ruth as i was just saying to

you, i spent the week in in graceland and daily and then in that fifth ward, a houston. and i keep thinking about one fundamental question that i was going to start with and that is how you muster the energy, not just to think about the good, the bad and the challenging with, such depth and authentic city, but to have the energy to express it and to say to the world, here is here is my life, my childhood. what did it take to do that and what was your motivation? well, i suppose a short answer for you and is that i it was the

love of my students that motivated because i found that over the course my career people tended to mythologize my accomplishments and so students continued to come to me and to say rose tell me how you did this. because so often it seemed improbable to them that a journey like mine have taken place. and i while, i tried to reassure them that was nothing. so different about my journey. i think still never convince them to that this was the case. i was walking, i was driving the road along, paradise pond. it smelled. one day and i encountered a student who was trying get up

the hill on crutches. i stopped car immediately and said, get in i'll take you wherever you need to go and to my surprise and horror said, oh, no, president simmons, if you could do what you've done under such difficult circumstances, i can certainly get up this hill crutches and that kept coming back to me this notion that my students had that something extraordinary had taken place so what i wanted to do is to give them the true contours of a life lived from moment moment with some fortunate things and some unfortunate things. and how by dint of personal interest and determination. one could come to shape a life

similar to mine so i often say this book is for my students to explain to them who i am and how i came to be who i am so that they understand that their lives can be shaped in a similar fashion great. sure. i'm going to go off script a sense and ask this question is the book shows just how secure you are again to talk in great detail about what was wonderful about your childhood the love but the challenge is could you have written book with this level of depth? 25, 30, 35, 40 years ago. what would you say? oh, of course not. well, first of all, women, i have to i have to say that for most of my growing up and the early part of my career i said nothing of my background.

and so colleagues, my professional knew nothing about. my origins, i think they thought i was the product of middle class existence and that there was nothing different about my background at all. it was not until and reason i they didn't know anything about it is i carried a lot embarrassment for long time about. the poverty of my family about the very difficult circum stances of my childhood about my parents and so on. and because of that shame i and that the fact that i was encountering people who are different given where i went to school, given the positions that

i held. so i'm around very wealthy people. i'm around people who've never much difficulty their lives. and i i'm not comfortable unloading them. the misery of my of my childhood. so it was not until i was named president of smith and the new york times wrote an article about my background and that people came to know the circumstances of my early life. and so so i just really didn't talk very much about it until then. but here's what i found out after that article came out, i received letters all over the country from people who were inspired not by the fact that i had been elected president of smith, but by the fact that i had come from the child that i came from to become president of a major college. they were inspired by that.

so i didn't start talking. the elements of journey until after that moment when i realized finally that the most important thing about me may not be what i've achieved. it actually may be about where i've come from. i started to appreciate that my smith's presidency and and that's from then on. i've wanted to talk about how i grew up, more about my parents and what gave to me and on and so the book could not have been written. i would say. 1995 or 2000. sure. it's interesting that here you are now someone as one of the most admired college presidents of past quarter of a century, and people have always been

about, you. i remember someone asking me if your parents teachers because typically that's the story of middle class black america as you know it, it was a mother, a french teacher, and the other person said, no, probably her parents were from the islands of el paso. s.a. oh, okay. you know, so it must have been that and people didn't know. so you are absolutely right. make assumptions because you're polish and because you speak french and because you are this ph.d. from harvard in romance languages and studied there. it's amazing. and yet you have this background. let me go back for a minute. we are both children of the south and we really everybody in the south knows what we mean when we say somebody is down home. we're being down home. but ruth, i have to tell you, i've been thinking about the title of this book, up home, and you wrote at some point something about you, the fact

that you you own the land now that your grandpa parents owned, that they had and all of this symbolism of that and why you return and you talked about that up home being a feel that somehow down home, you know you relish that feeling but up home is a journey to talk about up home because, you know, if you google it, there is no there in the googling even. you know, you get so you get because new language that some parts of country may understand others don't talk about home and you're your title the book well well it's it's quite amazing to me in a way that in spite of the harsh conditions under which we in great poland. yes we we remained always to that place we were shaped by it indelibly shaped by it.

and always referred to it as the place that we were from. it happens the great bloom is north of houston. we moved and so when we were going back to visit our relatives were still there. we would say, we're going up home, which was north of his. so it's it really is directional terms of saying where we're going and by the way, most people in, my group and my relatives understood perfectly that when i say home, they know that that's great. what? because that's the way we all to gracelyn but i love the i love the notion frankly because if i may i'll talk a little bit about what i was trying to capture with that notion of up home.

