At Rose Hill Missionary Baptist, church is a five-hour marathon of faith and sweat, from the first bell of Sunday School to the benediction by the Rev. Hezekiah Swanigan.
When the service is finally over, the sun is high, the soul is sated, but the stomach is growling.Rose Hill has been around for 138 years. Its oldest members are buried out back under crumbling tombstones. Its youngest members began Vacation Bible School this week.
Imagine if all this were burned to the ground. And gone.
"We are concerned it could happen to us," said Swanigan, 72, pastor at Rose Hill for 11 years.
Recent burnings of black churches are draped like a charred necklace across the South, but nowhere do they haunt more than here in Mississippi.
In 1963 alone, more than 20 black churches were firebombed in Mississippi by white racists who fought civil-rights progress.
"We just about burned up back then," Swanigan said. "We were bombed, bullied and gasolined."
Now, more than three decades later, there is a sense of deja vu in Mississippi.
In April of 1993, two rural churches were burned in the towns of McComb and Summit.
Early Tuesday, two more black churches were incinerated within minutes of each other in the small town of Kossuth in northeastern Mississippi. Sheriff Jimmy Taylor ordered patrols for all rural black churches in Alcorn County and requested help from the FBI and state investigators.
Nearly 250 federal agents have been deployed to investigate dozens of church fires across the South.
From an aerial view of a map, it's hard to find rhyme or reason to the pattern of arsons. Investigators have found no evidence of an organized racist conspiracy. But that doesn't lessen the pain of losing a church, nor does it soothe many black people here in Pike County.
"In the old days, you knew who the enemy was, and they wore white hoods," said C.C. Bryant, who was Pike County's NAACP president from 1954-1984. "Today, they could be running around in Brooks Brothers suits. You just don't know whom to finger. This is critical."
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In the early 1960s, Mississippi was a Bermuda Triangle for civil-rights activists. Some drove into the lush folds of the landscape and never came out alive.
Like James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were part of the campaign to register black voters in the summer of 1963 and mysteriously disappeared in the rural town of Philadelphia. The county sheriff had detained them on trumped-up charges and released them into the Mississippi night. Six weeks later, their battered bodies were found.
That same year, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down in his carport in Jackson.
When James Meredith became the first black student to enter the University of Mississippi, tear gas and rioting followed, and President John F. Kennedy sent more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers to guarantee Meredith's safety.
The state itself is like a civil-rights museum, full of epic events that would go down in history, flickering in grainy black-and-white footage, overlaid with Delta slide guitars and Walter Cronkite's voice.
But to black residents of Pike County, who can still walk out to the edge of their yard and point to the spot where a cross wrapped in burlap burned, or tell you where they were when Miss Quin's hamburger stand was firebombed, those events don't feel smoothed down by the years. They were terrifying and humiliating. They remain so in memory.
In 1963, Swanigan returned to Magnolia after serving 23 years with the U.S. Army. He came home wearing sergeant's stripes on his sleeves. He had seen the world, from Alaska to China. But when he went to register to vote in Pike County, like all blacks in Mississippi he was forced to interpret an arcane section of the State Constitution to the satisfaction of the county registrar.
Swanigan taught his wife and children to hit the floor if unexplained car lights flashed outside their house at night, and he trained himself to reach for his rifle in three seconds flat. He belonged to a group called Deacons for Defense and Justice.
Still, 33 years later, a rage creeps into Swanigan's voice as he describes how the white clerk at the voter registration office smirked and said, "I guess you pass."
"I wanted to reach out and cut his head off and throw it out in the street where it belonged," Swanigan said.
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Though the sheets of the Ku Klux Klan and the gold star of the bigoted Southern sheriffs may be fading, Swanigan believes there are newer, subtler tensions that fan the flames.
"It's not the Klan that's stirring up animosity," the pastor said. "It's these conservative white Republicans who are pitting whites against blacks, using tactics of hate and fear."
It's no coincidence that most of the black church fires have occurred in the past two years, when race relations have newly soured "and the white guy thinks a black man is gonna take his job because of affirmative action."
Swanigan shakes his head. "To take away our churches is to take away everything that's good."
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Drive through the tunnel of magnolia and pine, deep into the languid heat, past the shack that sells fried catfish and into the countryside. A hand-lettered sign is nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing left: Spring Hill Freewill Baptist Church. Turn down the orange clay road and go two miles into the cool green thicket. There, in the clearing, a white steeple stretches sharply into the sky. In the back, there is a cemetery.
Some of the dead were born during the Reconstruction and were buried during the years of the Apollo missions. Lambs and angels are sculpted atop crude headstones. There is nothing but the sound of birds.
On the night of April 4, 1993, the church burned to the ground. So did Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church in Summit, another rural church 20 miles away.
The fires occurred on the 25th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. An explosive liquid was used. All this made both blazes suspicious, and the FBI was called in.
Almost immediately, a group of white businessmen organized to help the Spring Hill church rebuild.
Jack Honea, a salesman with the Great American Box Co. and a member of First Baptist Church of Magnolia, helped raise money by visiting various churches in the area and asking for money. A black carpenter acted as a foreman of the construction site.
"On the morning we showed up for the first day of construction - Dec. 11, I'll never forget it - about 110 folks showed up," said Honea. "The ladies of the church fed us butter beans, fried chicken, dumplings, turnip greens. It was a 3,800-square-foot building, and we got all the walls up that first day."
All in all, 325 people from 77 different churches, black and white, helped with the resurrection of Spring Hill.
Three local white high school students - Charles McGeehee, 18, Jerome Belleol, 17, and Roy McGovern, 17 - were charged six months after the fires. They said they had been drinking and were upset when they broke into the churches to steal stereo equipment but found none. They claimed they used hymnals and flower baskets for kindling, but evidence of a flammable solution was later found.
All pleaded guilty to federal charges and were sentenced to three to four years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $133,000.
District Attorney Dunn Lampton does not believe these fires were part of an organized racist conspiracy.
"I think it was racially motivated in that these kids were white and the churches were black," said Lampton, who helped prosecute the case at the federal courthouse in Jackson. "But they were not on orders from higher headquarters somewhere."
Black residents were angered that it took so long to arrest the three young men, who bragged about the fires at school.
"If the whole town knew who did it, why was there so much feet-dragging on making the arrest?" said David Myers, a black state representative whose district includes Pike County.
Harry Bowie, a local black pastor and civil-rights activist, also cautions against hurrying to a conclusion of racist conspiracy in the church burnings across the South.
"Don't get me wrong, the cries must go out," Bowie said. "I think what we have here is not one story, but 31 individual stories. Which is frightening in itself."
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Way out at the end of an orange clay road, the new Spring Hill church has shiny brass locks on its door, and the steeple is flawless.
"It's real nice," said Carl Young, a 51-year-old black mechanic at the Ford dealership, who was baptized in the creek behind the old church, "but the real Spring Hill is gone."
And maybe some of the old Mississippi is gone too.
One of the fathers of the young men charged, Charles McGeehee, a local businessman, donated $2,500 to the rebuilding effort and helped in the project.
Every so often, he visits Carl Young at the Ford dealership.
"He comes up to talk to me sometime," Young said, "telling me how sorry he is."