Rural Ala. Obama voters hoping change brings jobs

SMUT EYE, Ala. - The last store in this dying farming community closed long before Barack Obama started talking about changing America. Not much progress rumbles down the narrow, bumpy county roads that crisscross its fields and forests.

So what do the rural blacks who live in this quiet, forgotten corner of America hope for from the first black president? Despite campaign skirmishes over redistributing wealth, people here say they backed Obama in hopes of an economic recovery that yields jobs, not handouts.

"We don't want free stuff. We want jobs. There's nothing free," said Mattie Kate Lampley, 71.

"Hopefully Obama will be able to get the economy going. I hope he can get existing companies going where they can create more jobs," said 46-year-old Willie Faulk, a construction worker struggling to make ends meet.

"My work is slow, and going into winter it gets slower," he said.

About 60 miles southeast of Montgomery, Smut Eye is a community of about 200 located in Bullock County, which is 73 percent black. It's part of Alabama's Black Belt, a chronically poor region named for the color of its soil.

The old Smut Eye Grocery sits vacant on a corner, a rusting monument to a community that's been drying up for decades. The nearest loaf of bread or gas pump is 12 miles away in Union Springs, where the biggest employers are a poultry factory, a plant farm and a state prison.

Smut Eye was a bustling farming community decades ago; it got its name from the sooty face of the local blacksmith. Ira Cox Jr., 85, remembers a boyhood of picking cotton with a bag slung over his shoulder. Other fields were filled with corn and peanuts.

A few people own chicken houses today, and big landowners lease land to out-of-town deer hunters for thousands of dollars an acre. The one big attraction in Smut Eye is an annual hog killing and barbecue thrown each November by one of Cox's relatives.

Cox wants new opportunities for his community, but he has a hard time imagining what they might look like.

"I think we need to change. I don't think we can keep going down this road," he said.

Things aren't different a few miles up the Jefferson Davis Highway in Midway, where Daniel Hicks spends most of his days on a sandy patch of ground beneath a towering shade tree near his roadside stand. On a good day he makes a few dollars selling household knickknacks to passers-by.

Hicks, 40, supported Obama for president. But for all the talk of hope and change this election, he doesn't expect much from the next four years just because the next president is black.

There's a war to fight and an economy to right, Hicks said, and now jobs come slowly to the poorest places.

"Hope is all I got," he said. "I wait for change all the time, but it never comes."

The head of an anti-poverty organization in Birmingham said it will take more than one election to change things in this part of the world. But voting for a new way of doing things was a first step, said Kristina Scott, executive director of the Alabama Poverty Project.

"Historically, poor communities that are not empowered remain poor," she said.

Sheriff Raymond "Buck" Rodgers is hoping for the best for Smut Eye, where he was just another Obama supporter on Tuesday.

"If he does what he says and gets the economy going, jobs are going to come even in these kind of places," he said.

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