dog, chained to a sawhorse, lay on the sod.
There were no clean cars or fancy-dressed people on the muddy streets. People who needed baths, who may never see each other again, hugged and cried, their tears turning muddy. They wrote down addresses and put them in their muddy pockets.
The work of the Jimmy Carter Work Project was over.
The work for Calhoun County has just begun. About 1,400 substandard houses remain.
Leaving the neighborhood, people filed onto buses and headed to the ceremonial ending at Jacksonville State University.
Frances Curry was among the last to leave. She got her house, and her street, acquainted with her voice.
“Rena!” she called. “Where did you go? What did you do with my keys?”
Rena heard her from the curb.
“They’re in my pocket.”
