“Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.”

“I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.”

“Once I could see Mom for who she was, and not the mother she had failed to be, I'd be able to forgive her. She was her own person, not just my mother, and it was this person I was forging a relationship with.”

“I wanted to tell her how that praise had made me feel, how starved I’d felt for any kind of attention, that I’d begun to think of my teacher Mrs. Terrance like she was my friend, like she was my mother, like she would take me home with her one day to her big house that would be warm and smell of fresh bread, and there would be gold stars all over the floors and ceilings, and she would look down at me as we walked through the door and tell me that this was my home too, that I would get to stay with her forever because she loved me too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t say that to my mother. Even then, I knew the power words had. To heal. To hurt.So I held my mother while she cried, and eventually the tears subsided, and she began to hiccup softly, and this made me giggle, and she almost looked like she was going to smile at me, and I forgot about the house filled with gold stars because one smile from my mother was worth a billion gold stars and a billion Mrs. Terrances and a billion houses that smelled like fresh bread.”

“I thought about my mother, and the words she said to me almost a lifetime ago. That’s when it clicked: she had asked me not to settle, to fight for the person I loved, and for the first time, I did what she expected of me. I had finally lived up to who she wanted me to be.”

“I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led. Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true. My vow is to learn more about her. To see her as she saw herself.”