You Can’t Bathe. You Can’t Wash
Ellen Ann Fentress
Word Count 815
The entire town of Jackson, Mississippi lacked drinking water for almost a month in the winter of 2021. The poorer —and Blacker—neighborhoods of south Jackson also had little to no water pressure. The city’s two water treatment plants are on the higher-income north side of town, historically white neighborhoods where the pressure usually ekes along minimally even in boil-water times, enough for toilets, baths and laundry, anyway.
I’m an occasional New York Times freelancer in Jackson, covering news like the drinking water outage. For this story, I drove around the south part of town looking for locals who’d stop and talk. I interviewed water case-lugging volunteers and recipients at the New Jerusalem Church’s water distribution site. I talked with the owners of Grooming Unlimited, a dry-fauceted south Jackson dog-washing shop hauling in trash cans of water from the next county to stay open. I kept cruising the streets. A City Hall staffer returned my call with the telephone number of a south Jackson resident, Carolyn Willis, who’d just called the city in frustration.
At Chapel Ridge Apartments, Carolyn Willis was waiting for me in the parking lot. Alongside my car was her 2000 white Chevy pickup. It had quit running at the start of the mid-February freeze that triggered the water crisis. Her truck breakdown shut Ms. Willis out of distribution lines like New Jerusalem’s and her own transportation to the grocery store. She caught rides to get gallon water jugs, most recently with her granddaughter the past weekend. While I jotted notes, the retired nursing home cook, 69, explained her water logistics with a mild face, her eyes and mouth giving away little. She let me come into her unit. She was courteous but wary. I didn’t blame her. I was a stranger and a reporter, one who was white on top of the first two red flags.
Inside her compact, immaculate apartment, Ms. Willis turned on her stainless-steel kitchen sink faucet so I could see the miniscule thread of water that dribbled out, as insubstantial as a piece of dental floss. The limits of the tiny trickle meant a bath turned cold in the time it took for a few inches of water to collect in the tub. She needed a bucket of water to flush the toilet.
The town’s water failure was due to an historical lack of outside concern for a Black-majority city, she observed. If our town were still white majority, “I don’t think our water would be like this,” she said. “I don’t feel like we would have to pick up the phone and call these people about the water.”
When I asked her if the photographer for the Times could take her photo the next day, I noticed a nano-second pause before she said yes. In fact, the next afternoon, the photographer texted me that Ms. Willis had changed her mind about the photo. I phoned her a few times, but she didn’t answer.
The Times piece ran without her image but Ms. Willis’s words were part of the headline: “’You Can’t Bathe. You Can’t Wash.’ Water Crisis Hobbles Jackson, Miss. For Weeks.”
I did a good enough reporting job—after the story ran, a Detroit group arranged a water delivery via Amazon and an Atlanta panhellenic association conducted a drive too—but it was three days later before it occurred to me that I could have gotten Ms. Willis water myself. Exactly what journalism ethics would that have broken? None that mattered much.
I hadn’t had drinking water at home for a month either, but hazards run on a sliding impact scale, depending on your circumstances. What’s a complication for someone with a working car and north Jackson water pressure—I had both-- is a no-net tight rope walk for someone without. That was the case for too many, including Ms. Willis.
Belatedly, I called Ms. Willis to ask about bringing water and whatever else she needed. She didn’t pick up that call or my next few either.
I went to the grocery store and drove back to Chateau Ridge, parking my Mazda by her pickup, still in its same spot. Outside her apartment, I set things out so she’d see them when she opened her door: four one-gallon water jugs, a pint of Louisiana strawberries, tomatoes, navel oranges and a four-inch foil-wrapped grocery store pot of shamrocks—February had turned into March.
My phone rang an hour later. It was Ms. Willis’s number.
“I thought that was from you,” she said.
Her response soaked into my head. Ms. Willis didn’t think I was the one who brought the water jugs due to pegging me as a nice human. Nothing like that. Instead, she spotted me as the kind of person used to getting a second chance, the latitude to fix a mistake, a margin of error.
I got something myself from taking the water jugs: a clue—at least that day.
Ellen Ann’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Baffler, Oxford American and Bitter Southerner. Her memoir The Steps We Take : A Memoir of Southern Reckoning came out in September 2023. She teaches in Mississippi University for Women’s low-residency creative writing MFA program. Follow her @ea_fentress on Twitter or through www.ellenannfentress.com
