SIDON, Mississippi — Malissa Whitehead is known for making tea cakes and blueberry pies during the holidays — but as Christmas approaches, she’s uneasy about baking anything in the house she’s lived in for 40 years.
The kitchen ceiling wood is peeling, revealing small holes and chipped paint. On the outside, the roof is covered with black plastic tarp. It leaks during every storm.
When a tornado swept through Sidon, Mississippi, more than a decade ago, Whitehead’s home was among the casualties. Inside, the walls are still exposed and the cracks reveal the home’s rocky foundation. In every room, the unstable floors, boarded up with wood, creak and sink with every step. The 61-year-old works two jobs and only makes $1,200 a month, and has spent thousands of dollars on costly repairs that don’t seem to last.
Outside Whitehead’s home, storm damage from a tornado more than 10 years ago is still evident. (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)
One day soon, she fears the house will collapse while she’s in it.
“My neighbor said, ‘Y’all better come out there before that house fall on you.’ That scared me even more because it looks like it’s split open,” Whitehead told Capital B.
For many Black families, homeownership represents the American dream and a pathway to generational wealth — but for some, like Whitehead, that dream has become a prolonged struggle for survival.
For at least 10 years, she has tried to get housing grants through her local government, written letters to state and congressional leaders, and even reached out to celebrities to no avail. She said she reached out to Oprah Winfrey, Steve Harvey, Ellen DeGeneres, and the reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. She also tagged Rickey Smiley, Tyler Perry, and Morgan Freeman in Facebook posts. Now, she faces an agonizing choice: let it all go or be displaced. Determined not to leave the place she calls home, where her children, sister, and mother live, she is turning to her community, asking for help to rebuild and hold on to what remains of her American dream.
Across the tracks, where Whitehead lives, many of the homes are dilapidated in Sidon, a majority-Black town of 300 people south of Greenwood. As she rides past a row of houses, she points at the ones that are boarded up one by one. People still live there.
In rural areas, households are taking home lower wages than their more affluent neighbors and live in persistent poverty counties, or places with a long history of high poverty.
“Research suggests people living in high poverty areas experience significant barriers to well-being whether or not they’re poor themselves,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “The longer poverty exists in an area, the more likely the community lacks adequate infrastructure and support services.”
Whitehead’s co-worker, Brandice Brown-Williams, a teacher at Amanda Elzy High School in Greenwood, created a GoFundMe for her, which has raised $6,521. She also published a video of the unsafe housing conditions, which has 2,300 views and 1,000 shares. After learning of Whitehead’s quality of life earlier this year, Brown-Williams knew more needed to be done than writing letters to elected officials to get immediate help.
But, Whitehead said she felt ashamed to ask others for support. It gave her anxiety and made her physically ill, she said. Until her pastor encouraged her to do it.
“He said, ‘Whitehead, I see your house. You’re not begging.’ I thought it’d be begging,” she said. “When I got that confirmation from him, then that’s what made me feel much better. When people I saw started embracing me, and praying for me, that’s what lifted me up.”
Brown-Williams acknowledged Whitehead’s courage to speak out.
“This is one of our elders, who’s working two jobs to pay her bills and is scared to sleep in her own home at night,” Brown-Williams said. “We still have a great number of people in our community that are living below the poverty line in 2025 that work. That’s an issue.”
The other side of homeownership
Malissa Whitehead gives a tour of her house. (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)
By the time the straight-line winds hit Mississippi in 2011, Whitehead had no home insurance.
A super outbreak of tornadoes spread across the Southeast, killing more than 320 people and injuring more than 3,200 others. In Mississippi, the disaster resulted in 30 injuries and a fatality. The state received two of the four EF5 tornadoes, the highest category on the scale used to rate tornado intensity.
The winds, running at 80 mph, snapped trees and tore off shingles and roofs on homes and churches in Leflore County, where Sidon is located. When the winds hit Sidon, it uprooted and snapped a couple dozen trees – some falling on houses – as it moved to the northeast.
One of those homes belonged to Whitehead.
The front porch fell in and the foundation cracked, she said. She recalled receiving about $2,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and a few repairs, but it didn’t help much. She has tried to get assistance from the town government in the past, but couldn’t because her sister Johnnie Neal was the mayor.
In the absence of funding, Whitehead has tried to keep her house from falling — using metal blocks here and boards there to sturdy the foundation. She’s endured cold winter nights, and “creepy crawlers” roaming around her home. One day she found two possums in her bedroom.
She’s not the only one enduring such living conditions.
Many families are living in homes without floors and are literally walking on the ground, said Neal, who served as mayor for 16 years.
During her tenure, which ended this year, it’s been more difficult to improve housing, she said. The town has received some grant money to build or rehabilitate homes, but it hasn’t been enough.
Oftentimes, the grants — from Mississippi Home Corp. or the United States Department of Agriculture — aren’t guaranteed. Some years, they’d receive enough to improve one or two homes. Other times, they didn’t get approved because funding may not be available that year or due to the competitiveness of the grants, which puts small towns at a disadvantage.
She said she’s sounded the alarm to the grant providers, but they responded with: “Good application, but we just didn’t have enough money.”
“It just broke me down. I would be crying for the town because families need [help],” Neal said in a phone call. “Sometimes people don’t see this firsthand. They don’t have a clue how they are living. It’s heartbreaking.”
Of the more than 300 persistent poverty counties in the U.S., 86% were rural and concentrated in poor areas, including the Mississippi Delta, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It is more dire for Black and Native rural residents. In Sidon, which is situated in the Delta, about 25% of people live below the poverty line and the median income is $15,000.
The residents search nearby cities to find employment.
Only 300 people live in Sidon, Mississippi, alongside a post office, a community center, and a few churches. (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)
Today in Sidon, there’s only a post office, a community center, and a few churches in town. Although there are recent reports of Delta Grain, a grain elevator and merchandiser, expanding to the town, it won’t be enough to lift the residents out of poverty.
“There’s a model that, if you follow it, you’ll be successful. You matriculate through school, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a job, you own a home, you raise a family, you retire,” Brown-Williams said. “That model is perfectly fine, but let’s be real, that’s not realistic for Black folks in the Delta.”
Since 2000, Whitehead has worked full time at her alma mater Amanda Elzy High School, shuffling from working in the classroom to now an office assistant. She also works a part-time job at a local car dealership.
She always dreamed of opening a day care center, even graduating from Mississippi Valley State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration with a concentration in organizational management in 2022.
But, she’s still struggling.
Whether you work or rely on government benefits, there is still a need for outside help to maintain your home, Neal added.
“It only takes one catastrophe to come in and put you behind. How do I pay for this roof? Or how do I feed my family? Or how do I go back and forth to work?” she said. “I hope that people realize that there is a great need — not only in the Mississippi Delta — for a better economic system and more available help for those who are trying to help themselves.”
Whitehead isn’t focusing her energy on what her home lacks.
Despite the challenges, she’s built her life there and doesn’t want to give up her home, plot of land, or the proximity to her family. Many people have offered to move her someplace else. One person offered her a trailer in the nearby city of Lexington. She doesn’t have the money to pay a mortgage or rent. She’d rather build something new on her land.
She’s hoping national attention on her story will not only help her, but her entire community.
“Maybe, when I get blessed for a house, maybe somebody else might see that and come out and then look at the town, and then they’ll see that all it needs, fixing it up and working to help,” she said.
She added: “I got a vision,” Whitehead said of rebuilding her home. “I just hope it comes to pass.”