Two years ago, Wilson, 68, lost the final spark in a 14-year campaign against failing eyesight, the last speck of light leaving him forever.
He's been through the suicide thing, through the search for a lifeline and has come to a point where he can bow his head at his Thanksgiving meal today to talk truly to God about what he's thankful for.
"I'm thankful for my wife that sticks by my side and my daughter that drives me around," Wilson says. "I'm thankful for my [National Federation of the Blind] chapter and that they believe in me so much."
To appreciate the depth of his words, you need to understand the soul they're coming from and the history of the voice speaking them.
Wilson was born in Williamsburg County in 1942 and grew up in a time when a whole group of people never called him anything but "Boy."
"Boy, you want something to eat?" he recalls being summoned from the back door of a house where he had been raking leaves all day. The offer, which he refused, was for food scraped from the plates of those inside, to be eaten on the porch. "What's the matter with you boy, ain't you hungry?"
Wilson shared his rural home with four sisters and four brothers, a father who set the rules and a mother who battled to give him a sense of self worth.
He recalls his father telling him that if he ever got in trouble for defending himself, he would be there to help him. If he was caught stealing, though, his father told him not to come home.
He recalls his mother's hands on his shoulders, her eyes boring into his, telling him he was as good as anybody else, no matter the taunts they threw at him.
Back in those days, Wilson says, Williamsburg County "was so poor a crow would have to carry his own corn."
The only work he and his siblings could get to help maintain the family was in agriculture, hard work, and the maximum pay was $3 a day.
"I knew I could handle more than $3 a day," he says. "I knew I was worth more than $3 a day."
$1.25/hour in Rochester
He saved what money he could and when he was 16, he went to the bus station in Hemingway to get a ticket to a better life. Wilson recalls studying the schedule on the wall while the man behind the counter badgered him about what he wanted, where he wanted to go. The man got tired of waiting on Wilson and turned to the customer behind him.
"Rochester," the man said in a deep voice as he handed over his money, Wilson recalls.
"Rochester," Wilson then mimicked in as deep a voice as he could muster.
Two days later, the bus pulled into the station in northwestern New York and Wilson disembarked into an October chill unlike that in South Carolina. He had $40 in his pocket.
He asked a cab driver where the black people lived and got in, stopping the journey short of his destination because the meter ticked to $10. He walked the rest of the way to a rooming house and plunked down another $15 for a week's rent, learning at the same time that a job was possible if he was waiting outside the car wash on Main Street when it opened the next morning.
He rose early and recalls a long, roundabout walk to Main Street. But he was there by 5 a.m. and was hired at $1.25 an hour to help wipe down cars after they emerged from the wash.
"I said 'Wow!'" he recalls. "A buck and a quarter an hour!"
Eventually, he got a job with Eastman Kodak, where he stayed for 30 years, met and married his wife, Jerlynn, started a family and built a life that defines the American dream.
He had a motorcycle, he went deep sea fishing, he loved to hunt, he detailed vans and entered them in competitions. He bought 80 acres with a cabin where he, his family and friends could share good times and bond.
The Wilsons raised their children - two sons, four daughters - the way he was raised. Well-defined rules. Copious love.
Glaucoma scare
He had a scare from glaucoma, but it was deemed dormant in 1973.
In 1993, he went to a doctor for help to stop tremors in his face and paralysis in his arms and legs. The doctor diagnosed him with Bell's palsy and started a regimen of steroids.
"Everything's going dark," Wilson recalls telling the doctor during the treatment. "I need to see an eye doctor."
Fine, said the physician, but wait until the steroids have run their course.
When the eye doctor examined him, Wilson recalls, she became furious. Wilson didn't have Bell's palsy, she said, he had suffered a stroke.
And the physician treating him for the palsy hadn't seen the glaucoma in Wilson's medical history.
Steroids will reawaken glaucoma and put it on fast forward.
Within three months, Wilson had lost the sight in his right eye and the peripheral vision in his left eye.
Because of the loss, he had to retire from Eastman Kodak and get out of a security business he owned with an associate because he could no longer accurately fire the gun he needed to carry. He had the retirement income, but lost the $12,000 to $15,000 he made each year in his own business.
