I came from a poor family. My father was from Glasgow, Scotland; my mother's brothers were brakemen on the railroad. We didn't have anything but mush for breakfast.

My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family.

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.

I came from a big family... a big family of Southerners.

I came from a very poor family and my main dream in life was to break out of this poverty.

I was an anomaly because my father was a Harvard man, and he came from a family of poor people.