Christopher Columbus (C.C.) Davenport, Eliza’s brother, originally published Looking Backward: Memoirs of the Early Settlement of Morehouse Parish in 1911, as a compilation of weekly columns he’d had written while serving as editor of the Mer Rouge Democrat. Lida’s second cousin, Tommy Davenport Rankin, gave us copies of the memoirs, which the local Lions Club had recently reprinted in pamphlet form. Tommy still farms cotton and soybeans on lands that the Davenport family has held for nearly 200 years in Morehouse Parish.

As reminiscences of early life on the Louisiana frontier and as a record of Lida’s family history, C.C.’s memoirs by themselves would be a wonderful treasure of local history and genealogy. But the final chapter reveals why they are so much more than that.

Chapter XV, “Life on the Plantation When the Negroes Were Slaves,” represents C.C.’s careful effort to portray how humanely his father, James Barlow Davenport, treated his 110 slaves on the family plantation. C.C. writes that his father provided the slaves with good housing, food, clothing and medical care. He gave them small plots of land for gardening and paid them cash for some of the cotton they picked. He provided a children’s nursery, and he permitted religious services and marriages among the slaves. After James died in 1858, C.C., Eliza and their brothers took charge of the plantation and even added a “plantation negro band.”

C.C. goes on to write:

There was no law against the whipping of slaves, but it was seldom done, and, when done it was generally inflicted because of fusses—quarrels among themselves. All disagreements and troubles among the slaves were settled by the owners of the slaves. The courts were not troubled by negro trials. It was a rare thing to see a negro in jail or in a penitentiary…As a rule, masters were kind to their slaves. Occasionally there were cruel masters and, occasionally there were bad negroes that required severe punishment.

He concludes:

Those were happy days that can never be recalled, but it was Southern life and the negroes of that day were happier, much happier than I have ever seen them since those days.

And so C.C. Davenport sums up in his memoirs the near universal attitude of Southern whites at the beginning of the 20th century, as they attempted to justify the system of slavery that had existed within their own lifetimes—and in his case within his own life. Although he doesn’t acknowledge it, 1911 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Since he ended the memoirs in 1860, he also doesn’t mention that he and his brothers all served in the Confederate army. None were killed in the war, and C.C. went on to become a successful farmer, state representative and active civic leader. But did he don his old uniform of the Twelfth Louisiana Infantry, Army of Tennessee, to commemorate the anniversary? Did his rosy reflections on his own slaves help to perpetuate the myth of the “Lost Cause”—a romantic view of the Confederacy and its defeat—that swept the agrarian South during Reconstruction and reached a crescendo with the 50th anniversary celebrations? Was his pen—innocently I believe—an instrument of Jim Crow? History and family lore don’t point to anyone’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, for example.

From the vantage point of another century’s passage, I prefer simply to point out the irony of his writing in 1911. I also hasten to note that his sister, Eliza Davenport Cotten, and her descendants quietly but substantively contributed to Eliza’s adopted city of Birmingham. This includes Lida’s family standing against racism during the city’s darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement. In their journeys Americans—and Southerners in particular—have passed through time as well as space. Along the way, thankfully, they tossed many old ideas into the rushing streams of history.

We arrived in Mer Rouge on a blistering hot afternoon. Our first stop was the small Episcopal church, where we hoped to find some of Lida’s family names—Davenport, Cotten, Douglass—on the handful of nearby cemetery monuments. No luck there. But then I noticed that the main street was Davenport Avenue, on which stood Davenport Insurance and, on the brick wall of another building, a mural depicting figures under a sign for the Davenport cotton gin. We were in the right place.

The helpful clerk in the main street pharmacy directed us to the local library, where she thought we could obtain a copy of a book about the early history of Mer Rouge and Morehouse Parish. She then phoned Tommy Davenport Rankin, whom she thought would have a copy too. Remarkably, we were there the one day of the week the library was open, and she reached Tommy on the first try. The town patriarch, Bill Davenport, was in a bank board meeting, but we met up with him in the two-seat barber shop later. Tommy and Bill turned out to be Lida’s second cousins.