"I thought it was devastating," Wilson says.
Sitting around doing nothing, though, was not an option.
"The measure of a man is that he has got to stand on his own two feet and make his mark in the world," he says.
So he bought a one-ton pickup truck and trailer and started making regular runs to South Carolina, hauling fresh produce and seafood back north.
The trips reacquainted him with how much warmer and slower life was in South Carolina than New York, and he began to talk with Jerlynn about relocating. A native of Florida, she resisted, partly because of her own memories but mostly because she worried about leaving friends, a paid-for home and support systems.
The sight in his left eye continued to deteriorate. Half of it was gone by 1997. By the time the Wilsons moved into their home on the golf course near Conway in 1999, he could no longer drive. He could still read some, watch a bit of television, but his sight kept sliding.
Gone for good
He was told at an eye appointment in 2007 that the nerves to his eyes were so damaged that there was no chance he would keep any vision. No hope.
He estimates he had 3 percent of his sight left at that time. He remembers it shrank even more, to a point where he had only what he describes as laser vision. If you were facing him head-on, he could see you. If you moved at all, you were gone.
"All I had to do was cough, sneeze, and everything went black," he says of episodes that began to plague him.
Then, one day in 2008, there was no recovery.
"I panicked," he said. "I used to wake up at night tearing at my face. It was like you had a mask on."
Wilson joined the Conway chapter of the National Federation of the Blind before he was totally blind. He got more serious with the organization after the 2007 diagnosis and now says his involvement with the organization played a big part in saving his life.
It wasn't an easy journey and the chapter work wasn't his only lifeline.
"My thought was what do I have to live for now?" he says. "Honest to God, I wanted to cash out."
Anger enveloped him like a cold blanket, preventing any human warmth from entering his dark new world. He remembers the day he sat hopeless on his bed with a .357 caliber pistol in his lap. He called his pastor, who stopped him from raising the gun and pulling the trigger. He began to accept help from Jerlynn, who he says is 150 percent of the reason for him making it this far "in a land I've never walked before."
He became president of the Conway chapter, increased membership to 20, took the post as Area One director for the state chapter and was named to head its fundraising committee.
He's proud of all that. But still, he says, each day is a challenge, a fight between the good memories of the good past and the intimidating fears of the unknown future.
"This is the only thing I can't whip," he says. "I wrassle with it every day. It's a struggle every day."
He wants to be able to walk out of his house and look around. Again.
Jerlynn wants him to get out more, spread his light further than the Federation. But he thinks his lack of formal education limits what others will see if he offers himself.
The Fixer
"He's one of the most impressive people I've met in recent memory," says Conway City Administrator Bill Graham.
David Houck, director of the S.C. Federation of the Blind, who's been legally blind since he was 16, says Wilson's future is limited only by what he will try to do.
Jerlynn Wilson still thinks of her husband as The Fixer, as she always has.
Wilson speaks with pride of his recent presentation before the Conway City Council, where he successfully sought money to help send chapter members to a national convention in Florida.
He impressed council members so much that even in a very tight budget year, they gave $500 to the effort. When Graham called Wilson to give him the news, Graham found himself lingering on the phone, enjoying the conversation.
"It's very uplifting to talk with him," Graham says.
Wilson says there are bright spots even on a completely dark road.
His sense of direction, always good, has uncannily stayed with him, and he routinely can tell Jerlynn which way to turn when they are driving together. He's learned to know where the sun is by the way it heats up one part or another of his face. He can feel how the space inside his home is different from that in the neighborhood outside and how an open field feels more spacious than the neighborhood.
He says he can pretty well gauge a person's height, weight and even hair color in a handshake and a bit of conversation.
Houck says blindness is to him what he imagines a lost leg is to a veteran. You always miss it, but the presence of the loss in your mind diminishes as increased activity takes over conscious thoughts.
It can be an anchor that stops movement or it can be a solitary tear that dries on a cheek. Wilson, you just know, is one who will win. One who will create a new identity once again that fits the definition of a strong man.
"I dream of hunting wild boars down here with my pistol," he says. "I love living on the edge."
