Brown water in Greenville

In the blur of his campaign, it was just another overnight stop: a Holiday Inn Express in Greenville, dead in the heart of this forsaken land called the Delta.

In the lobby, atop the front desk, a card in a plastic frame greeted guests. It served as an alert, a quaint warning of sorts: "You may be wondering why our water is brown -- it's the cypress tree roots, in the springs underground. Y'all can drink our water and bathe without fear. For no one lives longer than the folks around here."

Barack Obama passed the card on the way to his room. There, the bathroom sink and shower offered exactly what the card predicted: a stream of yellowish-brown water, to be found in every room. It came from a Greenville city well, which pumped the same alarming-looking water into all the homes and businesses in the area. City leaders and hotel employees emphasized that although it looked bad, the brown water met all federal and state safety standards, and that residents commonly drank it and bathed in it.

The next morning, Obama walked past the warning card again, on his way out of the hotel and into an SUV that would ferry him to a restaurant for a breakfast speech. He found himself sitting in the vehicle with Greenville's mayor, 33-year-old Heather McTeer Hudson, who had come to believe that the brown water was seriously harming her city's image, impeding its efforts to lure new businesses. She hoped to get rid of the color with a filtration system that several American and foreign cities had used to take care of their own brown-water problems. But struggling Greenville had no money to pay for such a system, another complication in an array of infrastructure quandaries for which Hudson was hoping to obtain federal assistance. As their 10-minute ride began, Obama said to the mayor, as she recalls, "Tell me about Greenville's needs, the Delta's needs."

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