so there's so much in the black community that we treasure during difficult moments. i about my mother's death. the hardest part of the book by far to write. and when i talk about her death i talk about her going up in a sense a home when when we talked about anything in our community there during those difficult days we used as a so the name of our church was not new hope it was greater new and so we load on all of these references a better time a brighter day a higher level. and so to me that was not only

the way we referred to our hometown home. well, it was an allusion to the way we got over as as an oppressed people always looking the most positive aspect of that we could find. and so at home, to me says this is a place that i belong to. it's a place. gave something to me. i'm attached to it. and it also capture my hopefulness about that area in of the difficult times that we had there that's powerful very. powerful. i have to say that anybody who reads the book will connect to you and your with your mother because all of us who've lost our mothers know that parents particularly mothers when when good things happen in great achievement we all said i wish

my mama was here and it you know it brings it to everybody's and and even when others don't know why we're getting teary we know and so you win the nerve for all of us for you really did in a very special way. you even said about your mother that she remains a puzzle to you. talk about that puzzle for a moment. would you. yes. so i've been haunted. all of my life by the fact that as a child i did not comprehend the magnificence of this woman. in fact, i was rather embarrassed by her. she was modest. she was self sack facing. she took no interest in her appearance at all.

she never learned to drive. she was not independent as a woman. she was very subservient to my father. she overly generous to everybody, giving freely anything that. she had to help someone and and yet here there was a woman who reared 12 children to adulthood 12. i only have two children and i could barely manage that. and and yet here is a woman who did that who worked in the fields who did all the household work who who inculcated us with values that she deemed important. she she was my greatest teacher. she taught me everything about to be a human, how to be a human

being. but of course, i didn't know that at the time i was too young and perhaps too foolish to know what a gift she in my in my life. and so she haunts my life in sense because. i'm always at, always trying to be what she would have wanted me to be. that's my ultimate test. is, is this something my mother would value? is this something. and so i always have to say to parents, you you don't understand children are paying attention to you don't understand what you mean to them and what you come to be in their lives because of what you do. and my mother was, i'm sure, completely impervious to the

fact that i could have the kind of life that would have because what did she have she had no money. she had no amenities at all. she had no education. she had no fine clothes. she had no enjoyment, really modern society at. and she was not an independent person. so she couldn't have imagine what it would be like for for me. and yet and yet by doing she did every day by being the person she was i took from her every thing that i know about to be a human being, it's it's incredible to me that as we can do that unknowingly and so power safely. so partly what i want say to people is, be careful with your children because they are taking from you every day what their

life can be. you know, my, my, my my grandmother would say right now that your mama is smiling right now down on you right now, ruth, you're very special you write in the book that to be in an environment in which one is legally designated is a defining experience. and that dominates one's self image and that lacks any will for ambitious goals and. you talk at great length about and you just to them about your mother and then you talk about your very complicated father and must tell you that as man, i at one of the reviews it talked about that you teach women about mothers and just the strength of womanhood and what you learn from your mother inside of me, from the teachers. but i learned so much in thinking about fatherhood from

your book. from your book, and thinking about my own situation and my dad, my wonderful. but i want you, if you would, because thought you were so fair. you were so badly in talking about a very difficult talk about your dad. you. well, i suppose you know some may see my father as a complicated man, but he was very much a product of that era where black lives were so inconsequential and where the poverty that he experience was in. so incredibly harsh. he was. one of five sons born to a mother who remarried and her new

husband did not want the children of. her first husband, who had died around and so they put the children out and they had both agreed to forage for themselves as essentially homeless kids. these brothers. and so my used to talk about how hungry he was at times as a child. and he tells us gruesome story of he once found a a parcel in the stomach of a dead animal and he got that possum and ate it as a meal. that's how grim the poverty was. and the what was. and yet in the midst of this terrible situation where they had to rhythms essentially are

he and his brothers were the closest ever they loved each other. they saw each other's company as as grown ups. they were close beyond any siblings ever seen because they in this difficult circumstance yet although he knew difficulty that did not translate into his being a more caring and parent and so we saw him as a boy basically a patriarch he demanded subservience of everybody the family. most of all my mother he what had to be waited on served all

the time and directed us in terms of what we needed to do but often was not the hardest working person among us. and so my brothers particular my older brothers i had seven brothers were directed to do all kinds of work that whatever ordinarily fallen to him, but he passed it on to them. and so he reigned over household and sometimes reigned over the household with with cruelty to my mother. and that was very hard for us as children to obviously and so i would say that you know he was in his own way devoted to my mother. but i understood that why she lived, because he treated her so shabbily. but once died, it became

