Road trip: In Mississippi, love in the time of coronavirus

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Her voice cracked as she spoke from her hospital bed. “I want to go home,” she pleaded.

More than 40 miles away, her husband sat in their living room, looking intently into his phone as they spoke on a video call, trying to soothe her. Bonnie Bishop had been in the hospital since early July. She’d been on a ventilator. She’d had surgery to put a tube down her throat. She’d been in a coma for six weeks. Sometimes, it was just too much, and on this October evening, she started to weep silently.

“You are coming home,” Mike Bishop, 63, said firmly. He seemed to be speaking as much to himself as to his wife. “You know you are.”

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This is a love story.

It’s a story about coronavirus, the people it strikes down, and a big quiet house outside of Jackson, Mississippi. It’s about those who take COVID-19 seriously, those who don’t, and how that divide breaks uncomfortably along racial lines.

Mostly it’s about Bonnie and Mike Bishop, an African American couple who met more than 25 years ago when she was organizing a basketball game to support an adopt-a-school program run by AT&T. She worked there until retiring a couple years ago. He still works there as a digital technician.

I met Mike on an Associated Press road trip across America that three of us are taking to try to make sense of a year like no other, with a global illness, protests over race and virulent politics. We went to talk to a pastor in Jackson about election issues. He told us about Mike and Bonnie.

Mike is tall and handsome, with a beard going grey and a gentle voice that’s almost musical. He radiates decency. It’s impossible not to like him.

For him, Bonnie is everything. She’s the woman in oversized sunglasses who hates to have her picture taken....