The road out of Rolling Fork unfurls for what seems like forever into the flat, yawning horizon of the Mississippi Delta. The relentless spread of fields is usually interrupted only by bumpy roads and the occasional gas station. On an April afternoon in 2023, though, there were also strips of metal twisted into abstract sculptures, the remnants of a tornado that had recently swept through.
All of it whooshed by Jaden Grayson that spring day, as he looked out the window of his uncle’s car.
Weeks earlier, Jaden had survived the tornado that killed 17 people in and around Rolling Fork, including the grandmother who had stood in for his mother for most of his childhood. The home he shared with her was nothing but cement steps and scattered debris. When Jaden, then 16, sifted through it, everything he recovered could fit in a laundry basket.
Then he was told that he was going to Arkansas. His Uncle Jarvis was taking him in.
•••
The car ride ended in Springdale, Ark., about 400 miles from Rolling Fork.
Jaden carried his things into the two-bedroom townhouse that he would share with four other people. There was Jarvis Odems, his 28-year-old uncle; Tami Johnson, Jarvis’s longtime girlfriend; their 8-year-old daughter, Aubrielle; and Marco, Tami’s 13-year-old son, with whom Jaden would share a room.
Jarvis and Tami split in 2022, deciding they needed time apart. But now Jarvis had to register Jaden for school, obtain legal custody and make sure he had what he needed to settle in and feel secure. Jarvis’s job as a truck driver came with lucrative pay, but also long days and odd hours.
He couldn’t imagine taking on this new challenge alone. Tami told him he didn’t have to.
•••
Tami posted an appeal on Facebook, raising $3,000 to buy Jaden what he needed — everything, basically.
That week in April, he also started school.
Har-Ber High School in Springdale has students in 10th through 12th grades. But it was designed almost 20 years ago to evoke a college campus, with a domed main academic building, impressive athletic facilities and room to accommodate more than 2,200 students.
Many of the students at Har-Ber live in the middle-class subdivisions that sprung up in Springdale as Northwest Arkansas exploded in population and prosperity, fueled by the presence of Walmart and Tyson Foods. Almost all of the students are Latino or white.
Jaden had come from South Delta High School in Rolling Fork, which had roughly 170 students enrolled before the tornado, most of them poor and Black. The district was strapped for resources, and Jaden felt it. “It was boring,” he said of his old school.
But in Arkansas, his classes could sometimes feel like an avalanche of information. His teachers also seemed to demand more of him.
“It’s pretty fast-paced here compared to Mississippi,” said Jennifer Baker, a teacher at Har-Ber who has known Jaden’s family for years and took it upon herself to get him situated, helping him pick classes, teachers and even friends, steering him toward students she thought would be good influences.
In more than two decades as a teacher, Ms. Baker had held onto a belief that her vocation was not limited by classroom walls. One student slept on her couch for a while. Another came home with her every day during a period of family turbulence.
It was only natural that she would look out for Jaden. She had also taught Jarvis and several other relatives. She knew Jaden’s grandmother and considered her a friend.
“You raised the whole family,” Jaden told her one day in her office, which had become an escape where he could vent, cry or do nothing at all.
He also joined the football team. The sport had long been a passion, but it also brought pressure: He hoped it would lead to a college scholarship. During the fall season, he struggled to focus, and then he hurt his shoulder.
“You think you held back a little bit this season?” Ms. Baker asked after the season had ended.
“I wasn’t in it,” Jaden replied. “I was going through it.”
•••
At home, he had no space to think, much less grieve.
Jaden was almost 6-foot-3 with a sturdy build that caught coaches’ attention. Marco, Tami’s son, was a lanky middle-schooler and already about six feet tall. The two of them had to share a full-size bed.
Nerves frayed. Squabbling erupted over the most tedious things, like who was wearing whose sneakers.
Jaden and Marco developed a habit of locking their bedroom door, an attempt to carve out some privacy. Which was fine until Tami had to bang on the door and yell in the morning, to get Jaden up for football practice.
One day, Jarvis, who was trying to sleep after a shift, became fed up. He took the door off its hinges.
•••
All his pain, all his frustration — Jaden saved it for the football field. Almost everyone around him had offered that advice: Harness the hardship.