apparent that he was making great efforts to keep her memory alive and that he treasured every everything that he had of hers he preserved and so forth. and he talked about endlessly. but of course, for us, his children, we needed more than that as children. and the hardest thing for me was to have her her death. and then not to have any consolation from my father, she died an and life went on and we were expected to as children we were expected just to accept it and go, i was in a bad place for a long time after my mother died because i did not have any one to help me with, to understand, to cope with that loss, and certainly not father who was not

engaged. in addition to that, he was. you have no sense of where the country was going or what the opportune days might be for his children eventually and he did not support our going to school at all. when i told him that i wanted to go to college and that i had a scholarship to go to dillard. i asked his permission to go to new orleans, to dillard. his answer was curt. yes, could go as long as did not expect one red cent from. he very serious about that because he gave me next to nothing for the duration of college experience and he meant that he would not help me in any way he. didn't see the value of it.

he didn't see it would lead. and of later on as became began to work as professional. he came to the import of it later on and i. i can say that he was quite proud of what accomplished in my career. but he help at all and this was consistent with in way what he was like when i was growing up. he was very self-centered, very much paying attention to his needs but not to my mother's needs, to his children's needs, not to anybody needs its it's even to hear you say that i was reading it through. i just have to ask you. so how you how do you not how did you not become bitter? i just have to ask that you you write it in such a way that you try to give him as much credit as you.

and you look at the larger context and what drove that your sisters, your siblings because you do talk about support you got from them how did combine those two things when you think about the lack of support from you from your father and the love among your siblings and some in particular including one or two of those brothers. how did you make it through? help me understand how we help our students sometimes when find the same kinds of challenges. what helped you to make it through? well, you first of all, let me say that these these things are always more complicated than they appear. and i was my father. favorite child. yeah. and and so people will be who know who knew that would be surprised at how harshly i judge him because did everything you know that a person of his

understood and they could do to to act to show that i was his favorite child and i his favorite because i was the youngest just the baby and so so would get special things when he went to the store he would get me he would me. when my sisters were or were angry with me. so on and so so i it felt much like i was his his favorite and my sisters remind me of that all the time. nevertheless when one becomes an adult and you have the ability to to really understand what was going on at the time, you begin to see differently. i love my father. and and when when he passed, i was, as you know, i grieved like

everybody else because finally, as an adult under his limitations and how he came to be the person that he was. and while he fell short of what i would have preferred, he was nevertheless someone that i understood. i like to think that i understood, and that's why i could reconcile myself with him as an adult from it growing in a household with a 12, you 12 children, including being the youngest. you can imagine that was raucous and that we all kinds of rivalries and we had all kinds of challenges among us but in the end my mother insisted always that we had to.

close to each other. we had to support each, and we must always, always be a family. among the many things that she loved, she gave us, she gave us that. and so every one of us has been faithful to that every one of us. and so they helped in innumerable ways. of course, by the time i got to when i lost my mother, especially my siblings stepped in and, they would they would feed us the three youngest children, they would support us when we had things do in school, they would give us money when we needed it, they would drop to help us. and i tell the in the book of when i graduated from from college, my father didn't bother to come to my graduation.

but my oldest siblings, two brothers and two sisters, drove all night to get there and drove right to houston. that was a long drive in those days just to come to my graduation new orleans. so we still just that close today every day starts with around robin of conversations among the siblings. and that starts at 5:00 in the morning and goes on throughout the day and we may talk to each other many times in the course of the day. we're that close. your mother, as i said before, she smiling. there's no doubt in my mind she is smiling. you know, you have always been independent thinker, even as a little girl talk about your observations of experience in church. because even the language that we in the black church, most people don't understand what we're talking about.

