There are adages about sewing that make one smile.

“Sewing isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of life.”

“Sewing is my happy place.”

“Sewing is like magic, but with fabric.”

All true for Annette Olowo-Ake, who with her husband Mike, owns and operates Perfect-Fit Alterations, located in the Fondren District in Jackson. The business sits tucked just west of North State Street on Mitchell Avenue. 

For 34 years, Olowo-Ake has made magic with needle, thread and fabric, whether she brings a teenager’s glam dress dream come true from a photograph to altering the length of a tee shirt to an emergency popped zipper fix or broken button. She admits, she really is in her happy place. 

Walk into her alteration shop and be immediately greeted with a smile.

“My grandmother taught me to sew,” said Olowo-Ake. “I was an accounting major. And yes, I had an accounting job,” she shares with a slight eye roll. “But I kept drifting back to sewing. I realized I loved my sewing more. So, here I am.”

“One thing accounting taught me, though, was how to manage money.”

“My husband and I started out with no loans of any kind. You know what we did? We saved our income tax checks and each time, we would buy one piece of equipment. We paid ourselves a salary. But that was it. No dipping into the bank account for frivolous things.”

“Over time and different locations, we built up a following. We built up a business,” she says proudly. “This place here was originally my husband’s shop. I was over on Old Canton Road. But as the years passed, as we got older, we simply decided to just have this one. And it’s been a blessing.”

Covered in bits of thread and wearing more varied sizes of pins in her work smock than a pin cushion, Olowo-Ake doesn’t miss a beat, from taking measurements for a party dress, writing up a customer’s requests, answering the phone and shouting out a greeting to a previous customer who “didn’t want to hold you up, I just stopped my to say, hi.”

“She’s good people and a good, good friend,” said Dr. Jim Aron, checking on clothing he’d previously dropped off and needing broken buttons replaced on a pair of slacks. 

“I’ve known him since he was a med student driving a beat up old truck,” said Olowo-Ake, taking a pair of slacks from the doctor. “It’s a little over 30 years, ’bout as long as I’ve been here. All of his children are doctors now. That’s how long we’ve known each other.”

The two hug and the doctor heads on his way as another customer enters the shop, and is greeted by name.

It’s obvious Olowo-Ake is truly wielding magic with fabrics and threads. She’s creating, making memories, friends and repeat business.

“This is an art I learned from my grandmother. It’s kind of sad really, because it’s a dying art. Kids today seem to be more interested in their phones. It’s a new age, though. I don’t fault them. Times change.”

Perfect-Fit Alterations is located at 538 Mitchell Ave. in the Fondren District in Jackson.

Shop hours: Monday – Friday, noon – 5 p.m. Closed: Saturday and Sunday.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

“We’re open for business,” Northern District Public Service Commissioner Chris Brown said, a sentiment he repeated throughout the PSC’s “Nuclear Summit” on Tuesday.

Brown and his colleagues – Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps and Southern District Public Service Commissioner Wayne Carr – are in their first term after last year’s statewide elections saw a complete turnover in the PSC. The PSC oversees a broad range of public utility issues, such as electric generation, power bills, water infrastructure, among many others. 

As the world looks towards alternative energy forms to balance an increased demand with the need to limit carbon emissions, the PSC is hoping to move Mississippi ahead of the curve. 

“We think nuclear’s our future,” Brown said during a Wednesday Senate hearing. 

The PSC’s “Nuclear Summit” hosted several speakers from the industry as well as representatives from utilities serving the state that are looking to expand nuclear generation. 

“Economic development in the future is going to go to places where you have affordable and reliable power,” Stamps said during the summit. “And one of the most affordable and reliable power sources is nuclear.” 

One speaker, Kirk Sorenson of Flibe Energy, talked about the prospects of opening a new nuclear plant in Tishomingo County at the Yellow Creek site. The Tennessee Valley Authority started, and later abandoned, work on a nuclear plant there in the 1970s. Sorenson said Flibe has been leasing the site for the last five years and has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on improvements, although it’s unclear what the timeline for a Yellow Creek nuclear plant would be (getting approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission can take up to five years, although Congress recently passed a bill to speed up the review process). 

In 2023, 76% of Mississippi’s generated energy came from natural gas, much higher than the 43% for the country as a whole. The state’s two largest power producers are the Grand Gulf nuclear plant in Port Gibson, owned by Entergy, and the Victor J. Daniel plant in Moss Point, owned by Mississippi Power, which uses both coal and gas. 

Mississippi Power initially planned to close Plant Daniel’s coal units in 2027, a move clean-energy advocates celebrated, because the plant was producing excess power. However, the company is now delaying the closure to sell energy to Georgia. At Grand Gulf, Entergy upgraded the plant’s power in 2012 to make it the country’s largest single-unit nuclear power plant in the country. The plant is licensed to run until 2044. 

