She Started at Sixteen

She came out to the farm the spring it was at its most alive.

May of 2025. The dahlias and peonies were in their third-year prime. The walk-in cooler was running cold in the workshop we'd just finished, the Chief Ladiga Trail kiosk was up at the road, and the rows ran green all the way back to the treeline behind the Walmart. I did not know yet that any of it was going to end. Nobody did. That is the part I keep going back to.

She stepped out of the car and went straight for my daughter. "Come here," she said. "I'm a hugger." She had her arms around her before she had shaken a single adult hand. I started to introduce her the way you introduce a mayor to your family. This is Mayor Smith. She waved it off. "Call me Ciara." We cut her an armful of flowers to take home.

She walked the rows while Heather and I talked about the trail porch we wanted to build, the thing we could see so clearly we could almost stand in it. She stopped at the edge of the field and looked out a long time. She said, "This is so peaceful out here. I can see it. Y'all's vision is beautiful and powerful."

I have thought about that one sentence more than she will ever know. I can see it. She was the mayor of a city that was about to change my life by staying exactly what it was, and she stood at the end of a row and saw the thing that was not built yet. That is a specific kind of attention. She had it before she said a word to me. She spent it on my daughter first.

I was in a room with her one other time, at Camp Lee, when Kyle interviewed her in front of a group. The two of them sat in rocking chairs by the big stone fireplace, the lake going gray in the windows behind them, an American flag on one side and a Christian flag on the other. She was the same person in that rocking chair that she had been at the end of my field. She looked at whoever was talking like they were the only thing happening in the building.

I want to tell you where she learned it.

The Room She Grew Up In

Before she could read, her grandmother brought her to 17th Street Baptist Church to hear grown people talk about how a city changes.

Gertrude Nettles raised her. The meetings were SCLC. Ciara was five. She sat in pews that had held Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, that had held Martin Luther King Jr. when he came through, and his father before him. The pastor through her childhood, Rev. Nimrod Q. Reynolds, had been beaten by a mob in 1963 on the same afternoon a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. He came back the next day. The church kept the meeting going.

In 1964 the ministers at 17th Street took out a one-page ad in the local paper that read, We want our freedom and we want it now. They called it the Anniston Manifesto.

That is the room she grew up in. Not the metaphorical room. The actual one. A child small enough to need a booster, listening to the people who had already decided that the city she would one day run was going to have to answer for itself.

City Hall at Sixteen

Her first job was a clerk's desk in the Anniston Finance Department. She was sixteen.

I keep coming back to that. You can spend a long time in a city and never see the inside of City Hall except for the lobby. She had a desk there before she had a driver's license. She filed budget paper while other people her age were stocking shelves at the Walmart on Highway 21. She watched a city run itself from a chair the public wasn't allowed to sit in.

Her mother, Christina Wolff, said it years later, at the victory party, after the votes were counted and the dancing had started.

A mother says a lot of things. Some of them turn out to be true the way prophecies are true, by repetition until somebody believes them. This one she said often enough that her daughter believed it before anyone asked her to.

After Anniston High School in 2017 she went to Spelman. Her freshman year she went door to door for Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta. The next year Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 list and flew her to Boston. At nineteen she was interning for Congressman Hank Johnson in Washington. The year after that he nominated her for the Congressional Black Caucus Institute training program.

She graduated from Spelman in 2020. She came back to Anniston.

The Ward 3 Race

The seat she came back for was held by Ben Little.

Little had been on the council a long time. In 2012 a Calhoun County judge convicted him of giving direct orders to a city employee. He had told someone to take a surveillance DVD out of a supervisor's desk. The judge removed him from office two and a half days before his term was set to expire. He came back. In 2018 he was indicted on ethics charges for voting on a nuisance resolution that involved properties he owned. He came back from that too.

In August of 2020 he ran for re-election in Ward 3 and Ciara Smith forced him into a runoff. She was twenty-one. On October 6 she beat him 67 percent to 33. She was sworn in on November 2, the youngest person ever elected to office in the city of Anniston. The council named her vice mayor that same week.

She would beat Ben Little again, five years later, in a five-way race for mayor. He finished third. He got 12 percent.

Twice he tried to hold ground. Twice she took it.

The Room Where Jay Resigned

On October 15, 2024, Ward 1 councilman Jay Jenkins waited until the end of a meeting the Anniston Star called "somewhat routine," and then he resigned. He had been on the council for fifteen years. He gave no notice. The other members were stunned.

The photograph the Star ran the next morning showed councilwoman Millie Harris hugging him. Behind them, in the background of the frame, was Ciara Smith. The caption named her. Vice Mayor. In the room.

Lewis Downing was appointed to fill the seat.

She has been in every room where the next thing happens. Her predecessor's resignation. Her successor's appointment. The morning the Star picked which photograph to run. She does not appear in the foreground of any of those frames. She was studying them.

