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Meanwhile, jobs are scarce, low paying and seasonal. For most of the year, | hundreds of families subsist on welfare: a single mother with one child gets $123 a month, a family of five, $370. For many the only available work is backbreaking minimum-wage jobs in the nearby cotton fields. Some older men, like John Henry Jackson, don't seem to do much but stand around drinking and swapping stories about the old days, when they worked on the farm and "followed some funky-ass mules all day long, smelled just like 'em and didn't get no money."
Inevitably, almost everyone who can escape from Lake Providence does so. "I'd rather shoot myself than stay here. It would be a wasted life," says Karva Henderson, who graduated from Lake Providence's high school in June. She plans to go to college and wants never to return.
The urge to flee is more urgent because staying behind often leads to tragedy. Such was the fate of Calvin Jones, who until last spring was one of Lake Providence's most promising young men. At 18, he was not only an honor student and a track and football star, but also a serious churchgoer who taught Sunday school and composed rap songs urging younger children to stay out of trouble. For Martin Luther King Day last year, his classmates and teachers chose him for keynote speaker. "I just talked about accomplishing your goals and not falling prey to society," Jones remembers. "I talked about the importance of having God in your life and the importance of getting your education. I told them to strive 110% for the goals that they want to accomplish, and don't become another victim."
Less than 48 hours later, Jones became another sad twist in the sorry history of Lake Providence. On the evening after his speech, Jones got together with Charles Reed, 19, a young man who was everything that Jones was not: a heavy boozer and drug user filled with sullen rage. Reed had never liked his do-gooder schoolmate Jones. "I wanted to hurt that dude the first time I seen him," Reed recalls. "It's just something about people I have when I first see them. I just don't like them." Yet on that night enmity dissolved in a haze of malt liquor, and somebody got an idea. Along with another young man, Jones and Reed wound up at the high school, and the school ended up in flames.
Calvin Jones stood among the crowd of onlookers as the blaze demolished the school. "When I saw the school burning, tears just came rolling down my face," he says. "My father went to that school, and three of my brothers had graduated from there, and I was getting ready to graduate."
Three months later, Jones, Reed and another teenager were arrested for arson. All three were tried and convicted; Jones and Reed were sentenced to prison; the other youth was released because he is a juvenile. Why did they do it? "There was no reason," says Calvin. "I'm just sorry I didn't do more to stop it." Perhaps it was just another attempt to change the bitter reality of Lake Providence.