Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Family was real important in putting me on my path. I'm so blessed to come from a home with a mother and a father.
After I came out to my mother at 17, I ran away from home and lived with a friend. We come from a highly religious family, and she could not accept it. It was devastating, and I was depressed.
I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us.
I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.
Am I feminist? I don't know. I'm not really sure what that is. I am all up for equality to a certain extent, although in the home, I do feel this is where the mother excels and the man needs to step back a bit. My family is from Nigeria, and this is our culture.
I have the greatest respect for single parents who struggle and sacrifice, trying against almost superhuman odds to hold the family together. They should be honored and helped in their heroic efforts. But any mother's or father's task is much easier where there are two functioning parents in the home.
Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations.