Who was the twenty-three-year-old woman whom my father married?

Admittedly, I am biased, but people would seek me out at social gatherings and exclaim, "You have the nicest mother!"

My mother had the ability to make everyone who visited us feel welcome. When she spoke to anyone, she gave them her full attention. She was down to earth and treated everyone with respect, whatever their station in life or their measure of success.

From a very early age, she had worked in her father's country store in Gadsden, South Carolina, listening to the mother wit and insistent humor of the black folk who frequented it. There was not a wisp of pretentiousness in her. She knew that wisdom and ignorance are attitudes people choose in living their lives and not products of social status.

One of the reasons she was proud to be black, she once told me, was that black people have rich emotional lives. Struggling to succeed, despite discrimination, develops strength of character and a well-developed sense of humor, she explained.

It was she and not my father who told me that, often, opportunity was cloaked in adversity. That was symbolized by one of her pearls of mother wit: "The devil may have brought it, but the Lord must have sent it!"