Willie Steele says his Mississippi upbringing and his father’s discipline helped make him the man he is today.
Steele, 68, who was raised in Itta Bena, served in the U.S. Army for about 10 years and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense for about 20. He moved back to Itta Bena in 2015 and has worked as a security guard at Greenwood Leflore Hospital for 3½ years.
He traveled a lot during his military career and experienced big-city life while working for the federal government, but he always preferred small towns.
“My worst day in Mississippi was better than my best day in D.C.,” he said.
Steele grew up on Ingleside Plantation with 10 siblings in a shotgun house. His father was a strict, but not mean, man who couldn’t read or write but stressed the importance of education to his children.
“I adjusted to the military well, because the drill sergeant sounded just like my dad,” Steele said.
The sharecropping family was poor, and when work had to be done, “the only excuse my daddy would accept is ‘dead,’” Steele said. But he has fond memories of those times, including good Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.
“As hard as we had it back then, I miss a lot of those days. I miss the family togetherness,” he said.
One year, Steele had to walk or run home 16 miles each night after high school basketball practice because he had no transportation. He said his dedication inspired others on the plantation to get in shape, as the young people on nearby Roebuck Plantation had done.
He attended Amanda Elzy elementary and junior high schools and then Leflore County High, where he started during the second year of integration.
He said the integration process could be stressful, but the students adjusted.
“The first year, of course, you had the white kids and Black kids, two value systems converging,” he said. “And the second year, everybody started to get to know each other a little bit better. .... Once we got to know each other, the color kind of started to fade away. You started to see a person’s character rather than the color of their skin.”
Once during Steele’s teenage years, while he and others were picking cotton, some white youths rode by yelling racial slurs and spat at them. When Steele told his father he didn’t want to pick cotton anymore, his father told him he would have to move out — so he began living with his grandmother. Eventually he got a girl pregnant and married her.
Later, after he had become an adult, he asked his father why he had to leave home.
“He said, ‘I knew life was either going to make you or break you — and the way I raised you, I knew it wasn’t going to break you,’” Steele recalled. “And we became the best of friends after that. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Steele said it was a proud, life-changing moment when he graduated from high school. However, the next step at Coahoma Community College proved more difficult, since he often had to hitchhike home and back. So he lasted there only a year before enlisting in the Army.
After training in South Carolina and Indiana, he did his first tour at Fort Sheridan in Illinois. He later served overseas, including in Germany and Korea.
He was working for the state government in Maryland at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which spurred him to apply for a job as an officer at the U.S. Department of Defense. He found out that life in the big city required a major adjustment.
“In D.C., if you speak to somebody, they look at you real weird,” he said. “In Mississippi, you can walk up to a stranger — white, Black — and you can start up a conversation. And you feel like you’ve been knowing that guy your whole life.”
He said he never had a violent encounter in the Washington area, but there was always a sense of being “on the edge.” He said people talk more roughly there, which he attributed to the stress of a fast-paced life. But it made him appreciate Mississippi more after he returned, and he said a lot of people in his home state don’t realize how fortunate they are.
In fact, while in the Washington area, he met a number of successful people from Mississippi who had been raised the way he was and learned to use stressful times to their advantage.
After retiring, he lived in a number of places for short periods before deciding to return home. His sister Annie Steele, who teaches at Leflore County High, returned to Mississippi from Milwaukee to raise her children in this environment, and he’s trying to convince his daughter to do the same.
“I wouldn’t trade Mississippi for going back up there for nothing in the world, because the state of mind is so much different,” he said.
Steele said he probably could get by on Social Security and his retirement benefits, but he’s not ready to slow down yet. He tried traveling for a while after retiring but decided he needed structure.
“Eventually, I’m going to call it quits, but it’s just too early right now,” he said.
He said a Veterans Administration representative connected him with the hospital security job, which fit his desire to serve the public and has given him a sense of purpose.
“There was one stipulation: I had to go to the academy. And I was 65 years of age,” he said, laughing. “And I jumped on it, because it was exciting to me.”
He said they called him “old guy” when he was going through police academy training at Mississippi Delta Community College, but he showed more endurance than some people half his age.
“I’d been trained, built on endurance,” he said. “That’s what made me who I am.”
He said he’s had some interesting conversations with people at the hospital and has been able to share his wisdom with young people.
In his spare time, he enjoys hunting, fishing, reading the Bible, and growing and giving away food. He also exercises regularly and is active at Old St. John Baptist Church.
He has been divorced twice and now has two sons — one in Milwaukee and one in North Carolina — and a daughter who lives in Virginia. Another son died in 2008.
He also has 10 grandchildren, and he looks forward to being able to see them more often.
“I have so much to pass on to my grandchildren,” he said. “I can teach them a lot of things. I talk to them on the phone all the time, but it’s not like being there.”
Mostly, he plans to stay where he is.
“I’m glad I was born and reared in Mississippi,” he said. “And I’m glad to be back.”
- Contact David Monroe at 581-7236 or dmonroe@gwcommonwealth.com.
