My aunt Sis — Syvella Bailey to everyone else — left Evening Shade, Arkansas as a young woman and spent forty years packing oranges in Haines City, Florida. She never finished high school. She never had much money. But she had something better: she knew how to listen.
When I was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base, I’d drive an hour every Saturday morning just to sit on her porch. We’d talk until midnight some nights — about her trip down from Arkansas decades earlier, five days on muddy back roads, sleeping roadside because there was nowhere else to stop.
When I was wrestling with a big decision — where to go to graduate school, whether to leave Florida — she never told me what to do. She’d just say, “Search your soul for the answer. Don’t fool yourself about what you want to do. Get in that moment, and when it feels right, even if it’s not what you want, but should — that’s your answer.”
She told me, more than once, that I was destined for something bigger than a country boy from a gravel road in Little River. I didn’t believe her at the time.
Fifty years later, I think she may have known something I didn’t. More of Sis’s wisdom is in A Journey from the Turnrows of the Delta to the Front Rows of Higher Education coming soon on Amazon.com
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