Retta Harris Moultrie

(1894 - 1996)

On June 28, 1894, a precious little girl was born into the Moultrie family on their 60-year-old farm in the rolling hills of northwest Tennessee. The youngest of nine children (seven of whom made it to adulthood) Retta would live the next 100 years on that property.

For most of that century, she kept house while her older brother, Charles, ran the farm until his death in 1961. Like Retta, her brother Charles never married. They did, however, raise their sister Myrtle’s boy (also named Charles), who came to live with them in the 1930s and help out on the farm. Upon her brother's death, that nephew (a 35-year-old strapping man by then – a looker, by all accounts) took over the day-to-day farm operations.

The nephew married and had two daughters, one of whom had two daughters of her own. 

His youngest daughter's youngest daughter, Rebeca, spent the vast majority of her days with Retta, listening to and telling stories. There, in the single-wide white trailer on the hill that sat in front of the ruins of the old plantation house, Retta taught her young protégé of the power of story to transmit history and value. 

Retta shared family lore and tales about the first car, first airplane, first telephone in their little town…story after rich story flowed as the two sat on her floral velour sofa. Rebeca tucked them away in her imagination, eventually spilling her own first story onto the page at age 8. Retta read it proudly and encouraged the girl to keep going. 

A corner of Retta's bedroom was dedicated to a built-in dresser that afforded a few feet of countertop. There, resting in the dappled sunshine from the massive oak tree outside, were Retta’s prized purple African violets. She hummed to them the same hymns she sang with her niece, slipping a finger – gnarled with arthritis but tipped with nails shining beneath clear polish – beneath the velvet, green leaves to test the soil for moisture.

“Be careful you don’t touch them,” she’d advise in a quiet voice, “or the leaves will turn black.”

The lesson was repeated so often, the girl carried it into adulthood. In 1996, Retta was laid to rest alongside those who had gone before in the little town's cemetery.

As the storytelling that Retta had praised in her niece morphed from hobby into career, Rebeca came to hear the lessons beneath her aunt's words and actions: To help a living thing, you first have to learn how it wants to be helped. To transmit history and truth and love and all the elements that make life abundant, tell stories. 

Today, Rebeca is a bestselling writer, producer, and executive in the storytelling industries. Holding Aunt Retta's lesson close at heart, she has served hundreds of writers in their journeys to becoming established, award-winning, bestsellers. When the day arrived to incorporate those efforts into a non-profit, Rebeca stepped forward as the founding Board president and said, "I know the perfect name for this."