FITLER – Inside his sky blue, single-story house on the outskirts of the south Delta, Anderson Jones Sr. smiled as he settled back into the cushions of his brown living room chair. After five and a half years away, he was home again. 

But as Jones relished in the comfort of his quarters, in an unincorporated area called Fitler, he also remembered what took him away in the first place. 

“It looked like an ocean,” Jones described on a cool January morning, “as far as you could see.”

In 2019, Jones fled the home he had lived in his entire life, the same home his father built in 1965. That February, a record-setting backwater flood slowly began to form, eventually covering over half a million acres. By the summer, the water crept under Jones’ front door. His was one of 750 homes to flood in the sparsely populated south Delta. 

Months before Jones left, the flood had created a quarter-mile barrier between his home and the nearest road. To go anywhere, he had to drive a four-wheeler from his front yard to a small metal boat, and then paddle himself about a hundred yards to his car. He tried not to leave home often. 

Jones, now 65, recalled guarding the property from snakes trying to swim up over his wall of sandbags surrounding the house. He claims he shot a dozen of them with his shotgun. “That’s in one day,” he added. 

After leaving their home in 2019, Jones and his wife, Felicia, lived in an apartment about 30 miles south in Vicksburg. Climbing the 13 stairs up was a struggle. 

When he was younger, Jones worked for a decade feeding wood to a rip saw machine at a local lumber mill. But in 1990, an injury from a car accident forced him into an early retirement, and he now walks with a cane and a leg brace. And if it wasn’t hard enough to get around, he contracted an infection in his foot in 2019 from walking through the floodwaters, and had to have a screw put in his toes just to balance properly. 

So in recent years, Jones has stuck to stationary hobbies. 

“When I ain’t doing nothing, I just get my pencil and paper and draw,” he said. 

Jones started drawing years ago, he said, mailing pictures to patients at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. These last few years, sitting idly in his Vicksburg apartment, he had time to draw whatever came to mind: rabbits and deer, Moses parting the Red Sea, him and his wife as the characters in “Lady and the Tramp” slurping spaghetti.

In the meantime in Fitler, a contractor Jones hired had to rebuild the whole structure: new walls, new roof, new concrete, new cesspool, new septic tank. While his insurance covered most of the repairs, he had to take out about $10,000 in loans to pay for the rest. 

In November, the contractor called Jones and finally gave him the good news: It was time to come back home. For the first time in years, Jones and his family celebrated the holidays in the south Delta.

In January, Jones had over two Mississippi Today reporters who visited him during the 2019 flood. 

The walls of Jones’ home are decorated with records of his different chapters: a pre-pubescent equestrian, an all-conference high school football player, a husband and father of two. Walking through the house, he pointed to the first bicycle he bought at 9 years old with money from working on a cotton field. 

On the wood panel walls of his kitchen hangs a painting of him on a boat, paddling through a lake where his street is supposed to be. The painting, which his children’s art teacher, Amelia Howle, did for Jones, depicts a photograph Mississippi Today took in 2019. 

“They don’t believe it, they can see it,” he said, looking proudly at the proof of his journey.

On that day in January, Jones rarely stopped smiling as he talked about the dogs in his backyard and the garden growing out back. When asked what he missed most after five and a half years away, Jones basked in the country calm. 

“Sometimes I might want to come out the door and scream, holler,” he said. “Ain’t nobody do nothing, can’t nobody hear you. 

“That’s a joy, that’s a real joy.”