A Well of Pain

They've been married 13 years, she and Corey Orsted, but the past four have been difficult, what with the upheaval of back-to-back father-daughter cancers.

Orsted, an electrician and Army veteran of Operation Desert Storm, would rather they all be together, but says, "I have to do what I have to do to support my wife."

He, too, believes the family has been discriminated against. Though he is white, he does not feel uncomfortable with his wife's talk of racism and the blame she lays at the feet of some white officials. Dickson County, population 43,156, was 4.6 percent black in the 2000 census, and Orsted does not know Dickson County well. But he knows that back in the 1990s a man in a pickup truck hollered "[epithet]-lover" at him when he saw Orsted with his black wife. So he does worry about their daughter, who has been living and going to school in Dickson since 2005.

"I don't want my daughter to hate my race or be leery of them because of these actions," Orsted says.

He calls his wife's work "awesome." When she was featured on CNN recently, he says, he felt a surge of pride to know that his family name is part of this battle.

His wife, he says, is aggressive, the kind of person who seizes the initiative.

"Anything she's done, she's been fully fledged, very focused. She makes things her mission, especially this," he says. Her mother and two sisters call Holt-Orsted obsessive, but they mean it affectionately.

This style and singular focus have angered some within her extended family who feel Holt-Orsted has taken the reins of the TCE battle too tightly.

"She caused it. I'm going to tell you right out," Lavenia Holt, the aunt who lives across Eno Road, says of the family split. That part of the Holt family is pursuing its own legal case.

Says Holt-Orsted, "I know I probably burned a lot of bridges." But that is the price she has to pay for the crusade she has chosen, she says.

"I had a minister tell me that this is a ministry for me," she says. "He said think of yourself as Moses. Do you think Moses was volunteering? You're going to have to take it this way rather than questioning why this happened to you."

Says former county commissioner England, "Sheila's been very patient in this. A lot of people look at her as a militant and an iron fist hammering all the time. But in all of us there's a time you snap.