She was a poor, elderly Black woman in South Carolina, living the life that her situation allowed — which was a life of modest means and constrained opportunity.

The article also notes that she had “many friends today.” This detail, small as it is, speaks to something about the social texture of her life in Blackville.

Whatever the community had thought about her in the years immediately following the alleged resurrection — the zombie rumors, the terror, the people crossing the street to avoid her — by 1955 she had apparently achieved a status not of feared outcast but of beloved local curiosity.

She was the woman who had come back, the local miracle, the person whose story people told.