I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

My grandfather used to take me down there and say, 'Why don't they do something with those things?'

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

I do everything I do to pay tribute to my great-grandfather.

My grandfather took me and my brother to the roof of his house, ... He took out his rifle and he blew rounds into the sky for ten minutes to celebrate. Then he took his bugle out and he blasted the whole neighborhood with his bugle, he was so thrilled about his son. Then he took us to the circus, and then he took us to the movie 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.'