COMO, Mississippi (CNN) -- Mary Dowden smiles when she thinks about this moment in history. At 80 years old, she's the granddaughter of a slave who was born in a cotton field outside of Como, Mississippi.



Mary Dowden, 80, is the granddaughter of a slave. Barack Obama is bringing white and blacks together, she says.



It's difficult to put into words how she feels about Barack Obama, the issues so complex for a black country girl who lost both her parents by the age of 18 and then had to work a hard-scrabble life as a sharecropper.



"I was really afraid for him, because I didn't want nobody to kill him," she says when asked about casting her ballot for Obama.



But she pauses and smiles. "I'm awfully proud of him, as a black person."  Watch "white and black is coming together" »



Did she ever think she would see this moment?



"No, I didn't," she says. "I always thought that, you know, the white was over the black, that they was the leading folks, that one nation is gonna be over another one, and that would be the white over the black. I never thought it would be a black president."



With Obama's election, CNN.com traveled to the town of Como to talk with African-Americans about their experience growing up black in Mississippi and what this moment in history means to them.



Como is a town of 1,400 people 45 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, along Interstate 55. It is a hard-hit rural community, home to a school with the dubious distinction of being among the worst-performing schools in the nation. In 2007, the IRS froze the town's bank accounts for not paying payroll taxes.



A railroad track cuts through the middle of town. Even to this day, blacks largely live on one side of the track; whites on the other side.  See the hard-scrabble life of a slave's grandson »



Dowden is a living testament to a life of struggle, sacrifice and ultimately success. When she was 10 years old, her mom cooked a dewberry pie after working the cotton fields all day. She then went to a friend's house and died.



"It was real devastating," Dowden says softly. "I was 10. My sister was 12, and we didn't know how to do nothing. And we had to take care of our little brother."



She missed one year of schooling because her father, Moses Wilson, couldn't afford schoolbooks. He died four days after she turned 18.



She had two photos of her parents, but they were lost over the years. She knows even less about her grandparents.



"All I know is, he said that his momma was sold. She was auctioned off," Dowden says. "I don't know where she was from. I don't know anything about her."



Dowden is a mother of 12. One son died when he was 3; another died when he was 47. "It was hard both ways."



Across town, a group of African-Americans have gathered at Cistern Hill Church to talk about the good times and the hard times -- and hope for a better future. They range in age from 74 to 18.  Watch "I started working when I was 6 years old" »



Aubrey "Bill" Turner, 26, perks up when talking about Obama.



"He's going to bring a sense of respect in Mississippi, that it's not just a white man's country. You can be young, you can be black, and you can do anything that you want to do," Turner says. "You do have a chance. And he's gonna put that all on the table for us."



Turner has a tattoo across his neck that reads "Mr. Ssippi." His grandfather was well-known fife musician Otha Turner, whose music was
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