Christopher Columbus (C.C.) Davenport, Eliza’s brother, originally published Looking Backward: Memoirs of the Early Settlement of Morehouse Parish in 1911, as a compilation of weekly columns he’d had written while serving as editor of the Mer Rouge Democrat. Tommy eagerly gave us copies, which the local Lions Club had recently reprinted in pamphlet form.

The Davenport family journey begins with Eliza and C.C.’s grandfather, Josiah Davenport, who charted his own remarkable course by ocean, river and land in 1806. Born in 1771 in Providence, Rhode Island, Josiah took to the sea at the age of 21. He owned two ships, the Brunswick and the Cleopatra, which plied the cotton trade between Savannah and Liverpool for 14 years. But in 1806 he sold the Cleopatra in Savannah to a man who paid him partially in cash and partially in African slaves. Journeying to New Orleans with his slaves, he struck a bargain with Abram Morehouse, a Kentucky entrepreneur who had contracted with Baron de Bastrop to settle a large tract of land in the territory’s northeastern region. Morehouse borrowed a sizable sum of Davenport’s money, then persuaded him to use his slaves to pull a pirogue full of supplies up the Mississippi and Ouachita River to what is now the region around Monroe and Bastrop. Josiah desired to return to the sea, but when Morehouse defaulted on the loan, the Rhode Islander found himself not only a reluctant slaveholder, but now also a cotton farmer and landlocked Louisianan. The area they settled became known as Prairie Mer Rouge, or Mer Rouge for short. C.C.’s memoirs don’t explain the reason for the name. But Tommy claims that either the local Choctaws or the white settlers, looking back east from “the first hill in Louisiana west of the Mississippi,” saw vast fields of red clover waving in the breeze, looking much like a sea of red.

The remainder of C.C.’s memoirs describes the local families and life on the frontier. Josiah himself was known for wearing buckskin until his death in 1835. In about 1858 his granddaughter Eliza (who also went by the nickname Lida) enrolled in college in Cincinnati. Her father James Davenport passed away that year, leaving the family farm to her, C.C. and their two brothers. But the outbreak of the Civil War forced her to return to Mer Rouge. (C.C.’s memoirs also end in 1860.) She later married Robert Cotten, a local physician. It is believed that in the 1870s Robert and Eliza migrated to the new city of Birmingham, Alabama, where Robert treated victims of the city’s early cholera epidemic. His name first appears in the 1889 Birmingham City Directory. They also played a role in the founding of the Church of the Advent, the city’s first Episcopal church.

Before Lida and I left Mer Rouge, Tommy drove us past the farmhouse that Lida’s family had photographed in 1951. He said the original Davenport house stood somewhere behind it, which got Lida to thinking about doing some amateur archaeology in the fields there. Tommy then took us to the top of the “first hill in Louisiana.” There in the town cemetery he showed us the final resting place of several Davenports and other founding families of Mer Rouge. You can’t see red clover any longer from this hill, only fields of corn, cotton and soybeans. It’s an even longer view—about 300 miles, I’d guess—to see the Red Mountain that overlooks what became Eliza’s new home, the Magic City. Over time their children, including Lida’s grandmother, Clara, settled on the side of the mountain in what are now the Forest Park and Highland Park neighborhoods. Lida herself, I think, feels more akin to the forests and hills. She even attended the University of the South, up on a mountain in Tennessee. But driving across the Louisiana flatlands that day, in a heavy rain towards the Mississippi Delta, she said she wants to return to Mer Rouge someday. Maybe get some Davenport soil under her finger nails and keep digging up her roots.

Coming Soon: From the “Red Sea” to the Red Mountain: An Afterward

On July 10 Lida and I attended the opening reception for AHF’s SUPER institute at Spring Hill College in Mobile on “The Alabama Coast: A Sense of Place.” We decided to take a few days to explore areas of Louisiana and Mississippi that we had never visited together, including the charming antebellum Mississippi River towns of St. Francisville, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi. But our ultimate destination was to be the tiny northeast Louisiana community of Mer Rouge. On the first leg we visited historic Oakley Plantation outside St. Francisville, where John James Audubon spent several months working on his “Birds of America” masterpieces. (Oakley is an impeccably restored and interpreted Federal-style home and outbuildings deep in semi-tropical forest. I highly recommend it.) From there we drove along famed Highway 61 to Natchez, where we toured magnificent Stanton Hall (1858) and, from our hotel room at night, watched tugs push long barges up the river.

