March 24, 2023 started out as a perfect day for Tracy Harden and her small Rolling Fork business, Chuck’s Dairy Bar.
The sun was shining. The wind was blowing briskly, and many area farmers around the south Delta town had planned to work past sundown, which meant they were ordering more food than usual from the restaurant.
“We were enjoying the most beautiful day,” Harden told the Indianola Rotary Club this week, nearly one year after an EF-4 tornado leveled the restaurant and most of the town of about 2,000. “It was one of those where you know you’re going to get paid. It was a wonderful day in our business. We had
farmers coming in and out all day.”
Earlier in the day, Harden, who also owned the hotel next door to the restaurant, had her grandson Thomas, who lives in Vicksburg. There was chatter about a potential threat for severe weather, but Harden didn’t pay it much mind. At one point, her daughter called and said that she wanted Thomas to come home but promised Harden that they would be back in Rolling Fork the next day to spend the night.
As the sun started to go down, severe storms and long track tornados were the furthest things from Harden’s mind.
“That busy day went on into the night,” she said. “I told the ladies, ‘Nothing is better than this.’ It was a beautiful day. Farmers were able to work into the night, to get their crops planted. I can make payroll with no problem.”
Harden said that she had kept her phone on her desk in her office for most of the day. She stopped at around 8 p.m. to start on payroll so that she could leave the restaurant at a reasonable hour.
Two customers came in, a couple of hunters from out of town, and they ordered hamburger steak and mashed potatoes.
Harden said her husband, Tim, walked through the door and ordered supper.
Harden sat down at her desk to start the clerical work, and at 8:05 p.m., she received back-to-back texts from her daughter and her sister.
“I still just thank God every day that I stopped to do payroll, because my phone was there,” Harden said. “At 8:05, I got a text that there was a tornado on the ground.”
She still did not think too much about it, and that is when the lights blinked for the first time, she said. The workers up front were receiving calls and texts as well, and they were headed toward Harden’s office.
“One of the ladies screamed so loud, and I kept thinking, ‘Calm down, everything is okay,’” she said. “The lights blink again, and I don’t know why, but I said ‘Cooler.’”
The cooler she was referring to was a 6x8 refrigeration unit, packed with groceries. It would soon be packed with nine people, Harden, her husband and seven female employees.
Harden thought that when her husband opened the cooler door to usher them in, they would be back out in the restaurant in a matter of minutes, feeding more farmers.
“By the time he had pushed me into that cooler, the lights went completely out, and we could feel wind,” Harden said.
They felt the wind pulling on them, but they could hear very little. There was no freight train sound, she said. There were no sirens from the town.
Harden said her husband thought about the two customers in the dining area.
“He was going to go and check on the customers, but the door yanked from him,” she said. “He couldn’t close it. He jumped into the cooler, and he somehow managed to pull the door through. As he was pulling the door, he said, ‘I see the sky.’”
Harden said that all of this occurred in about a minute’s time.
“By 8:06, the whole roof is gone off of our building,” she said. “We’re in the cooler, and of course, panicking. There were two customers out there. Where are they? We know it’s bad, but we can’t get out.”
Harden said they began to feel the cooler move and sway.
A tear in the back of the cooler allowed some debris to fly in. Soon, their eyes were covered, and many of them had small cuts.
“And then, as if nothing had ever happened, it stopped, and we’re still sitting in the same spot that we were,” she said.
Harden said that her phone was working. She called 911. She received calls and texts from customers and friends who said they were on their way to rescue them.
“After a while, we realized that 911 is not coming. Our friends aren’t coming. How bad is it? We still don’t know how bad it is,” she said.
Positioned behind Chuck’s and the hotel were 42 house trailers, she said, and they decided to start screaming, hoping someone from the trailer park would hear them.
“We knew that there was a trailer park behind our building that housed 42 families,” Harden said. “So, maybe if we screamed, somebody from one of those trailers would hear us. We start screaming, and one of the customers who we had left sitting at the table eating heard us. He was hurt, but he made it to us, and he removed every single piece of debris from that door, and he let all nine of us out.”
The customers had managed to shelter, one under a booth and the other between the two restrooms.
When they came out of the cooler, they were standing outside. Most everything around them was destroyed, including 41 of the 42 trailers behind the store.
Harden said that on any given day, prior to March 24, 2023, she could help just about anybody when it came to food, clothing and shelter.
At that point, on that night, she and her husband began to care for people in a completely different way.
They began helping with the rescue and recovery efforts in the trailer park.
They pulled bodies from the rubble, some living, some dead and others in critical condition.
They comforted children who had lost their parents.
There was one woman, wheelchair bound, who lost her daughter in the storm. That woman, Harden said, also lost her medication, which she needed by the next morning in order to live.
Harden said she got on the phone and tracked down a drugstore owner who assured the woman that she would have her medicine the next morning.
They waited with people who were waiting on ambulances. They waited with families who were waiting on hearses to arrive, she said.
“You’re thankful you are alive,” she said. “You’re thankful you were there and that you were able to bring some comfort.”
Since the tornado hit nearly a year ago, the town is still rebuilding.
That includes Chuck’s Dairy Bar, which Harden said should be celebrating a grand reopening next month.
Harden said they managed to salvage the booth where one of the customers hunkered down during the tornado.
Both of those men, she said, have been invited to the grand reopening.
“We saved his booth, and it’s going back in our dairy bar,” she said. “We’re going to feed them the hamburger steak that they didn’t get to finish.”
Harden was also the winner last year of the Fox Nation Weather Award for Courage.
She also serves on the board of Rolling Fork Rising, which has helped to build two new homes for residents, who should receive their keys later this month. Four more are in the works.
Due to the fact that so many rental homes were destroyed and are not being rebuilt, Harden and Rolling Fork Rising are stressing financial health and are teaching the citizens of Rolling Fork about homeownership.
They hope that more survivors will decide to stay and be a part of the rebirth of the small south Delta town.
“I always want people to know that this just wasn’t me,” Harden told The Enterprise-Tocsin. “This was a whole community of wonderful people helping each other. I never want it to just be about me. I know I couldn’t do any of what I did without others right there with me. We may be little but we sure are mighty.”
