On the fifth day, when the workers painted her walls, Edna Mae Yates did what she has done every day this week: she picked up cans.Then she went to meet a president.
Im Edna Yates, yeah, she told Jimmy Carter, bobbing her head. Ive worked 12 years without missing a day.
Yates didnt mind that Carter didnt come to her western Anniston house this week. She posed for a picture with him in the Wellborn Manor neighborhood, where the other 35 houses had been built.
It was raining, and for the first time all week, Yates was without her straw hat. She wrapped a black trash bag around her head and held it under her chin. She looked very much like a nun.
She smiled when Carter hugged her. They could have been in high school together, though their lives took opposite routes to meet at this point. He is 78. She is 75.
But she dealt with him in the same way she dealt with the people who raised her roof. She seemed grateful, but not impressed that a man who had lived in the White House had founded the project that was building her gray house.
Hes fine, she said. I told him I aint met no strangers, only angels.
Carter ducked into a Suburban and was chauffeured away. Yates walked up a hill, a kind man holding a plastic sign over her head to serve as an umbrella.
She went back to western Anniston, back to the neighborhood that, of all the 36 new Habitat for Humanity homeowners this week, only she was willing to move to.
The workers wrote their names and addresses on a piece of paper. They took pictures with her on the porch.
Then Yates stood on 16th Street and looked at the place.
My house, she said.
And the roof was strong, and the windows were unbroken, and the shingles turned the rain away, and the yard was smooth, and the workers all left, and Edna Mae Yates, always a proud woman, was prouder the fifth day.
