There was a young man in our community who said he wanted to be a minister, and my father was trying to mentor him in the ministry, and something supposedly happened in town.And this young man was jailed. I remember my father lamenting and saying, well, regardless of what happened, he's human; he's human like the rest of us and he deserves, to be heard and to be seen.

My parents were not formally educated. Both were cognizant of the importance of education. The teachers and ministers were the role models, and they would say, you should want to be like Miss Gardiner, you should want to be like Mr. Freeman, or be like your dad. Shun the people who don't value education.

There was no real gender definition in the sense of how you treat people in those days with gender differences. You avoided them. My parents always told me that you do not make fun of anybody, and so I didn't see anything funny about it.

Even when I became cognizant of this societal problem in this country, I asked my father and my mother if they knew anything that had been passed on to them, about slavery, and my father was very reticent about it. He often said, "No, I don't know anything about it, and it was bad, it was awful and it's over and we want to get on with our lives."

There was this judgmental sense of what was good and what was bad in my father's words. You couldn't necessarily shut the people out who were not considered good. But on the other hand, as children we were told, you don't do those things, which means that you don't really mix with that crowd as much. You don't go to town on Saturday night and hang out and go to the beer parlors. Even though it was a dry county, there was plenty of moonshine and beer and liquor being brought in from other counties.

I hadn't had any course work in ceramics. I had no courses in art education but I wasn't going to let this chance to have a job pass me by. I went out and learned and I stayed one step ahead of the students by reading and I got to be pretty proficient at throwing on the wheel and making my own glazes, ordering the chemicals and having the students go out and dig and process their clay, and doing things that they weren't teaching at Howard University. So Talladega College opened up my whole sensibility about experimental teaching.

My sister was like my surrogate mother here, in Washington, with very much of the same persuasions as my mother. Even when friends came from home that I knew were more socially adaptable to the mores of the time, she would always caution me and say, "Be careful if you're going out with so and so because you know such and such a thing could happen." It was that kind of guardianship, and concern that imprinted me.