Storytelling

Memphis Commercial Appeal/USA Today

"The fight that you put in to do it is worth it," Jessica Wester said of buying a home as a single, working-class mom, making around $12.50 an hour. For Wester, home ownership meant the ability to move her children from a hectic apartment complex to a quiet street of affordable houses, built by the non-profit Habitat for Humanity which extends zero-interest mortgages.

"You see your kids. They're smiling. My babies are so happy ," she said, of the first neighborhood where her children can safely ride their bikes.

But with a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week trucking terminal set to occupy 60 acres in the field across the street from her backyard, Wester's prior safety concerns have been replaced with new worries.

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg

Memphis Commerical Appeal/USA Today

Sitting in her living room, at a table bearing boxes of public records on raw sewage leaks and utilities in her community, 48-year-old Cassandra Meyer paused to remember what Lakeshore Estates was like growing up.

In what began in the '60s as a retirement community, where she was raised by her grandparents, Meyer recalled spilling off her school bus every day to a grilled cheese cooked by her grandmother, followed by the rambunctious play of a childhood spent outdoors.

“It was just like any other neighborhood, only we lived in trailers,” she said.

“You could play in the parks. You could go fishing,” Meyer said of Lakeshore’s namesake.

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg

USA Today

For Kimberly Pearson and other families from southwest Memphis, the movement gaining momentum against the Byhalia Connection is about much more than a pipeline — or any one of the major sources of air pollution encircling the area her family has long called home.

"It always seems like it's assumed we don't care and that is deplorable," she said. "What we feel about our homes, about our people, about our generations...it's invaluable," said Pearson, a teacher at Central High School who, along with her husband, was born and raised in Westwood. 

The pair started their family in the neighborhood and later moved while pursuing undergraduate and advanced degrees. But to Westwood they always return, to homes where their siblings live, passed on by the hard work of their parents and the elders that came before them.

Over the years they've seen industry rise and community investment decline in the area. "It makes me so upset because it keeps happening," Pearson said.

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg

Memphis Commercial Appeal/USA Today

Standing amid the six small tents he's pitched and begun to waterproof, Reginald "Reggie" McGregor Sr. explained why he's so stalwart in providing what he can to those without shelter. He experienced homelessness himself, in the wake of a divorce.

"I got twisted around and it just threw my life into a tailspin," he said. McGregor ended up staying on the opposite side of town from his job at the time. And transit woes translated into employment issues, he recalled.

He's now back on his feet, working carpentry jobs two days a week — and spending most of his time, at 59, as part of the Urban Bicycle Food Ministry. 

"I do it rain, sleet or snow," he said of the rounds he makes by bike across the city, talking with people who have no shelter about their needs.

"I've seen a lot of suffering," he said. "It's been so cold here lately, we should try to get those people off the street. They've been in some tight spots lately, with the weather." 

As for what keeps him out on his bike despite the conditions, McGregor said that's simple: "So somebody can have hope." 

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg

Memphis Commerical Appeal/USA Today

When 59-year-old Dorothy Ross and her children and grandchildren get to remembering their old house in North Memphis, they start finishing each others' sentences, tumbling from one memory to the next.

There was the Fourth of July Ross put a rented water slide and bouncy castle in the empty field across the street, for the kids and neighboring relatives, said Angelo, 12.

There was the entire room and bathroom his grandmother had added to the back of their previously two-bedroom house, remembered Kendrick, 19.

A Memphis native whose parents lived around the block before they died, Ross had a method to the modest magic of her home.

A porch widened to hold bikes, a front yard made suitable for basketball, flowering bushes — each flourish reflected a simple plan, "just to keep them around," she said of the children. 

"I had it in my mind that I'm here to stay. So I did what I had to do to keep myself comfortable, to try to keep my kids comfortable, so I know where they at, keeping them from going somewhere else, playing. So, I decided to do all this to the house," she said.

But the house, along with its porch and patio, no longer exists. Neither does the neighborhood that used to surround it.

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg

Memphis Commerical Appeal/USA Today

Though neither Joe nor Everlyn Bryant knew it the day they met in the late '70s, while working on the railroad in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the future husband and wife had both grown up farming.

In nearby Allport, Arkansas, 120 miles southwest of Memphis, Joe Bryant Jr., now 78, had come of age farming with his dad, on land the family owned or leased, from the time he was 16 until he graduated from college. Joe Jr. then taught agriculture classes before going to work for the railroad, while continuing to farm on the side.

Everlyn, meanwhile, had started farm work much younger, as a 10-year-old member of a family of laborers who neither owned nor leased land. Everlyn credits farm work with instilling her sense of determination. "That was the making of who I am," she said of her youth in the fields and early exposure to exploitation. "When I was growing up and seeing those things happen, I was like, 'That’s not gonna be me.'"

Decades later, the couple had grown Joe Sr.'s farm from 250 acres to 2,500 — a scale  of operation that only 1 percent of Black farm operators reach, according to the most recently available Census of Agriculture figures.

But five years ago, the family faced a financial crisis after two consecutive years of farming soybeans that they say produced an inexplicably small yield.

Photo: Sarah Macaraeg