Spending the Day
with
Kathryn Tucker Windham
July 19, 2007

Selma, Alabama




Lunch at Hancock's Barbeque was enjoyed by all

 Kathryn Tucker Windham and Ed Williams enjoy a convivial lunch
and delightful conversation at Hancock's Barbeque,
which provided ambiance for the occasion


From this week's social column:
July 19, 2007
    Selma storyteller and Alabama journalist
 Kathryn Tucker Windham was a cordial host
to Auburn journalism professor Ed Williams
 on Thursday as he motored
over to Selma, Alabama to spend the day.

    After delightful conversation over a delicious lunch
at Hancock's Barbeque of tender, chopped pork,
sweet tea, coleslaw, fries and bread, they then
 toured
the city to see many of  the sights.
Most impressive was the Spanish
moss at historic Old Live Oak Cemetery,
and the architecture of the churches and
 homes in beautiful and historic Selma.

Mrs. Windham was a convivial
 host as she escorted Williams on
a tour of the sanctuary in the beautiful Church
Street United Methodist Church where
she is a member and Sunday School teacher,
and both marveled at the stained glass windows,
particularly the depiction of the Last Supper.

    Both friends agreed that it had
been much too long since they had spent
the day together, and they vowed to meet again,

 on a cooler day in the fall,
for a picnic at Old Live Oak Cemetery.

    A good time was had by all.
 


Williams crosses the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge as he motors onward to Selma.




Kathryn Tucker Windham
A biography
Kathryn Tucker Windham was born in a hospital in Selma and grew up in Thomasville surrounded by her extended family.

 She became interested in the newspaper business at an early age, assisting her cousin, the editor of the Thomasville Times, and writing movie reviews for the paper. She also became interested in photography after receiving a Brownie camera in a Kodak promotional giveaway. Windham attended Huntingdon College, where she worked on the college newspaper.

 After graduating with an AB in 1939, Windham worked as a freelance journalist. In 1941, she was hired as a police reporter and feature writer by the Alabama Journal in Montgomery. In 1943, Windham moved to Birmingham to work for the U.S. Treasury Department promoting war bond sales. She missed journalism, however, and began working for the Birmingham News in 1944.

 In 1946, Windham and her husband moved to Selma, where she wrote freelance articles while raising her children. In the early 1950s, she also wrote a locally syndicated newspaper column, “Around Our House.” After her husband’s death, Windham worked for the Selma Times-Journal from 1960-1973. Windham was community relations coordinator for the Alabama-Tombigbee Rivers Regional Planning and Development Commission’s Area Agency on Aging for four years in the mid-1970s.


Windham’s first book, Treasured Alabama Recipes, was published in 1967. Perhaps her best-known book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, cowritten with folklorist Margaret Figh, was published in 1969.

In 1974, Windham was invited to participate in the second annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. She became a founder of the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling and has served on its board of directors.

She continues to perform at festivals across the South and has made recordings of her stories. In 1984, Windham began doing radio commentaries for WUAL, the public radio station in Tuscaloosa. For eighteen months in the mid-1980s, these were also broadcast by National Public Radio.

Also in the mid-1980s, Windham wrote and began performing My Name Is Julia, a one-woman play about the life of Alabama educator and reformer Julia S. Tutwiler. Alabama Public Television filmed and aired a special version of My Name Is Julia in 1993.

 Windham published a memoir of her experiences as a journalist, Odd-Egg Editor, in 1990. Windham’s early interest in photography has continued throughout her life. The first public exhibition of her photographs took place in 1993, and she has published several books of photographs.

 In 2000, Windham received the Alabama Humanities Award from the Alabama Humanities Foundation.
Interests and Themes



Our "itinerary" for the day...
1.  A visit to Mrs. Windham's Royal Street home.
2.  Lunch at (Hancock's Barbeque).
3.  A drive through Old Live Oak Cemetery.

4.  A walking tour of Church Street United Methodist Church sanctuary.
5. A driving tour of downtown Selma, its historic churches and homes.


