Released September 29, 1999

To "keep Corinthians from falling out"

OSEOLA MCCARTY'S TATTERED BIBLE WAS SCOTCH-TAPED
By Phil Hearn

HATTIESBURG -- Rick Bragg coined a memorable line four years ago when he wrote that Oseola McCarty bound her "ragged Bible with Scotch tape to keep Corinthians from falling out."

"When I talk to journalism students and they say `Why did you use Corinthians?' I say I couldn't spell Deuteronomy," the New York Times correspondent quipped during a visit to The University of Southern Mississippi campus earlier this week.
Bragg, 40, a Southerner who has risen to the highest echelons of American journalism, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for a package of stories he wrote, including one about Oseola McCarty. He subsequently penned a best-selling autobiography, It's All Over But the Shoutin', which traces his life growing up poor in Alabama.

The scheduled keynote speaker for Southern Miss's Freshman Convocation Monday, Bragg said he had planned to visit with Miss McCarty while here and present her with an autographed copy of his book, in which she is prominently mentioned. He arrived in Hattiesburg Sunday evening, however, to learn the 91-year-old Southern Miss benefactress had died from complications of liver cancer earlier that day.

"The first time I saw her, everybody and their brother had already written a story," said Bragg, who interviewed Miss McCarty in August of 1995, right after she made international headlines by donating $150,000 of her life's savings to Southern Miss -- money she had earned washing and ironing other people's clothes.

"Television news crews had lined up down the block (at Miss McCarty's wood-frame Hattiesburg home) and people were coming from everywhere," he remembered. "I cover a lot of terrible stuff, write about a lot of misery -- but here was this little biddy woman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who had given away everything she had ever worked for... It drew us like gnats...

"She spent the better part of an afternoon with me and she turned on her air conditioner for me, just to be nice," said Bragg. "She didn't use it unless company was there.

"She was holding this Bible.... It was held together with Scotch tape. I think all of us who grow up in the South have seen that. You know, you don't throw away a Bible just beccause the cover wears out. It had Corinthians sticking out -- and practically every other part of the Bible. I wrote that her Bible was bound to keep Corinthians from falling out and it became one of those famous Southern newspaper lines people love to quote...

"We just talked about why she did it (gave away her savings) and I think that's one reason why -- instead of there being this tremendous sadness over her death -- there's almost a kind of peace," he continued.

"In 1995, she knew that her death, if not imminent, was coming. She made that wonderful gift in anticipation of that. What really surprised people -- and what surprised her -- was what that gift did during the interim.

"She gave the gift in anticipation of dying and lived in a way in those four years after the gift that most people couldn't imagine," Bragg said. "Shaking hands with the President, being honored by the United Nations, being honored by people of all colors everywhere around the country -- it just doesn't happen."

Bragg, who moved to the Miami burea of the Times six months ago after covering the South for the New York newspaper from Atlanta for the previous four years, said there were many parallels between Miss McCarty and his mother, "who raised me by picking cotten and scrubbing floors, working herself half to death...

"They just don't make people like that anymore," he added. "I mean, my mama's like that, but they just don't make people like that anymore... I've always said if judgment day came and I couldn't hide under my mama's porch -- because I know I'd be safe there -- I'd try to hide under Miss McCarty's."

Miss McCarty will be buried at Hattiesburg's Highland Cemetery Saturday following a 2 p.m. funeral at Friendship Baptist Church. Her body will lie in the rotunda of Southern Miss's Lucas Administration Building from 9 a.m. to noon, with a "Celebration of the Life of Oseola McCarty" program scheduled from noon until 1 p.m. in Southern Miss's Bennett Auditorium.

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