D’Lo, MS native James Harper is a quiet man with a gentle spirit. Now 68, he says he was not always that way but learned to be so as life went on.
Harper lives across the railroad tracks on South Oak but grew up on North Oak. He lives in a modest house he built himself with the help of friends. He poured the slab in 1999 and completed the work in 2000.
It is one large room that contains his kitchen, living room and bedroom with a bath off to the back. In the middle of the room is a large pool table that is used by friends when they visit. Harper does not play anymore as he has very poor eyesight.
The home’s fixtures and appliances have seen some age but he has made them work. He recycled on old diving board for the entry to his home and plans to add a separate bedroom in the coming months.
As a young man, Harper attended Alcorn State University in Lorman, MS, for two years after graduation in 1974 from Mendenhall High School. Then financial challenges brought him back to D’Lo to look for work. Initially he began at Sunflower Grocery #23 in Mendenhall as a bag boy. After a series of odd jobs he went to work in the construction industry doing foundation work and carpentry for residential homes. Harper stayed with construction until the housing market crash in the mid 2000’s.
“They’d build houses and everybody could get a loan to build a house. But they forgot they had to pay for them. And the market crashed.” After a few months Harper found work again in construction until his health deteriorated. He retired in 2017 at 60.
Harper remembers in the early days of his childhood the expansive farmlands in the area beyond his neighborhood. His first comment was that every family treated each other’s kids as their own, especially when it came to getting into trouble. “If I got in trouble at my friend’s house, they’d treat me just like they’d treat their own kids. We couldn’t figure out what was going on because somehow they knew what was going on! It was like they’d send a runner to the store. They’d let everybody in the neighborhood know. The elderly would be like ‘what’s all that racket down there?’ and they’d know about it. You got chastised and got whooped from one end of the street till you got home. You got home and you’d get a whooping there.”
He recalls his neighborhood fondly, saying it was a close-knit neighborhood, and he has good memories growing up there. “We went up and down the street playing Cowboys and Indians. We’d ride our bicycles behind the fog truck when they’d spray for mosquitoes, sucking in all kinds of chemicals.”
There was a cotton gin in D’Lo at that time too. Harper recalls playing on the gin and the bales of cotton as a child. Cotton and soybeans transitioned to tree farming.
Harper also remembers the days of segregation and integration. He attended a school for black children off St. John’s Road long before the days of Highway 49. Schools in Simpson County were integrated in the fall of 1970 when Harper was in the 9th grade. His sister was a senior in high school.
D’Lo resident James Davis remembers Harper as a good student at Mendenhall, calling him well-versed, interested in the well-being of his fellow man as well as current events. “James is well-read, although his formal education ended when he graduated from Mendenhall High School. He is a keen observer. He dearly loves D'Lo and prides himself on keeping current on all the news with regard to the old-timers, especially those in the black community.”
He has only one brother living, E.C. Harper. His father died in an automobile accident when James was 12 and his sister in 2019. His mother passed in 1999. He never married.
D’Lo has always been known for the number of people who served during World War II. Harper had five uncles serve in different branches of the military during the war: Johnny, Otis, Albert, Ernest and Archie Harper. And they all returned from the war, resettling in other parts of the United States.
He readily tells people he was born in 1956 but also began dying in 1956. “I say I don’t know when my final days are going to be up but I started dying then. I tell people I started living but I also started dying. It’s just life. Death is essential when it comes with living.”
Harper added very personal comments. “I started taking a closer look at the individual I face every day in the mirror, if I can get him to change his ways. Be a little more understanding of people. I’d be better off and the world would be better off. It took me a while to learn it’s not about me. People are different. I’m better off.”,