“Football is my therapy,” he said recently. “It lets a lot out.”
Still, football could only do so much.
Jaden was quiet by nature, preferring to communicate through mumbles and whispers. Tami encouraged him to express his emotions. “Sometimes, you’ve just got to break down,” she told him. “It’s OK to not be OK.”
There were days when he needed time alone in Ms. Baker’s room with the lights off.
In moments like those, he relived the last time he saw his grandmother. He was out with friends, walking along the country highway that serves as Rolling Fork’s main road, and she drove by on her way home from work. They waved.
Now, he tried to imagine what she would tell him, what she would want him to do.
He had little doubt about the answer.
•••
Jaden had been the responsibility of his grandmother, Brenda Odoms, essentially since he was born. His mother — Ms. Odoms’s daughter, Arielle — had chronic health issues and died when Jaden was 6. His father left for Texas, where he was serving an extended prison sentence.
Ms. Odoms, 55, saw the Mississippi Delta as a series of traps for the young Black men growing up there. She was determined that Jaden and Jarvis would avoid them. It motivated nearly every one of her decisions as a mother and grandmother.
The Delta, a triangle of territory formed by the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, is known for having some of the most fertile soil anywhere. But the curse of its bounty is that it is always bound for somewhere else: The harvest is distributed around the world, but grocery stores with fresh produce are scarce in the region. Similarly, its brightest young people often feel like they have no other option but to leave.
Ms. Odoms had made that choice for Jarvis. She sent him to Northwest Arkansas for high school, where he stayed with relatives who had left the Delta and found opportunity in this new destination.
Ms. Odoms had just as firm a hand with Jaden. She was the reason football was so important to him. There was no way he would waste his days sitting around at home. He had to be involved in something.
•••
As Jaden adjusted to life in Springdale, Jarvis started taking him to the gym on the weekends. If football was Jaden’s therapy, this was Jarvis’s. He went no matter what, even if he had worked a 14-hour day.
There, he pressed his nephew to eke out one more rep as he did squats, to not slow down as he shoved a sled.
“I don’t take it easy on him,” Jarvis said.
Jarvis had once been like an older brother. Now, he was Jaden’s guardian and disciplinarian, tasked with figuring out how to parent a teenager.
Jarvis had long conversations with Ms. Baker about it. One Sunday afternoon, they spent 45 minutes on the phone. “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” she told him. “Pick your battles.”
It was funny, she said later, because she remembered Jarvis when he was Jaden’s age.
“I almost wish Jaden was worse than he is,” she joked, sitting in her office at school, instructing Jaden to cover his ears, “so I could say: ‘Karma, Jarvis! Payback is a you-know-what!’”
She was proud of Jarvis, though. He had stepped up for Jaden.
“Without Jarvis,” she said, “his life would have been much more difficult.”
•••
Over his junior year at Har-Ber, Jaden’s grades improved.
He was up at 5 a.m. for football practice and did track and field in the afternoons. Ms. Baker had been helping him prepare for his driving test. He also developed a solid group of friends.
The biggest change came in January: Jarvis and Tami found a brick house with four bedrooms for rent on a quiet street. Jaden got his own room where he could close his bedroom door and be alone.
But just as often, he hung out with Marco. Bug, he called him. “It’s like we’re brothers,” Marco said.
•••
In late March, Jaden climbed into Jarvis’s truck and they headed toward Mississippi. His grandmother’s ID badge from her job as a home health care aide hung from the rearview mirror. The anniversary of the storm was a day away.
Rolling Fork looked somewhat different: a rebuilt home here, a new gas station there. But the mangled remains of buildings still lined streets. And there was a void that made both of them reluctant to return.
“My grandma,” Jaden said. “She isn’t here.”
He ran into some friends, but the vibe felt off after so much time and distance.
The next morning, the anniversary, he was already thinking about the six-hour drive back to Springdale and the 5 a.m. alarm for football practice.
Before he and Jarvis got in the car, Jaden stood by his grandmother’s grave as family and friends prayed, shared memories, lamented all that had been lost. In a way, someone noted, that included Jaden. His absence was felt in Rolling Fork, too.
Everyone let go of balloons, looking up as the currents swept them away, black, silver and gold dots shrinking into a boundless horizon until they disappeared.
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