Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone.

My mother taught me to always be strong and always work hard. She's been working hard her whole life for me and my brother. I'm a lot like her in that I work hard for what I want. She taught me that.

My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.