“I ran into the living room and began rolling
on the floor,” she said. “When I stood up, I saw
huge pieces of my skin laying there. I reached
back to my hair and my ponytail came off and
fell into my hand. One of my feet had already
swollen up like a bowling ball.”
The girls were terrified at the sight of their
sister’s burning flesh. But all Bessie could think
about was the burning trailer. She ran out the
front door and went around to the back of the
trailer for the water hose. Entering the back
door, she doused the kitchen from floor to
ceiling. “I just kept thinking, ‘Mama is gonna
kill me for getting the kitchen wet like this,’” she
said with a sideways grin.
Miraculously, Bessie did manage to put out
the fire and save the trailer, although the kitchen
was ruined. Once the fire was out, she ran back
to the front yard and collapsed on the ground.
When the ENTs arrived, Bessie was taken to the
ER in Vidalia where she was immediately sent
by ambulance to the Joseph M. Still (JMS) Burn
Center in Augusta, Georgia. “It’s one of the most
elite burn centers in the United States,” said
Bessie. “I was lucky it was so close.”
Somehow both of her parents were there
when she arrived. “Daddy was working on a
bridge in Sylvania. I don’t know how he got
there so fast. They had given me something for
pain, so I was in and out. I couldn’t open my
eyes or sit up. It was this terrible, dreamlike
feeling.” But even drugged, Bessie remembered
the doctor’s foreign accent and his next words.
“He said, ‘Tonight, we will take the right foot,
and we will see tomorrow with the left foot if we
can leave it or not.’ I told myself, ‘Bessie, don't
you fall asleep. If you fall asleep, you're going to
wake up without a foot.’ But my daddy just lost
his mind. He hollered at the poor man, ‘You ain’t
cutting nothin’ off my daughter!’” she laughed.
The reality was that Bessie’s right foot
had been burned down to the muscle. It was
taking a huge risk to even attempt to save the
foot. The risk of infection could be deadly. But
Bessie’s daddy meant that they were going to
do everything and then some to try to save his
daughter’s foot.
The healing process was long and tedious. It
38 TOOMBS COUNTY MAGAZINE