(Plains) “President Carter will always be alive in Plains”, breathes Philip Kurland to AFP. In this town in the state of Georgia, in the southeastern United States, there is only Jimmy Carter that the inhabitants cherish more than peanuts.
The 98-year-old former American president, now in palliative care at home, has made this small rural town, of which he is a native, famous.
Tourists and swarms of journalists have swept there according to his accomplishments, in particular when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, or during visits from high dignitaries like Joe Biden.
“It’s important to know how involved he was in local life – you couldn’t go to a meeting without him or Rosalynn being involved,” says Mr. Kurland behind the counter in his gift shop, about Jimmy Carter and his wife.
PHOTO JOHN BAZEMORE, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Jimmy Carter
Right in the center of the town of 600 inhabitants, this shop is in a building that once belonged to an uncle of Jimmy Carter.
In Plains, in the heart of the American Peanut Belt, visitors can enjoy peanut ice cream before discovering fields of this traditional crop as far as the eye can see, along dusty roads.
But it is above all the former Democratic leader who makes Plains famous.
The oldest American president still alive is present everywhere: from the sign that welcomes visitors to the city of “our 39e President of the United States”, to the peanut farm of his childhood, passing by his old high school, two places moreover managed by the service of the American national parks.
Just like the small railway depot that served as headquarters for his 1976 presidential campaign.
“Our Hero”
The modest residence of the Carters is only a two-minute drive from the center, but a solid fence and agents from the Secret Service, which protects high American personalities, keep onlookers at bay. It, too, was bequeathed to the National Parks Service, and it is there that the President and his wife will be buried.
Around the corner, under the much less touristy Dollar General, locals are doing their shopping, as the Carter couple sometimes used to do.
Kelvin Sims once overheard them having fun quibbling over canned tuna. “He was coming into the neighborhood, he was telling the Secret Service to stay back,” said the 47-year-old man, outside the brick store, near a propane tank, his black Chevrolet in the background.
“I consider him a friend because that’s what he gave off to people,” he says about Jimmy Carter. He also mentions that his grandmother Rosa Brown looked after the Carters’ grandchildren.
As for the imminent death of the child of the country: “We all know that this day would come. He’ll come for everybody, but I wasn’t thinking for Jimmy Carter […] because he was our hero,” he says.
Jan Williams, friend of the former president, knew him when she was the teacher of her daughter Amy in CM1 in 1976.
More recently, she helped contain the crowds that flocked to see Jimmy Carter teach catechism on Sundays at the small Maranatha Baptist Church, even after he turned 90.
“Ready to leave this world”
The red-brick building with a white steeple stands near several rows of pecan trees on a road leading out of Plains.
Jimmy Carter was very clear with the fact “that he was ready to leave this world”, reports to AFP, Jan Williams, in front of the church.
“Palliative care is a scary term, it’s almost the equivalent of the word death. And he is not yet,” she adds, believing that the man who has already overcome brain cancer at the age of 90 will still be there for some time.
A few steps from the Maranatha Baptist Church, on a patch of grass near a gas station, sits a four-meter-tall peanut statue, installed after a Carter campaign event in 1976.
She presents a broad smile, which resembles that of Jimmy Carter. At his feet a bouquet of pink flowers was already placed on Tuesday.