Moss Point vows better future one year after tornado’s wrath. ‘We chose to stand up.’

The deacon is home again. Ernest Watson rocked in his porch chair and kept smiling on Tuesday, because even though his church is gone and his city is still healing, he is back where he has always lived one long year after a tornado tore through Moss Point and pounded his old house to pieces.

“Thank God,” Watson, 96, said as he waved to his neighbors and looked out at the empty lot where his First Missionary Baptist Church once stood. “I’m home at last.”

Life is back to normal for many in the Mississippi Coast city after a 130 miles-per-hour tornado cut a two mile path of destruction last summer through the high school, Main Street, Watson’s church and his neighborhood. The storm destroyed 36 homes and hurt the soul of Moss Point, whose residents have cried and rebuilt, struggled but stuck together, and taken the twister as a test from which they say they will emerge stronger than ever.

But good things move slow, they said, and signs of progress mix with sorrow. Where a car was crushed: an empty parking lot. Where a church once stood: dirt. Where the storm shattered glass and sent eight people praying for life behind a bank staircase: a groundbreaking ceremony, and plans to rebuild.

“Every disaster is an opportunity,” Mayor Billy Knight said Tuesday from his City Hall office, where, to make the message stick, he has hung sign after sign with a rallying cry: Believe.

He said houses will be built stronger. The new bank will be more electronically friendly. Plans for new riverfront development with apartments and businesses will thrust new energy into the tax structure.

And the people of Moss Point have come together, said Curley Clark, president of the Moss Point-Jackson County NAACP branch, who worships at First Missionary Baptist Church. “Black and white, poor and rich, male and female,” he said, “in a joint effort to hold the community together and make sure it endures.”

Take the churches, Clark said. First Missionary Baptist Church, which has a mostly Black congregation, is gone. First Baptist Church, with a mostly white congregation, remains. And so for months, it has welcomed the First Missionary Baptist Church and the congregations have held back to back services.

Still, some people are “trying to put the pieces of their life back together,” said the Rev. Kevin Henry, the pastor at First Missionary Baptist Church. The paperwork required for repairs has been a struggle for some older residents, Henry said. An abandoned building on Main Street still has no roof. The Sonic restaurant is serving, but there is no sign where it once welcomed customers in block letters. The plastic that covers one house’s taped-up windows flutters in the breeze.

But the city is determined. Last week, the Moss Point Alumnae Chapter of the sorority Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. presented $10,000 worth of appliances, electronics, gift cards and cash to those who needed it most.

“I don’t know if I have been hugged and kissed so much since before COVID,” Angela Haynes, the chapter’s president, said of the response to the donations. Still, she said, some people could only take money. They had no homes for the household goods.

But like the Mayor, many citizens say they believe. They believe in the future of a new church, which Henry said is in the final stages of design and will one day sit across the street from Watson’s new house, just as it always did. Residents are cleaning up their yards and houses. The city is tearing down old homes whose owners have not returned to pick them up. The change, like the demolition of the old Recreation Center to make way for new riverfront development, is hard for some to stomach. But many seem enthusiastic, Henry said.

“We had an opportunity to be down on ourselves,” he said, “to indulge in the devastation. We chose not to do that. We chose to stand up.”

And Watson is home, in a new build painted a dusk blue of his wife’s choosing. Volunteers built it on the same ground as his old place, where he said he had lived for 75 years.

All his furniture is new, because the storm and the hole it left in place of his roof let mold take hold. But now, as he waits on the porch for the neighborhood to return, the memory of that day stays strong, the heartbreak is softer.

He waved goodbye as he rocked there, same as ever.

This story was originally published June 19, 2024 at 6:00 AM.