The washerwoman philanthropist: Mississippi senior citizen gives $150,000 to local university

Ebony, Dec, 1995 by Kevin Chapell

Although she has hobnobbed with some of Hattiesburg, Mississippi's, most polished people, Oseola McCarty has never been one to get excited by fancy stuff. So when the small town's big wigs would come to her house, informing her about an upcoming ritzy social event, government function or showy country club luncheon, she would never consider attending.

It didn't matter that she was never invited. McCarty had learned to be happy simply lending an ear and a hand. After all, she was only the town's washerwoman.

So day after day, for much of her 87 years, she waited for the "important" people to bring their clothes to her old wood-frame house. She'd rush out to their car, gather the dirty laundry and make a little small talk before carting their clothes to the backyard.

There, she made the clothes look nice, persnicketily scrubbing them until the colors sparkled, the whites gleamed and her hands ached.

All the while, the tiny woman kept a secret that has recently rocked the town's 45,000 residents. "There's good money in washing clothes," says the silver-haired McCarty with a smile seemingly for everyone, from the Black neighbors who criticized her for "washing them White folks' dirty drawers" to the White fat-cat customers who considered her a poor little old washerwoman, who never married, never had kids and lived alone. "People didn't think there was money in washing, but there was. And I wasn't saying nothing."

For 60 years, only the local bankers knew that while McCarty was elbow deep in dirty water; she was knee deep in money, having squirreled away what would eventually total nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The town and the world found out about the virtues of washing clothes recently when McCarty decided to give $150,000 to the nearby University of Southern Mississippi, a school she had never visited.

It's a remarkable story of how a simple woman's work and savings ethic, unselfish giving and unyielding faith have inspired an entire country and crushed stereotypes in the Deep South. "I want to give some child the opportunity I didn't have," says McCarty, who had to drop out of school in the sixth-grade to care for her sick aunt and stayed out of school when her grandmother became ill. "I hope this money can help children, for years to come, make their dreams come true."

McCarty used to dream, and think, sometimes about things like shoes, or rather people's fascination with them. She always thought what difference does it make what kind of shoes a person wears? Heck, as a kid, she would cut the toes out of her shoes when they became too tight. She'd run through the fiery red Mississippi dirt, toes flapping and mind dreaming. At first, she would dream vivid dreams about exotic places she wanted to go, exciting things she wanted to do, expensive items she wanted to buy and wearing shoes that fit.

But with a bundle of soiled clothes always there to jar her back to reality, the dreams soon turned empty. Anyhow, coming from a family of washerwomen, she was told empty dreams were the best kind. They were less disappointing. Wash clothes and dream empty dreams. That's what her mother did and that's what her mother's mother did. And eventually, that's what she did.

Before the washerwoman knew it, she was caught in a vicious spin cycle. Every day was the same: At the first sign of daybreak, she would begin boiling white clothes in a big iron pot, grinding dirty socks and underwear on her old Maid Rite scrub board in water she had drawn from a nearby fire hydrant. She would then wring the clothes and hang them to dry on about 100 feet of line. By the time she reached the end of the line, the clothes at the beginning would be dry. The day ended with her ironing as the sun set.

In the '60s, she bought an automatic washer and dryer, but gave both away after using them once and finding them miserably insufficient. "The washing machine didn't rinse enough and the dryer turned the whites yellow," she says.

Through it all, the quiet woman never took sick, never complained much and never raised her voice much above a whisper: In fact, McCarty's life has been filled with nevers. She's never owned a car (she still pushes a buggy about a mile to the local Big Star grocery store), never used her air conditioner (unless visitors insisted), never attended a play or concert ("There was never anything I particularly wanted to see"), never traveled out of the South ("There was never anywhere I wanted to go") and never even treated herself to a new Bible (her old one has been read so much, tape is the only thing holding together the Old and New Testaments).

Through bank mergers, closings and name changes, she just kept saving, every week depositing half her earnings into the bank. "I'd take so much for my groceries and my bills," she says, "and save the rest." McCarty saved just in case one day she wanted to stop washing clothes and start dreaming vivid dreams again.

In her 20s, when McCarty was charging only 50 cents for a load of clothes for a family of foul; she began saving pennies and nickels. She never kept up with how much she had saved and never withdrew any money. In her 80s, she was charging mole than $10 a bundle and her change had changed into certificates of deposit, savings bonds, money market and Christmas club accounts at four different banks. But she hadn't changed a bit.