Thursday afternoon would be the best time for me to visit, Melba Parker said, because it was supposed to rain then, so she wouldn’t be able to paint the roof anyway.

I’ve known Melba for about four decades, and I know she has never ignored a problem or avoided a challenge in her 88 years. In choosing sides, I have always wanted to be on her team.

She lives at the yonder end of Eagle Lake, has been there since the first day of January 1950 when she and her late husband, Fleming Green Parker — “that’s why they called him F.G.” — moved there. It’s one of the most historic pieces of land in Warren County, having been bought shortly after the War of 1812 for 25 cents an acre by the Gwins, who were neighbors and friends of Andrew Jackson. The Rev. James Gwin was a Methodist chaplain; his son Samuel was a U S. marshal and son William M. was a Mississippi congressman and the first senator from California. Melba lives in the house the Gwins built in 1816.

It’s hard to imagine the Eagle Lake community without Melba, for she has been a witness to a lot of changes, and in fact has helped instigate some of them.

When she moved to Eagle Lake, the main way to get there from Vicksburg was by Kings Point Ferry; the other route was along the narrow gravel levee road from near Mayersville. Most dwellings along the lake housed weekend residents who came for fishing and relaxation.

When she saw a school bus on the ferry, which was pulled by a cable, she said “It scared me to death,” for she knew that a big log swirling down the Yazoo could easily have snapped the cable and set the ferry adrift. That fear never left her and, in years to come, she and others would fight for a road to connect them to the rest of the county.

Melba grew up in Bay Springs in Jasper County. She graduated from Mississippi State College for Women, now Mississippi State University for Women, with a major in home economics and a minor in science and, though she wanted to get out into the business world, she promised her father she would give teaching a whirl. He called a friend in Vicksburg, who talked to the superintendent of education, who offered her a job — no interview, no resume.

“I taught at Oak Ridge High School,” she said. “Four girls lived in the teacherage, and three of us did all the cooking because, well, if the other one had cooked we wouldn’t have eaten it.”

It was during that first year of teaching that she met F.G., a farmer from Eldorado on the Warren-Yazoo line who brought students from his community to events at Oak Ridge. He and Melba got acquainted, but it was eight more years before they married. She had moved to Memphis where she was a sales rep in a five-state area for a large company, and F.G. made the trip to Memphis about once a month until she said yes to a marriage proposal and moved back to Warren County.

Soon she was back in the classroom, teaching eighth-grade home economics at Carr Central. Much of her life was spent teaching, and she laughingly said, “but I try to keep it out of my mind,” then, as quickly, added that she had a good time. She still recalls one episode at Oak Ridge, though, when a student threatened to throw her out the window but backed down when she told him, “Come on. We’ll both go together.”

She taught at Carr Central until the mid-1960s when Lou, her son, was in the 10th grade and transferred from the city schools to Warren Central. That’s also when she began her years at the Australia Island school, a two-room, clapboard, tin-roofed structure where she taught eight grades. It was only a mile or two from Melba’s house and, though on the east side of the river and an island only during floods, it is in Louisiana, but too remote to transport students to Tallulah or Lake Providence. It was one of the last one-teacher schools in the area.

Melba loved it: “I always wanted to teach in a school where all you did was be a teacher — not be a record keeper or a clerk or referee.” Nobody interfered, there was no bureaucracy with mindless directives, and the children always scored highest in area testing. There were no frills — all they had was school — and all learned. When the school was closed in the mid-1970s, Melba’s official teaching career came to an end, and she devoted herself to farming and community activities.

In 1950, the main objective of the Eagle Lake Community Club was to get an all-weather road to the rest of the county, and residents wanted it built higher than the 100-year frequency flood level so they wouldn’t have to go all the way around on the levee to get to Vicksburg.

“Sam Waggoner, the highway commissioner, promised us faithfully he would abide by that — but he didn’t,” Melba said, recalling also that he later went to prison. The first flood closed the road most of the way and has in both major floods because the road wasn’t built to specs. The residents also had to fight to get the levee road widened and paved north of Eagle Lake as an escape route.

In addition to the normal spring rise, Melba has witnessed two major floods, 1973 and this year, but during neither was her house flooded. Each morning she went out to see how high it had risen, “and when it got to my top step it crested.” Her cows lived on the levee.

Melba’s husband died when their son, Lou, was in the sixth grade, and the boy grew up helping his mother run the farm. F.G. had 400 hogs, but she sold them and concentrated on cattle — as the sandy soil isn’t good for crops.

After high school, Lou went to Mississippi State and Delta State, and his mother told him, “Let me know when you decide what you want to do.” One spring day, he called and told her he was coming home but needed a new tractor, hay bailer and rake. If she would pay for it, he could have it delivered that day. She agreed.

“When he graduated, he went to work here on this place and didn’t let up. He never complained or mentioned doing something else. He was also improving the place, getting better quality cattle, that sort of thing,” she said.

Though he runs the place now, Melba said, “When he first came home from college, he didn’t have any help but me. I got out every day and drove the tractor.”

She could also brand cattle, but that wasn’t all. She asked Dr. Bertram Lindley to teach her and Lou how to castrate the calves. She told him they both needed to know how to perform the operations including how to tie and throw the calves. She asked Lou what part of the job he wanted and, “as he didn’t like the blood business,” he said he’d throw and hold the calves if his mother would do the cutting.

“That didn’t last long,” she said. “He got ashamed of himself and decided he could do that, too. I thought he was going to vomit the first time, but it didn’t bother me a bit,” and, soon, Lou got the hang of it.

Melba has always liked to garden, from the time she was a girl, and grows a lot of vegetables each spring and summer and keeps her freezer full. She was always active in the Home Demonstration Club, and she grows beautiful flowers and keeps a very large lawn cut. She restored and refinished many fine antiques, which her husband thought were only good for kindling. One of her jobs is cooking for Lou and his workers.

She and her friend Dorothy Butts, both of whom served as president of the Eagle Lake Club, helped organize the Methodist church, worked at the polls and “tried to do what needed to be done up here.”

“I live this way,” Melba said. “I try to leave everybody else alone and tend to my own business and hope they do, too.”

She remains active and interested, she said, even though “I’m about at the jumping-off place.”

Back to the roof: “It’s not the steep roof on the main house. The roof really has very little slope. There is a leak up there that has been driving me crazy. I’ve caulked every seam I could find.”

And what does her son think of it?

“He’s quiet,” she said. “Lou doesn’t say anything because he knows its not going to do any good.”

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.