Earlier this month, state lawmakers advocated for bringing more nuclear power to the state during a Senate committee hearing, the Clarion Ledger reported. Industry representatives advised lawmakers tax incentives were one of the ways to attract more nuclear development in the state.

Nuclear power isn’t considered renewable because its required fuel, such as uranium, is a finite resource, but its generation doesn’t yield any carbon emissions. Compared to renewable energy like wind and solar, nuclear plants can run more consistently and use up less space. However, nuclear power comes with much higher upfront costs and more government restrictions because of safety concerns. On top of that, the United States doesn’t have any permanent storage facilities for nuclear waste.

‘We’re not anti-solar’

During interviews with Mississippi Today, all three commissioners maintained that they weren’t against solar power, saying they believe in an “all of the above” approach to sourcing energy.

Brown, a former state lawmaker and the current PSC chairman, took exception to media and advocacy groups painting the commission as “anti-solar.” 

“We’ve approved every solar generation plant (that’s come before the PSC),” he said. Electric generating facilities in the state have to get approval from the PSC. “Just because you ask questions doesn’t make you anti-anything. Our goal is just to ask questions our constituents are asking.”

Brown referenced a “Solar Summit” the PSC held in August, similar to other fact-finding sessions the agency has held around certain topics. The “Solar Summit,” though, didn’t include any speakers from the solar industry, as the outlet Floodlight reported. And unlike the “Nuclear Summit,” much of the session‘s airtime was instead filled with skepticism around what the industry might mean for Mississippi.

One of the speakers, for instance, was state Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson, who has no background in the energy field. Gipson spoke for about an hour and theorized over the threat that new solar facilities could pose to farmland.

“How much solar do we need as a state?” Gipson asked. 

As of 2023, solar power made up less than a percent of the state’s electric generation, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, compared to 4% nationally. Overall, when including sources like wind and hydropower, renewables made up 21% of the country’s energy mix, compared to under 3% for Mississippi. 

A major point of disagreement between the PSC and solar advocates is that of incentives. The last PSC, led by former commissioners Brandon Presley and Brent Bailey, added incentives under the state’s net metering rule, which requires the two state-regulated energy companies – Entergy Mississippi and Mississippi Power – to reimburse customers for self-generated renewable energy. Gov. Tate Reeves criticized the move, calling on state lawmakers to reverse the rule. 

This spring, just over a year after the new rule went into effect, commissioners Brown and Carr voted to suspend incentives for low-income customers as well as for schools looking to put in solar panels.

The two commissioners argued that such incentives create a cost shift against people without solar panels, although it’s unclear whether that’s come close to happening in Mississippi, a state with relatively few net metering customers.

“No one has ever given me anything my entire adult life,” Carr told Mississippi Today, also panning recent federal programs pushing for more solar generation. “I don’t feel like that because ‘Big Brother,’ so to speak, says that we should be helping out an industry, I don’t agree with that… We’re not against solar. If you want to do it, pay for it.” 

Renewable advocates like Monika Gerhart pushed back on that point. Gerhart, executive director of the Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association, argued that the state government gives out economic incentives to different industries all the time, including recently for Amazon as well as an electric car battery plant. 

“Mississippi has historically provided a pretty good economic incentive for industries that it was interested in,” she said. “I don’t see this as being that different, that you attract a developing industry because you know there will be dividends.” 

The PSC is also looking to create an “overarching state law” around approving solar facilities, Stamps said during the summit, to create a consistent process for every county to follow. During Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Brown said that the agency will be asking for new regulations dealing with solar plants, including around decommissioning facilities. 

“I think that solar is a useful tool, but it does need some guardrails,” he told the lawmakers. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Oct. 24, 1994

President Bill Clinton awarded Dorothy Porter Wesley the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Charles Frankel Award for her service as a Black librarian, bibliographer, researcher and curator. 

The first Black woman to complete her graduate studies at Columbia University, she joined the Howard University library staff in 1928. With no budget and almost no staff, she overcame sexism and other barriers to transform the Library of Negro Life and History, with a few thousand titles, into a world-class research center with more than 180,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts and other materials, which scholars from around the globe came to visit. 

She recalled that work: “I went around the (Howard) library and pulled out every relevant book I could find – the history of slavery, Black poets – for the collection. Over the years, the main thing I had to do was beg – from publishers, authors, families. Sometimes it meant being there just after the funeral director took out the bodies and saying, ‘You want all this junk in the basement?’” 

Before she died in 1995 at the age of 91, Howard named the reading room in its library after her, and historian Benjamin Quarles declared, “Without exaggeration, there hasn’t been a major black history book in the last 30 years in which the author hasn’t acknowledged Mrs. Porter’s help.” 

A portrait of her hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.