'The heart and soul of Rolling Fork,' Perkins keeps community going in crisis

ROLLING FORK−Natalie Perkins has been burning the candle at both ends and somewhere in the middle the last few weeks. Since Friday night, however, the task has been a much bigger lift.

Perkins is the editor/publisher/designer and everything else of the local weekly newspaper, The Deer Creek Pilot, where she has been for 28 years. She is also on the board of the Sharkey County Emergency Management Agency. And oh, by the way, she is a single mom with a junior daughter in high school that had been preparing for prom.

All hell broke loose Friday night when all of her worlds collided. The now infamous EF-4 wedge tornado nearly a mile wide, touched down just outside the Southwest corner of the city limits of Rolling Fork around 9 p.m. on Friday. A few minutes later, the twister exited the city along the Northeast corner of town, leaving a swath of damage unimaginable, even to veteran storm chasers who witnessed the damage.

When she was told of the storm while at the prom as a chaperone a few miles away, Perkins turned to her daughter and said, "I have to go to work."

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She didn't go home for 48 hours and didn't see her daughter again until Sunday night.

By Monday morning, she had managed almost no sleep as she was trying to keep her community informed through the newspaper as well as keeping the town safe and making a plan for the future in her role at the EMA. By Monday afternoon, she crashed.

She was suffering from exhaustion and was taken to see her local doctor at the mobile clinic tent, set up in the hours after the tornado for storm victims.

By Tuesday, she had gotten a little rest, but there was the monumental task of putting together what may be one of the most important print editions in the history of the Deer Creek Pilot.

"The phone just won't stop ringing," Perkins said from her home in Anguilla, just five miles from Rolling Fork.

It's probably because Perkins has so much to coordinate. The newspaper is printed in Greenwood, 70 miles away. Perkins normally has 1,000 copies printed, but she increased that total to 1,500 this week, anticipating demand. The post office mails out her publication, but she's not sure how many mailboxes stand to receive them.

So, the post office will hold the issues for her subscribers. She will sell copies at Deep Delta Pharmacy and the local Stop-N-Shop grocery store in in Rolling Fork and the lone gas station in Anguilla.

She joked that if you want a copy at the Stop-N-Shop, you'll have to go inside. The outside rack is broken.

While the DCP offices sustained only minor damage compared to the rest of the town, there was going to be no electricity for the foreseeable future, and so she had much of her equipment moved to Anguilla just to get the paper out.

"This is how it has been," Perkins said as she looked at her phone. "This one is from Wiggins. I've had to stop answering unless their contact is already on my phone."

But, she paused, "I haven't been very good at that either."

She also said she had to step away from some of her duties at the EMA just to focus on the newspaper and her health.

She may not have been good at that either as she answered a call from someone asking about logistics and getting a truck from one place to another while a reporter observed her putting out her newspaper.

"I know," she joked. "I just can't stop."

Most everyone in town recognizes what Perkins means to the community.

Russell Stewart, a Sharkey County native and a long-time member of the business community, said she is integral to the entire area.

"She is the heart and soul of Rolling Fork," Stewart said. "She wears more hats than anyone really understands."

Even the Bank of Anguilla, which has a branch just steps away from the Deer Creek Pilot office, has a hat for Perkins to wear.

"She is a hero for what she means to this town. ... She doesn't have a lazy bone in her body," Bank of Anguilla CEO Andy Alexander said. "Even for us, she helps us with marketing and more things than I can say. We depend on her for a lot of things. She is definitely burning the candle everywhere it can be burned. I am sure I talked with her three or four times (Tuesday) ... we probably don't pay her nearly what she is worth for the things she does for us."

Alexander said she is always willing to help, no matter what else is going on.

"She helps in so many ways that other people really don't know," Alexander said. "Our community is blessed to have a Natalie Perkins."

Perkins said she is having trouble putting words together to describe what her community is going through. She has thought about a column for the paper to describe the events of the last few days, but hasn't been able to put it all together just yet.

"My brain is just so overloaded," she said. "I have just been in response mode and disconnected from my people and everyone."

The fact is she has been completely connected and working to help Rolling Fork make the next step to recovery, and she hails the efforts of colleagues.

"The first responders in Mississippi are second to none," Perkins said. "My emergency responders and the MEMA people, I cannot express how great they have been. They have just come in droves and have come every day and they have helped run our command center. They have let us deal with us. They defer to us but they are making everything happen. They know what they are doing and have been the best asset we could have had."

Other might argue the best asset is Perkins herself as every time you asked someone different, you find a few more things she does for Rolling Fork and Sharkey and Issaquena counties.

"Natalie is devoted to her family and her community," said decades-long Rolling Fork resident Anne Weissinger. "She puts her heart and soul into the good of this community, making this a better place to live.

"In the last few years, Natalie has held down a full-time job with the Deer Creek Pilot, and worked on the immunization drive during the COVID pandemic and worked on the steering community for the local festival, the Great Delta Bear Affair."

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Local paper editor serves many roles in helping Rolling Fork recover