A legacy of Hope and Glory
DESPITE my birthplace in the Mississippi Delta and my early years in schools whose teachers tried hard to educate the children in the poorest state in the Union, I reckon I had a head start when I arrived in Suffolk as the bride of a farmer. White children in the Deep South were taught that America owed everything to English literature, English history and English law.
As soon as we could recite the Ten Commandments and Psalm 23 by heart, we latched on to Wordsworth, Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Our valiant teachers believed it was their bounden