After 24 hours in such stereotypical Southern splendor, our expectations for the farming town of Mer Rouge — the ancestral home of one side of Lida’s family — were admittedly tempered. No one from the family had been to Mer Rouge in 60 years, when someone took a black-and-white snapshot of trees partially blocking the view of a nondescript farmhouse in the distance. That was our only real image of the town, and it didn’t suggest much to compete with the charming areas we had just left. Moreover, what could we expect to find in a Louisiana burg named for a body of water in the Middle East — the Red Sea?

Still, what Mer Rouge had going for itself, as far as we were concerned, was an authentic connection to us, especially in the person of Eliza Davenport, Lida’s great-grandmother and namesake. Eliza’s hand-painted photographic portrait hangs in our dining room, and Lida has her schoolgirl songbook. Frances Robb, Alabama’s expert on historic photographs, had dated Eliza’s portrait to ca. 1858-60, when we knew she was in college in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Click here to view the portrait.) We also knew that somehow she had made it to Birmingham in the late 19th century. But it took our visit to her hometown in Morehouse Parish to put her and all the Davenports into a more vivid picture than just an image in a frame or names on a family tree.

Coming Soon: Part II of From the “Red Sea” to the Red Mountain

By Bob Stewart, AHF executive director

Compared to railroads, riverboats and covered wagons, hitchhiking doesn’t hold a lofty place in America’s transportation history. But there’s no doubt of its place in popular culture. Think of Jack Kerouac (On the Road), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), and Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), to name just three writers who have included hitchhiking in their classic works. Science fiction writers have even described interstellar hitchhiking (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and inter-dimensional hitchhiking (Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice). Add to these literary works the many references to hitchhiking in music and film, and it’s safe to say that the lone traveler thumbing a ride on an interstate ramp or a dusty two-lane highway will remain an icon of the American imagination.

Fortunately for my generation, the golden age of hitchhiking on a mass scale occurred when some of us needed it most—the 1960s and early 1970s. Not that we were penniless or homeless. But in much of the country, hitchhiking was simply an accepted mode of travel without having to invest in a personal vehicle. Until I bought my first car in 1974, I relied on the outstretched thumb for a good part of my travels and transportation during my first two years of college. In the Five College area of Massachusetts (Amherst-Hampshire-Mount Holyoke-Smith-UMass), a reliable, free bus system allowed you to easily move around from campus to campus for classes, parties, etc. But the area was also filled with students and “townies” offering equally reliable, free—and safe—rides for the asking. You could stand outside my fraternity house on Route 9 and catch a lift to virtually any local community, and even farther destinations such as New York and Boston, as quickly as you could catch a bus. So everybody hitched, even women.

Some of my most memorable hitchhikes included:
• A series of rides with my fellow Alabamian, Rik Williams, to the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire during our first Thanksgiving break. One ride was in the back of a pickup during a driving snowfall.
• Standing alone with my thumb out on I-95 in the notorious South Bronx area of NYC. That I jumped into the cab of a semi shows how desperate I was to get off that stretch of highway.
• A college chum and I being picked up on the Bessemer Superhighway by another friend’s mother and sister after hitchhiking from Nashville (having already bummed a nonstop ride from Massachusetts to the Music City). They were so shocked to see us on the side of the road that they actually stopped and took us to Tuscaloosa! We were undoubtedly the first and last hitchhikers that either of them ever picked up!

After I acquired my own automobile, I regularly returned the favor by picking up hitchhikers myself. I even gave a ride to three total strangers from Boston to San Francisco—and back for another one.

There must be an “invincibility delusion” gene among 21-year-old males, which leads them to not think twice about catching a ride from a bearded guy in a baseball cap driving a Peterbilt—or eagerly stopping for him when he’s the one with his thumb out. That gene became dormant in the late 1970s after a few well-publicized killings of and by hitchhikers. Young male and female hitchhikers finally bought cars, got married and began raising children for whom hitchhiking was absolutely verboten—even if it meant buying them their own cars. (Perhaps the invincibility delusion gene has reemerged in recent years with the explosion of extreme sports.)

