A razor strop is ready on a barber’s chair, and the familiar blue liquids with hairbrushes in them line the mirror. A current license hangs on the wall in a shop behind a Franklin Street residence.

A piece of cardboard bears a handwritten note proclaiming that, while haircuts were once $2, they’d been bumped up to $5. They were later again bumped to $7, but that’s not on the sign.

The barber doesn’t keep regular business hours these days, but he will still cut hair for the occasional client or two. At his age, you get to pick and choose when you work.

Meet Jessie Winston, a man who without unnecessary buildup — but with a little grin — calls himself, “Natchez’s oldest barber.”

Winston has been cutting hair in Natchez since the 1930s, and Christmas Day he celebrated his 105th birthday.

“The other Sunday, the preacher asked everyone to stand up and say their age, and when I said it, the people just hollered in that church,” he said. “I don’t think anybody was expecting that.”

Born in 1910 on Rembert Street, Winston can remember Natchez before the Great War, a time when, “no one in this town had seen streets with pavement.”

“This town looked like the Wild West, with nothing but horse and buggies,” he said.

“The (county) supervisors had mules and skids, and just like you plow, they would grade the streets. Horses pulled the fire department truck. The funeral home hearse was pulled by horses.”

As a child, he took a trip to the Mississippi Delta by steamboat, he said, and he was well into adulthood when the first bridge across the Mississippi River was built at Natchez. The power plant was operated by a private company in town and fueled by piles of coal.

“I used to follow prize fighting, and we’d walk down to Main Street where The Democrat office was, and there was a man there who had this radio, and he’d sit at the open window, and there’d be a group of us who would gather around and he would lean out and tell us how the fight was going round by round,” Winston said.

In a life as long as his, one is bound to have a few brushes with history. He remembers seeing bodies stacked outside the scene of the Rhythm Night Club after the infamous 1940 fire that killed hundreds.

“I never thought I would have seen that,” he said. “I had gone uptown to pay some bills, and I stopped by there to drink a couple of beers. That was Monday, and on Tuesday there was a fire that burned up more than 200 people.”

Winston has been around the country — New Orleans, Chicago, places like that — but most of his life has been spent in Natchez. A few of those years — 10 to 15 — were spent working part-time for the Armstrong Tire Company. Somewhere along the way the hair cutting business went from giving trims inside a house to a barbershop in town to his current location.

And while he’s got plenty of history to look back on, Winston is living these days in the present.

He still tends his garden and takes care of the landscaping in front of the house, and when the banister on the small back deck broke recently, he was the one to fix it.

“He just can’t sit still,” said Helen Winston, his youngest daughter. “I tell him, ‘Daddy, you need to sit down,’ and he says, ‘If I sit down, I will go down.’”

Long life seems to run in the Winston family, Helen said, because Jessie’s mother lived to 101 and his sister made it to 103.

He’s lived a good full life, Winston said, and as best he can tell the secret to living as long as he has is that he eats lots of fruit and vegetables.

And 105 feels pretty good.

“I feel fine,” he said leaning back and lifting his legs, “I can kick these feet up yet.”