From the slave ship to the present, Miss Mamie ruled, influenced and controlled her heirs through her daughter, Mamie, aptly named after her. Miss Mamie's daughter, Janie, grew and prospered under her mother's power and carried on their traditions, heritage and ancestry. Their escape to Virginia, the free-slave state, proved to be a ground-breaking adventure for all of Miss Mamie's family, especially Janie, who came to be known as, Miss Mamie's Girl'. The life of the child of a slave, to one of the wealthiest women in Jakesville, Virginia, Miss Mamie, Janie and their families became a family to be honored and recognized. Their efforts and contributions led to many prosperous and fast growing towns, communities and cities. Their ultimate quest to keep all family ties and culture alive catapulted them into many surprising twists and turns before the entire family was re-united and all striving for the same cause recognition, freedom and unity. Everyone that came into their family by blood or by association was soon embraced just by being one of Miss Mamie's. There were many ups and down, revelation s and many skeletons pulled from the family's closet, but in the end the family would eventually make lemonade from those lemons.' Miss Mamie's Girl' is meant to be a catalyst for us to continue to teach, remember and practice the heritage, culture and tradition left to us by our ancestors and to make it a lifelong goal to remember and cherish our own Miss Mamie and her girl(s).

The stress of knowing that someone is trying to kill you and your ex-husband is nerve racking in itself. But, when that someone is your ex-husbands wife, then another issue presents itself: mainly staying alive Camilla was standing a couple feet from him with a gun trained at his chest Camilla what are you doing with that gun. Put it away before someone gets hurt. I cant do that Jason. You destroyed me, destroyed my life and now you have to pay. I am a good defense attorney. No, I am a great defense attorney, but defending a guilty client is almost impossible. The solution: Let them convict themselves. For now, I just played the loyal defense attorney, waiting for the right moment to pounce on him with my new evidence. Knowing who you are sometimes is not enough. The tricky part is really learning who you are I marveled at the things in the Jakesville Museum that my great-grandmother Mamie and Aunt Tammy had started so many decades ago. I never really saw them before today Today is the first day of the rest of your life, came to mind. My LifeHow true. How very true.

You may have heard that actions speak louder than words. This is very true, but for myself and for many others, the words and phrases that we grew up with as children have influenced our actions and therefore ring very loudly in our lives. I grew up on a rich diet of words and phrases that shaped and molded me into my adulthood and even until today. You see, I did not grow up influenced by the writings of Voltaire or the paintings of Rembrandt, but I grew up on the words and phrases of a little Southern black woman with a man's middle name""Mamie Floyd. This work is a compilation of stories and sayings from and about Miss Mamie. Many of these sayings were, in some cases, casually spoken. In other cases, they came as strong admonition as a result of or to prevent some undesirable action. Whatever the reasons, these sayings have become internalized as part of a rich family legacy, affecting my life in quiet, unspoken ways. For example, to this day, I cannot whistle. It is certainly not because I am not physically able to whistle, but like many other African American and Southern women I grew up with, I believed that this was not only unladylike but could possibly affect the way I would turn out as an adult. I rarely, if ever, talked back to my parents, especially my mother. If I did not find myself in the "middle of next week" or "wake up dead," I knew I at least wanted to live past that day. It is funny. I don't believe anyone really knows where the place called the "middle of next week" is, but few have dared to do what it took to venture there. I am also very thankful for my taste buds. As a matter of fact, long before I studied science in grade school and found out exactly what and where taste buds are, I knew they had to be very special because Mama frequently threatened to slap them out of my mouth. In an age of jargon and political correctness, they are a refreshing oasis from which to draw.

The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work. In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman. Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.

The Guntersville Democrat was not the first newspaper to be published in Marshall County, but is the one most complete from the 19th Century. It was first published in October of 1880 by a Gadsden newspaperman, William M. Meeks. Over the years, it chronicled much of the early history of Marshall County. This second book in the series attempts to capture mentions of births, marriages, deaths and obituaries It also reproduces items of interest and importance in the development of the county--all with a full name index. In this volume you can find the complete "Sword of Bushwhacker Johnston" by Rev. M.E. Johnston-- a thrilling first person account of the actions of guerrilla fighters operating in the Tennessee Valley during the Civil War. Also O.D. Street's account of the first 100 years of Marshall County's existence-and much more. The early history of Marshall County is written on the pages of its newspapers. This book will be valuable to any student of the history and genealogy of Marshall County.