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My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.

My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

When Demetrie got sick, we knew it was our responsibility to take care of her and pay her medical bills. And we embraced that. But the tricky part is, like so many families in the South, we also expected her to use a separate bathroom, to use separate utensils.

I was 25 years old when I arrived in D.C. It was just myself and two people who worked and helped me in the kitchen. I was only cooking for three people most of the time.

'Grandmother' doesn't mean that you have gray hair and you retire and stay home cooking cakes for your grandchildren.

When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves.

My grandmother was a typical farm-family mother. She would regularly prepare dinner for thirty people, and that meant something was always cooking in the kitchen. All of my grandmother's recipes went back to her grandmother.

After Emancipation, black women married earlier and more often because they were legally free to do so for the first time, and that was true until after World War II. But middle-class white women married less and later.

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.