According to British sociologists Graeme Chesters and David Smith in a 2001 paper, “The Neglected Art of Hitch-hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability,” (http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/chesters.html), hitchhiking isn’t likely to return on a widespread scale, despite nostalgia, charity, and young people’s passion for adventure and the environment. Most folks view the risk as too high, and they have a greater variety of transportation options anyway. Those occasional souls on the side of the road with a handmade sign reading “New Orleans” or “need food and a ride” aren’t your father’s hitchhikers. Give them a couple of dollars, but let them catch a lift with another Good Samaritan besides you. Nor would I advise hitchhiking as an efficient method of, say, getting to that important business meeting in Atlanta. Amtrak—or even a bicycle—might be faster.

Our executive director, Bob Stewart, recently offered his thoughts on the tragedies of that day in an editorial published in The Birmingham News on Sunday, May 8, 2011.

To read the full article, please click here.

We at the Alabama Humanities Foundation hope you and your loved ones are safe, healthy, and beginning to heal after this natural disaster.

As February—Black History Month—turns to March—Women’s History Month—it’s worth noting that three women played key roles in recording the African-American experience in rural Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through oral history, photography and art, they captured a way of life defined by deep poverty and Jim Crow segregation, but rich in stories, music, religion and strong family ties.

Arguably the most famous of these women was Ruby Pickens Tartt of Livingston (1880-1974). Daughter of a prominent Black Belt cotton grower, she became captivated at an early age by the black community surrounding her in Sumter County. She attended Alabama State Normal College (now the University of West Alabama), studying under the progressive educator Julia Tutwiler. She later attended the prestigious Chase School of Art in New York, where she studied under the realist painter William Merritt Chase. The combination of her early interest in the people of the Black Belt, her art training and financial need, led Tartt to accept a job with the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. In 1936 she was appointed chair of the local Federal Writers’ Project in Sumter County, whose responsibilities included accompanying the ethnomusicologist John Lomax to record folk songs for the Library of Congress. Between the two, they compiled a large collection of recordings of songs and interviews with ex-slaves. Among them was the local cook Vera Hall Ward, who is now considered among the most important folk, blues and spirituals singers of the 20th century. The online Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) includes Lomax’s recording of Vera Hall singing “Railroad Bill.”

Instead of using a tape recorder, Mary Morgan Keipp (1875-1961) documented life in the Black Belt with a different instrument—a camera. A native of Selma, Keipp trained in the Northeast to become a nurse-anesthetist. Like Tartt, she was also exposed to the visual arts while away from Alabama. Between 1899 and 1904, Keipp exhibited her photographs, which she made on trips home to Selma, with some of the greatest photographers in America, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Thomas Eakins. She returned permanently to Selma in 1904 and ceased exhibiting. As photography scholar Frances Robb writes in her EOA entry on Keipp: “Although some of Keipp’s photographs were publicly exhibited and probably interpreted across a spectrum of racial attitudes, no comic or denigrating elements are evident in her work. Because her photographic activity was not reported in Selma newspapers and was completely unknown outside her family at her death, her images were apparently not intended to influence Alabamians’ ideas about race and culture. Instead, they are most appropriately viewed as Keipp’s personal appreciation of rural and small-town Alabama life and a means of artistic and perhaps social discovery.”

The last of the three women, who documented African American life in postbellum Alabama, was Maria Howard Weeden of Huntsville (1846-1905). Born a generation earlier than Tartt and Keipp, Weeden also studied art—not in the North but from the successful local portraitist William Frye. But her education and youth were profoundly interrupted by the Civil War. Her relatively prosperous family was forced to flee Huntsville when Union troops occupied the city in 1862. When they returned after the war, they were financially ruined. To supplement the family income Howard (as she was called), began producing hand-painted greeting cards and writing romantic novels, which she then illustrated with her own calligraphy. In the 1890s she produced the most important work of her career—brush-and-ink portraits of ex-slaves who lived nearby. These straightforward but sympathetic images gained her international recognition and eventual exhibitions in Chicago, Berlin and Paris. Today Howard Weeden’s work and life can be seen firsthand in the Weeden House Museum near downtown Huntsville. Built in 1819, the Federal style house is one of the oldest in Alabama.

