Hope Village

By Sela Ward, Los Angeles, California

As appeared in

Home for Christmas, like always, no matter how crazy my schedule. It was 1997 and I decided to spend the afternoon visiting my friend at the shelter for children she'd started back in 1992 in my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi. When I stepped off the front porch into the living room, it was warm and cozy, with soft couches against the walls and a thick colorful rug on the floor. Not like what I'd pictured a shelter to be at all.

"Hi," my friend said, relieving me of the armful of packages I'd bought for the kids at the local Wal-Mart that morning. We knelt down and piled them under the brightly lit Christmas tree in the middle of the room. "That was so sweet of you to bring these."

As I stood up to give her a hug I noticed a pair of little boys standing against the wall. I could tell they were brothers, not so much by their matching brown eyes, but by the way they alternately laughed and fussed. "Merry Christmas," I said, smiling at them.

The younger boy turned away shyly, but the older one smiled back.

"Merry Christmas, ma'am," he said.

Maybe it was the simple down-home politeness of that "ma'am." But at that moment something melted in my heart. Their shy smiles, the way they shuffled their feet nervously. There was such a sweetness and promise to them. I just wanted to scoop them up and take them home with me.

I pulled my friend aside. "Tell me about those boys," I said.

"It's a sad story, Sela," she said, "but a much too common one. Michael and Jimmy are eight and nine. They were taken out of their house because their father had been abusing them. He's in jail now. No one knows where the mother is. Drugs, probably."

"What will happen to them?" I asked quietly.

"They'll probably be split up, sent to different places in Mississippi," she said. "With our overtaxed foster-care system it's too hard to keep them together."

If only they could be placed together somewhere, I thought. Someplace safe. That's what kids need most. To feel loved and protected. Growing up in Meridian, that's what I had felt. That's why I came back with my own kids every chance I got.

I was raised here in the Deep South, loving Bear Bryant on Saturday and worshiping Jesus Christ on Sunday morning, savoring sweet tea and porch swings, corn bread and courtesy and all the tender mercies of a Mississippi childhood. It took a lot to leave and when I finally did I traveled north to New York and then west to southern California where I became an actress in TV shows like Sisters and movies like The Fugitive. I married a tall handsome beau and started a family, who became the center of my world.

I thought I had everything. But midway through my life's journey, I began to realize what I'd been missing—the good, irreplaceable things I'd left behind in the South. And though I'm not in the South most of the time, I am undeniably of the South. The roots of my family tree run deep into the red dirt of Mississippi. There have been Wards living in and around Meridian for six generations—since the 1840s. Daddy grew up there in the Depression, and the concept of helping was always familiar to him.

In 1953 Daddy met a dark-haired beauty named Annie Kate Boswell who would become his wife and, not long thereafter, my mother. She had an indomitable sense of pride, a regal bearing and steely dignity. And like all good Southern women, Mama believed in the secret power of manners.