What She Walked Into

Jack Draper resigned the mayor's office on May 1, 2025. He had served eight and a half years. He said he needed to focus on his family, his health, and his career.

On May 6 the council appointed Ciara Smith mayor by unanimous vote. Gloria Floyd, Calhoun County's first African American female attorney, administered the oath. Floyd had taught her. She called the moment "profoundly moving."

At the same meeting, during public comment, a man named Joseph Giri stood up and addressed the new mayor about Monsanto's PCB legacy on the city's Westside. The $700 million settlement. The billions in cancer claims still moving through the courts. The herbicide the city was still spraying on its own lawns. He did not soften it. He listed the chemistry and the case law.

Smith had been sworn in less than an hour. She thanked him. She said environmental responsibility would be a mandate of the office.

The room the city raised her in was answering to itself again. She was on the other side of the dais now.

The August Vote and the November Oath

She ran for the seat in her own right that summer. Five candidates, including the sitting city manager and Ben Little. She avoided a runoff. She took 57.31 percent on the first ballot.

The victory party was at the Anniston City Meeting Center. She waited until after eight to declare it. Her supporters were dancing. In November she was formally inaugurated to the full four-year term, the first time the office had been handed to her by the whole city instead of by the seven people on the council.

In the alumni profile Jacksonville State ran that summer, she said this about the ceiling:

There were, in fact, some people who beat on it. Rev. Reynolds. The ministers who signed the Manifesto. Gloria Floyd. The grandmother who carried her to those Sunday meetings before she had to be carried. Hank Thomas and Charles Person, the Freedom Riders she had stood beside in 2021 as master of ceremonies for the 60th anniversary of the bus burning on the edge of this town. She was twenty-two then. She is twenty-seven now. The math of the city's history is not abstract to her.

The Record So Far

A year in, the things she has done are mostly unglamorous, which is how you know they are real.

She negotiated the sale of the city-owned Regional Medical Center to Orlando Health, a 375-bed hospital and the largest thing this city owns, announced April 7, 2026 after what she called "months of intentional work behind the scenes." She toured the Anniston Army Depot in April to sit with the other engine that keeps this economy running. She raised starting salaries for police officers and firefighters in the budget. Her husband, Jamel Roston, is an officer in the Anniston Police Department, which she does not raise often, and which the people who run against her have not yet figured out how to use against her. She moved federal block-grant money into blight removal. She got the Barber Terrace public housing transformation moving. She put townhouses in South Anniston.

Not all of it is smooth. In the spring of 2026 the council split 4 to 1 over keeping Matthew Caballero as city manager, with Julie Moss voting no and arguing the city should run a full professional search. Smith defended the arrangement as a way to "evaluate his leadership in real time while preserving the option of a broader search later." A twenty-seven-year-old mayor with a divided council, making the case for patience. She has been in the room for enough of these to know they do not resolve on victory night.

When she announced for the seat in her own right, her platform named four things: economic development, infrastructure, housing stability, and what she called "government transparency and public engagement." In practice that last one means town halls and explaining the budget to people who have never been asked to read one.

She said something at that launch that I keep going back to.

In another mouth that would be a piece of furniture. From her it is a description of what her grandmother did with her at five.

What She Saw

Her visit ended up in a list I wrote later, in the hospital, the fall everything came down. I was lying in a psychiatric ward inventorying what was gone. The Anniston Star articles about the farm. The mayor coming out to see it. My tools. I set her name in a column of losses without thinking twice about it.

What that list did not know is that she was there for the other end of it too. When the farm was gone and I was casting around for work, I wrote to her. I don't remember everything she said back. I remember she told me God was going to get us through it, and that she would be praying for me. A mayor has a hundred more useful things to hand a man asking after a job. She handed me that.

But she did not come to the farm at the end. She came at the height. She stood in a field that was about to disappear and told us she could see the thing we were building. She was wrong about the timeline, the way everyone who loved that place was wrong about the timeline, me most of all. She was not wrong about the vision.

This October, Heather runs a bridal show at the Anniston Museum of Art, in a building the city owns, in the city Ciara leads. The Bloom Bar we built for a farm that no longer exists will finally get used, indoors, in a room the city makes possible, because Heather works for that city now. Sierra saw a porch that never got built. She could not have known the flowers would end up under museum lights three years and one collapse later, in her city. Neither could I.

She crouched to the child first. Then she looked at the field. I have decided that is the whole of it, the order she did those two things in. A city could do worse than be run by someone who does them in that order.

Ciara Smith-Roston has spoken about her own story at more length than I can here, including on the Called Coffee podcast in early 2026, where she talked about purpose, perseverance, and calling. This profile is one neighbor's account of one afternoon, set against the public record. The illustration is mine, generated with AI.