Written by Bob Stewart, AHF’s executive director

I was fortunate to finish my k-12 education in Tuscaloosa as desegregation was well under way—and largely without any serious incidents—throughout the city school system. My classes had included black students since about my 8th-grade year in 1966-67.

Nevertheless, when I arrived at Amherst College in 1971, I encountered a far more open educational environment than even the most progressive ones in Alabama. The staunch abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher co-founded the college in 1821. Edward Jones, a free biracial man from Charleston, South Carolina, graduated from the college in 1826 and went on to serve as a missionary in the colony of Sierra Leone. All the campus fraternities had integrated in the 1960s, many of which lost their national affiliation in so doing. Racial integration was fundamentally established in policy and practice (if not in large numbers of African-American students).

Yet I recall that the most prominent African Americans at that time in the surrounding Pioneer Valley were not at Amherst College, but instead a couple of miles up the road at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I just missed the chance to be in the same building with one of them; I was privileged to be in the same classroom with the other. Both were named Julius.

Julius Erving was born and raised in Roosevelt, New York, where he played basketball and reportedly received the nickname “Doctor” or “Dr. J” from a high school friend. Erving enrolled at UMass in 1968, though he didn’t finally earn his bachelor’s degree until 1986. In two varsity seasons at UMass, he averaged 32.5 points and 20.2 rebounds per game, becoming one of only five college players in history to average more than 20 points and 20 rebounds per game. His basketball feats were legendary. Too bad he left for the professional ranks the year before I arrived in Amherst.

But in 1974 I had the opportunity to attend a class at UMass on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, taught by the multi-talented black intellectual and cultural icon, Julius Lester. Lester had already achieved fame in New York as a teacher, folk singer and television host. As a member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) he participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. In 1966 he traveled as a photographer to North Vietnam and as a companion of Stokely Carmichael and Fidel Castro in Cuba. But his interests lay more in art, music and writing than in politics. By the time I enrolled in his seminar, Lester had converted to Judaism and was a distinguished faculty member. He had also launched a prolific writing career. He eventually published dozens of books ranging from fiction to folk tales to children’s books.

Dr. J’s accomplishments on the basketball court are etched forever in the record books, the Basketball Hall of Fame and ESPN film archives. I really wish I had had the chance to see him play in college. But maybe one day someone will start handing out MVPs in the humanities. When that happens I will be proud to say that for one semester I indeed had the chance to share the “bench” with an all-star in his own right—the other African American in town named Julius.

Next year marks the 45^th anniversary of the publication of two novels by authors who were born in Alabama but who made their literary reputations elsewhere. I first read them as an undergraduate at college far away from the state. There, ironically, I learned much about the South’s rich literary tradition. Let me tell you why I plan to reread both of them soon.

I read In Cold Blood by Monroeville native Truman Capote for a course on “Violence in America.” Most of the non-fiction readings in the class dealt with issues of violence surrounding the Vietnam War, presidential assassinations, and urban riots. But Capote’s powerful account of the random murders of a Kansas family in 1959 struck at a deeper psychological element in American culture. I don’t recall that it especially captivated me as a young student, as I was more attuned to the larger social and political topics found in the other course readings. But as a middle-aged family man today, who watches TV shows such as “Criminal Minds,” I’m looking forward to diving into it again.

Interestingly, Capote celebrated the publication of his very dark masterpiece with a high-profile, high-society party at New York’s lavish Plaza Hotel. Called the Black and White Ball, it featured a sparkling coterie of celebrities, politicians, literary types, and fashion mavens. In 2011, AHF hopes to create a 45^th anniversary reprise of the ball here in Alabama—but with the serious intent to raise funds for worthy educational and cultural groups and projects. Watch for details later this fall.

