I could have been, and may one day well be a high school English teacher, because I've been given so much I just feel like I have to give something back. The fact that some people consider my work to be good or strong, it's nice, but I know in my heart that if it's not coming - oftentimes it's probably not coming from the best place.

Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

But what difference does it make? ... When you're mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.

My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."