STARKVILLE — It was the fall of 2006 and Jeanette Bailey wondered if she had made a terrible mistake.
After a painful divorce, she had left Houston, Texas and was back in Mississippi, back in school, working, and taking care of her young children.
Some days, it seemed almost too much to bear.
On one of those bad days, she stepped aboard a shuttle bus on the Mississippi State University campus, driven by Ann Hopkins, more commonly known as Miss Effie.
“I remember sitting on that bus thinking, ‘Did I do the right thing?'” Bailey recalled. “I had a full-time job back in Houston and now, here I am, with a part-time job, going to school, with two kids to take care of. I just didn’t know.
“I’m thinking about all that and suddenly Miss Effie taps her brakes — the way you do when you are trying to get someone’s attention to get them to look up — and she’s looking at me in her rear-view mirror,” Bailey continued. “Smile, (Hopkins) says. It’s not that bad! Everything’s going to be fine.”
“It doesn’t seem like much,” Bailey said. “But at that moment, it was exactly what I needed to hear.”
These days
On a typical day, Hopkins, 56, makes her circuit from the Colvard Student Union to the Research Park, a 30-minute trip she repeats continuously, from 7 a.m. until 3:30 p.m.
“Blue Thunder,” Hopkins calls her van, smiling at her joke. Before coming to MSU to drive shuttles, Hopkins drove all sorts of trucks in the construction industry. Now her white van, with two rows of bench seats behind the driver’s seat, is a meek, timid, little vehicle, compared to the thunderous trucks of her past.
As she drove along her route Thursday, she cheerfully greeted a new passenger, introducing him to all her other guests. “This is Ramon! He’s from Brazil,” she explained of one. “His name’s not really Ramon, though. That’s just the name he gave himself when he came here.
“And this is Vineetha,” she continued, giving a pat on the knee to a young lady sitting next to her, in the front passenger seat. “She’s from India. Ain’t that right, baby? And this one here, her name is Emmie.”
Emmie Johnson leaned in and told Hopkins about her Spring Break trip to New Orleans, where she took her little sister to see a play, The Lion King. She described the costumes and how they were not only beautiful, but in proper scale.
“The giraffe is as big as a real giraffe,” Johnson said.
Hopkins eyes sparkled. “Oh,” she murmured. “Imagine that!”
At each stop, Hopkins made introductions. “This is David,” she said. “He just had a new baby – Lucy Jean Francis. His wife’s name is Emily.”
And so it went. Every new passenger was met, with the affection of a soldier returning home from the war. She must know hundreds of students, not only their names, but details, sometimes intimate, of their lives.
Soon, the passengers were smiling. They were listening and talking. They were engaged. And the van became more than just a method of traveling from one point to another; it was a warm, happy place.
Ravi “Raj” Sadasivuni, a PhD candidate from India studying geosciences, expressed the feeling.
“The moment you get on her shuttle, you are better person,” he said.
Like family
Because the route Hopkins drives includes The Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park, many of her passengers are international students, most of them in engineering graduate programs.
For students like Sadasivuni, Hopkins is more than a friendly face.
“Just think of it,” she said, of the international students. “They are thousands of miles from home, thousands of miles from their family. They have friends here. What they don’t have is family, their mamas and daddies. They get homesick, I think, and lonely. Oh, so lonely. Well, what I try to do is let them know that somebody loves them.”
Some of the students call Hopkins “Granny,” but she’s more than a surrogate family member.
Over the years, she bore quiet witness as students, overwhelmed with the pressures of school or loneliness or relationships or the trials of being independent, broke down in tears, as they told their stories.
“I don’t pry,” Hopkins said. “I don’t invade nobody’s privacy; I just listen.”
Hopkins does not pretend to be a counselor. Her advice is simple and sincere.
“I just tell them how much Jesus loves them and I tell them how beautiful they are,” she said. “You know, you can’t really love anybody, until you can love yourself. I just try to help them see how wonderful they are. I try to help them love themselves.”
In the way of materials things, Hopkins doesn’t have much. But she has enough to share.
For the past year, she has been helping some of her students with errands, after her shifts end. She picks them up, in her old Chevy Blazer, and drives them to Wal-Mart or the Asian market or to get a haircut. Since most of the international students don’t have cars, Hopkins has become like a taxi service for them.
Most offer to pay her, but she neither asks for nor accepts payment.
A while back, a student, who needed surgery, arranged a flight out of Golden Triangle Regional Airport. His flight departed at 6 a.m., but the student assured Hopkins, if she dropped him off at midnight, he would sleep in the airport, until his flight time, so Hopkins could get home and to sleep before going to work.
“Well, I pick him up about midnight and we drive over to the (airport) and it’s locked up tight,” Hopkins recalled. “I get on the phone and call someone I know who works at the airport and he tells me nobody comes to open the airport, until about 4:30 in the morning.”
The student assured her he would wait outside, until then. But Hopkins wouldn’t hear of it. She took him back to Starkville, fell into bed for a few hours, then picked him up at 4 a.m. and drove him back to the airport.
“As we are driving back to the airport, I look at him and he’s got this frown on his face,” Hopkins remembered. “I say, “You are mad at me for not leaving you at the airport last night, aren’t you? He admits he’s mad. But I just told him, love isn’t just about what you say, it’s about what you do, too. You think I’m going to leave somebody I love sitting outside an airport?”
When word of Hopkins’ off-duty efforts reached her church – The Church of the Living God – the congregation decided to help pay for the gas she uses. But she was not compensated for her time. She wouldn’t permit it.
Lasting impact
Bailey did earn her degree. Her oldest child is 22 years old, and a mother herself, now. Bailey is working to earn her master’s degree and she has a full-time job, as manager of the University Transit System. She now is Hopkins boss.
“I have a lot of great drivers,” Bailey said. “But if all of them were as devoted as Miss Effie, I’d really have it made.”
Hopkins’ passengers appreciate her devotion, too.
“She cares, she really cares,” said Johnson. “You know that, because she remembers everything you say. I won’t see her for a week or two, but when I get on the bus, she picks up the conversation right where we left off. That’s because she cares. You matter to her.”
Sadasivuni referenced his native country to illustrate Hopkins’ effect on people.
“In India, we have a tree that is called Sandalwood and it is very important, because it has a beautiful fragrance,” he explained. “But when you go out to look for sandalwood trees, they are sometimes difficult to find, because their fragrance is so great that it carries over to all of the other trees, so that they have the fragrance, also. I think Miss Effie is like the sandalwood tree. Everyone she meets carries the fragrance of the love she gives.”
But Hopkins is quick to credit another.
“Everything I do out here, I do to glorify God,” she said. “Because God’s been mighty, mighty good to me.”
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.