For a course on “Cervantes and the Picaresque Tradition in Literature,” I read The Last Gentleman by Birmingham-born Walker Percy. Percy lived most of his adult life in Louisiana, but his work was partially shaped by strong family traditions in Alabama and the Magic City. (For a fascinating depiction of Birmingham and its wealthy families such as the Percys at the turn of the 20^th century, read the first chapter of Jay Tolson’s 1992 biography of Walker Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins.) The main character in The Last Gentleman suffers from aimless detachment from his family roots in Birmingham and dead-end relationships. Though I haven’t started my reread, I couldn’t help peeking at one passage to share here. It deals with the protagonist, young Will Barrett, watching golfers on the course next to his suburban family home whence he has returned.

Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.

As a Kiwanian I am offended! I’m not saying that none of us would ever cheat at golf. (Actually I don’t play despite having a brother who is a professional golfer.) But we are men and women of action; we are neither “musing” nor “benign” as community leaders and philanthropists! Nor would we ever intentionally get our shoes wet! Just for that, Mr. Percy, I think I’ll have another go at your book—and pairing you with Mr. Capote will serve you right!

• His first stop was a tour of Vulcan Museum and Park. The AHF-funded exhibition on the history of baseball in Birmingham, now on view there, vividly demonstrates how our grant funds can be used to produce historically well-documented and skillfully designed museum exhibitions. The staff there did a superb job of orienting Leach to the city’s geology, topography and industrial history—some of which they did from the catwalk 160 feet atop Vulcan’s pedestal! Many thanks to Vulcan president Darlene Negrotto and education curator Phillip Ratliff. (For photos from the chairman’s visit to Vulcan, please see Flickr.)

• AHF Board member John Knapp hosted a luncheon at Samford where the faculty and staff shared with Leach how AHF and the university are supporting liberal arts education in Alabama. Knapp serves as executive director of the Frances Marlin Mann Center for Ethics and Leadership at Samford. The Mann Center, the Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE) and AHF collaborated on many of the day’s events. Knapp, his Samford colleague Kara Kennedy, and BACHE Chairman David Chapman all deserve thanks.

• The chairman also toured the internationally acclaimed Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI). BCRI Education Director Ahmad Ward gave him a concise overview of the exhibitions, which dramatically tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. BCRI Vice President Priscilla Cooper also reported to Leach about their current teacher education grant from NEH, entitled “Stony the Road We Trod.”

• While at BCRI, Leach met with 15 AHF constituents and three AHF program staff members. These constituents included humanities scholars, secondary teachers, high school students and grant recipients. Each one told how SUPER, SES and other AHF projects have had meaningful impacts on their educations and professions. One participant said, “Tears almost come to my eyes when I talk about these programs.” Another stated that AHF has “changed Alabama,” especially through such major efforts as the Encyclopedia of Alabama. These were not scripted or solicited comments. I hope staff members Tom Bryant, Susan Perry and Michael Chambers took great pride in hearing them. I certainly did.

• That evening Leach spoke before about 150 citizens, business leaders and elected officials in Samford’s Beeson Recital Hall. In a wide-ranging talk about how the decline of civility has affected everything in our political life—from elections to congressional legislation to Supreme Court decisions—he sounded a clarion call for a greater willingness to see all points of view on an issue. The audience left with a renewed commitment to this goal, respect for the new leader at NEH and appreciation for how AHF itself plays a role in improving civic life in Alabama. We hope he returns here soon.

A New Jersey native, Jennifer is a 2001 graduate of Penn State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in Spanish. She received a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2006. From 2001-2005 she was employed by Greater Media Newspapers in Freehold, NJ, moving up from copy editor to managing editor before leaving for Medill. While at Medill, she interned in the London bureau of Fairchild Publications. After graduation, Jennifer joined Time Inc. as an intern at Southern Living magazine. She served as assistant copy editor for Southern Living until March 2010. Since March she was freelance writing and copy editing for Hoffman Media in Birmingham.

Jennifer has also been very involved locally with the United Way Young Leaders Society, as well as serving as a volunteer with Grace’s Kitchen and the Time to Read program at Center Street Middle School. Please welcome Jennifer, as she takes charge of our print and electronic communication—including the print Mosaic, eMosaic newsletter, and “Kudzu Twines Journal” blog.