Canton, Mississippi A New Kind of Moving Day

By DANIEL S. LEVY

Last year, after fire destroyed their home outside Canton, Miss., Willie Anderson and seven of her children moved into a rented shack. The place was a horror, with no electricity or running water, rotting walls papered with newsprint, and gaping holes in the tin roof that allowed the rain to pour through. "Once a snake came up under the stove, and we got big rats in there all the time," recalled Anderson, 47, a big, strapping woman in a flowered blouse. "I couldn't wait to get away."

The family's ordeal finally ended in August, when a trailer truck carrying a hip-roofed house with yellow shingles pulled up on the site of Anderson's burned-out home. "This house," she boasts, "won't have no holes like the other one."

Anderson's new home was donated by a church in nearby Pearl to a nonprofit organization called MadCAAP -- short for Madison Countians Allied Against Poverty -- which helps poor people in one of the poorest parts of the nation. Financed solely by donations and grants, MadCAAP takes old wood-frame buildings that local communities and private owners no longer need and hauls them to new sites. There volunteers from local churches and schools join with families that have been aided in the past to install wiring, put up paneling and dig septic tanks. Over the past six years MadCAAP has recycled old houses for 70 families in and around Canton (pop. 11,500), a courthouse-squared town 20 miles north of Jackson. MadCAAP's aim, according to its unflappable founder and director, Sister Grace Mary McGuire, 57, is to "try and break the cycle of poverty by helping one family at a time."

Among its recipients is Johnnie Murry, who used to live with her husband and 15 children in a two-room trailer. In 1984 MadCAAP brought a four-bedroom house to Murry's farm. Now white curtains hang from the windows and stuffed animals, high school banners and framed graduation pictures decorate the wood- paneled walls. "We can sleep better now," says Murry. "I am grateful that I have a place to cook, a table to feed my family at and a place for me to rest later."

For Sister Grace, a conservatively dressed woman with gentle blue eyes and short brown hair, helping the poor has been a lifelong ambition. As a child growing up in New York City, she wanted to aid leprosy sufferers in India. She never made it to Asia, but in 1973 her Philadelphia-based religious order, Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, sent her to the Deep South. "I never dreamed that I'd be working with septic tanks, wiring, let alone moving houses," she says, "but when people are poor and depressed, you want to do anything you can to uplift them."

Moving a house is a time-consuming affair. The morning that Willie Anderson's home is delivered begins with workers hoisting the house's concrete steps onto a pickup truck while Anderson and her children pile broken bricks and stack cut wood. Clearance for the move requires approval from a slew of bureaucrats, and Walter Malone, 52, a professional house mover who has completed 30 jobs for Sister Grace, still has a few final forms to sign and fees to pay. "The biggest difficulty is the paperwork," he says, pointing to a glove compartment crammed full of documents. "I got so much paperwork on this thing that if anyone stops me, it will take me 15 minutes just to find it."

After a trip to Pearl city hall to write one last check, Malone heads back to the site. The Mississippi Power & Light man is already there, and a Pearl police officer stops by to inform Malone that the move will be delayed until after a funeral passes through town. Malone looks annoyed. He kicks some sod, readjusts his blue Malone House Moving cap and struts over to the rig to recheck the house's support system.

At 11 a.m. the police return, and Malone slowly trucks the house from the site, pulling past the Pearl Grocery Mart and onto Route 80. The police escort halts traffic as Malone's son Greg leads the caravan in an attention-grabbing red-bannered pickup. Next come the police, a Mississippi Power & Light crew and Sister Grace, who occasionally slows down to take a picture. Bringing up the rear is Otis Towner at the wheel of the pickup carrying the steps. With hazard lights blinking, the procession crawls past the local U-Haul dealership, gas stations and the post office. Impatient drivers trail behind, and kids on bicycles stop to gaze at the rolling house.

As the line snakes out of Pearl, the row of cars picks up speed, and the cab's chimney spouts black smoke that swirls around the head of Steve Harris, who is kneeling on the house's gray-green roof and raising low-hanging telephone wires. The town is left behind, and the landscape shifts to fields of cotton and soybean. As he approaches the Ross R. Barnett Reservoir, Malone pulls a lever on the floor, cranking a cable that raises the house an extra foot so it just barely clears the side railings. "I've been doing this for 20 years, so I know what will go and where it will go," he boasts. The house fills both lanes and knocks into a speed-limit sign, shattering two back windowpanes. Shelton Kelly walks ahead, bending back or briefly yanking out a few signs in order to make room for the wide load. Oncoming traffic generally gives way, yet one van driver insists on trying to squeeze by.

"Move out of the way. Damn fool!" Malone hollers out the window. "Don't you see I'm moving a house?"

The other driver yells back over the incessant barking of his bird dog, "I can't get over any more."

"Well, we're in a hell of a shape if you can't get over any more," Malone replies, " 'cause I surely can't."

Eventually, the driver maneuvers past the house. "He saw me coming," Malone snarls, as he hunches over the wheel. "These two-lane highways are mighty aggravating when I got a wide load."

Fortunately, traffic around Canton is light, and the drive through town and up to Anderson's land proceeds without delay. Malone pulls the truck through an opening in the bushes and turns the rig around in front of the burned remains of the old house. "I think you should move it a little more away from the power line," the Mississippi Power & Light man warns Malone as he checks the house's positioning. Towner calls Anderson over to the front. "Do you like it here?" he asks. She looks up and down the building's length and along its sides and then responds with a simple yes.

"This house is one of the best we've gotten," Sister Grace says as she appraises the building. "It is everyone working together that makes this happen. That is love of neighbor. Little by little you take each family and do what you can."

Now happily settled, Anderson is burbling with joy. "This house is simply wonderful." She beams. "This is the first time I ever had a bathroom, and I am going to have a beautiful flower yard. The children also stay at home now. I don't have to worry about them being out all the time of night." Because of MadCAAP, the old yellow house has become a home.