Web page and photos

By Ed Williams
Auburn, Alabama
willik5@auburn.edu

1. Royal Street home...


Mrs. Windham's license plate honors her resident ghost, "Jeffrey"







2. Lunch at Hancock's Barbeque






3. A drive through
Old Live Oak Cemetery...

Old Live Oak Cemetery
One of the few cemeteries in the South on the National Register of Historic Sites,
 Old Live Oak is the resting place of more than 8,000 people.

Several famous women are buried in Old Live Oak including: Elodie Todd Dawson, staunch Confederate supporter and sister-in-law of Abraham Lincoln; Harriet Hooker Wilkins, the Selma suffragist who in 1922 became the first woman elected to the Alabama Legislature; Clara Weaver Parrish, member of one of Selma's first families and internationally known artist who also is noted for Tiffany stained glass designs (several are in Selma churches); and Frances John Hobbs, well known suffragist who sewed the most valuable treasures from her jeweler husband's shop into her petticoats, saving them from Union Army looters.

Other historic burial sites include those of William Rufus King, founder of Selma, U.S. senator and vice president of the United States; Benjamin Sterling Turner, Alabama's first black congressman; N.H.R. Dawson, Confederate colonel who later was appointed U.S. commissioner of education; John Tyler Morgan and Edmund Winston Pettus, both Confederate generals who later became U.S. senators; Catesby ap Roger Jones, commander of the Confederate ironclad Merrimac (or Virginia) and of the Confederate Naval Ordnance Works at Selma; and the Rev. Arthur Small, a Presbyterian minister who died in the Battle of Selma.


A picnic at the historic  Old Live Oak Cemetery  in Selma.


4. A walking tour of Church Street United Methodist Church sanctuary


Methodist circuit riders apparently conducted the first church services in Selma in the 1820s, and the first Methodist Church was organized here in 1835. The current Church Street building was built in 1901 with a renovation and addition in 1986. The church, located at 214 Church Street at Dallas Avenue, now has a three-building church complex.








<>

5.  A driving tour
of downtown Selma



Historic Brown Chapel AME Zion Church

Both the building and the members of Brown Chapel AME Church played pivotal roles in the Selma, Alabama, marches that helped lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The starting point for the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, Brown Chapel also hosted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for the first three months of 1965. Another nearby local church, First Baptist, acted as the headquarters for the organizers of the Selma Campaign--the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Brown Chapel AME Church, with its imposing twin towers and Romanesque Revival styling, was built in 1908 by a black builder--of whom little is known -- Mr. A.J. Farley. On Sunday morning (known as Bloody Sunday) March 7, 1965, despite a ban on protest marches by Governor George Wallace, about 600 black protesters gathered outside Brown Chapel to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.


A quick trip back to Mrs. Windham's home
before departing for Auburn...
and Williams mentions his admiration
of her bottle tree in her back yard...

 
...Mrs. Windham surprises Williams
 with two blue bottles
to start his own bottle tree
at his home in Auburn, Alabama...


...Williams departs,
 to motor back to Auburn,
through downtown Selma...




Crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge once again,
motoring onward to Auburn, Alabama...


By the way, you know about bottle trees, don't you?
For those who believe the folklore, they transform her backyard into an enchanted garden.
According to ancient African myth, bottles on trees could catch evil spirits and prevent them from entering a home. In the 18th century, Africans who came to the South as slaves adorned cedar trees with bottles for protection, said Robert Farris Thompson, African and African American art historian at Yale University. The color blue also signified healing powers.
"Bottle trees are an important element of African-American visual culture," Thompson said. "They will always be with us - like okra, hominy and black-eyed peas."
Even into the late 1950s, bottle trees glistened in out-of-the-way backyards in the rural South. Stories such as Eudora Welty's "Livvie," published in 1943, preserved the lore.
(See article from The Denver Post)


The next day, Williams has fond memories
of spending the day with Kathryn Tucker Windham,
and he now has his very own bottle tree
 in his very own back yard, compliments of
two blue bottles from
his very good friend, Kathryn Tucker Windham!



Thanks for visiting my
"Spending the Day with Kathryn Tucker Windham Web page

Look for another "Spending the day" in fall 2007
when the weather is cooler!

Ed Williams


Professor
Department of Communication and Journalism
Auburn University

313 Tichenor Hall
Auburn University, Ala. 36849