when we say somebody gets, for example, or and those experiences that if you would talk a moment about how you viewed what you saw in the church as a child, even your observations. well, first of all, we are living in great blood when. we were living on a sharecropper's farm. there's no, there's no entertainment. of course, there there's no television, no radio. there's nothing there. books? yes. and so the only social in a way that we had was going to church on sundays and seeing show the show in church. and i was fascinated by that because i you know, outside of what i saw in my family, i i was mystified by of these wonderful people in church and the way they behaved. and i you know, i'm i'm sitting there as a child observing that. and this this is real

entertainment for me because there is that there was a service of course, and the the way the morning the emotional and the emotional aspects of the service where people are weeping and and they're getting happy and jumping up and testifying and and and then also the fact that they're very careful and judiciously. i walking across in the middle of the service because they have to do something and yet they have nothing to do. they want people to see how they're dressed, their new shoes and so on. so this is this is unbelievable to me. i mean imagine what kind of show that is to it to a kid that doesn't get to see movies or anything else and that you have

wonderful people. and then my mother my mother was perspicacious to say the least, and she interpreted those people and judged people. and so i came understand that there were certain people mattered and certain people who mattered less. i came to understand that there were certain people who were no account people that were corrupt in some way. and and and they were on her list that someone we dared not associate with. so there was all this hierarchy in the human family where some people mattered and some people mattered less, where some people were supremely good people and other people were supremely people. all of this i'm learning as as a child from observing what's taking place in church. but here's the thing that also was happening. i was noticing the disjuncture

between the the people behave and during the week and the way that they position themselves during the sunday services i could see the gap and so and so my father who was trying to become a minister would be a welcome in the pulpit and he would be clutching bible and he be very submissive and give the that he was humble that he was he a very pious this was not the man that saw at home who was a tyrant. okay. and so so so i mean, i always say that that my early days in

church really helped me to begin to observe people and to look the veneer, to see what people were really like underneath. but it was also tremendous fun. let's face having to observe all. there's nothing more exciting than being in a baptist church service or a sanctified church service. there's nothing than so you just mentioned something about people. teachers. let's get to the stuff you and i would consider really fun stuff. and that's about education and it amazes me that even though you didn't have books in your home, even though there were times when you knew hunger yourself, even though you got the chicken feet to eat as the baby, you had to bring

everything. i bring it up because my wife, who grew up in rural virginia, talked religion. being that i didn't think anybody else would have one of the i ever heard about chicken feet from, a sophisticated woman of french literature talking about chicken feet, right where all those experiences that got to miss out of me in in this school. and all of a sudden she somehow was able to let you know how much you mattered, that you mattered. and i want you to talk about your starting, miss ida mae. and one thing as you talk, if you would, ruth, when did you begin to love to? because where i see, as you know, so many of our children never learning to love to read. so please. all my well, certainly you know,

it's hard, i suppose some people who didn't expect in their first classroom in the same way to understand the lightning bolt that struck me when i walked in to the side of my henderson's class for the first time. so picture this i am country bumpkin. i'm wearing homemade clothes, probably from flour sacks. i have wax sticking out over my head. i, i have shoes that barely fit. i an ugly thing walking into classroom and my family being very large family of 12 children was kind of known as, you know, how people cast aspersions on people with a lot of children. well we were sort of regarded oh, gee, those those double

fields, you know, all those children. and so and so we were not respected to say the least as a family. here i am coming into the classroom the first time as as the youngest of these and this woman greets as if am the queen of sheba and so. oh, come in, baby. how are you? here's your desk. i mean a desk for me. i'd never had anything of my own at that point in a large. with essentially three rooms in the house and so here she says here's a desk for you here are your books and in your you know, writing routine utensils and then i start to i start to do work and she is amazed she's all of that's wonderful. oh you're so smart.

i was not old enough to recognize that all these were probably lies. i in publicly and thought oh my goodness the first time that i remember in my life anyone treating me as if i actually mattered okay and that i could do something and well of course in response to that what you to do you're to pour your heart and soul into pleasing this person who is a teacher and responding everything that she gives you to do. and so that's how my learning started at the you know at the hands of this magician who by the way was that for every child, not just me. and so i often say teachers, you are not allowed ever as a

teacher to have down day when. you walk into a classroom because you don't know. if that's the day that you're going to light a fire for a child in that classroom, because that's what did for that's what she did me. so i started obviously while in pipeline at that level then when i came to houston when i was seven years old and continued my education in the school in houston and then i had access to books i had there were libraries here and i could get books free. and so i just started reading. and then i had the notion that, okay, i can have all of these books, an unlimited number of books really, and i can read the entire library. i thought, i could read every

book in, the library nearby. and that i was on a quest to do exactly that because i was finding from reading that my world was opening up in a way that i could not have foreseen. yes, i had the day to day reality around in this very poor neighborhood of houston. i also had these worlds that i was reading about that were extraordinary because the descriptions were false. some because i could come to imagine a places that i had never before i could to appreciate the world that i was living in was not the only world. and that started in me. a quest to know as much as i could about the rest of the world and to just keep reading and acquiring knowledge these

different circumstance. since i wasn't trying to become an expert at anything, i was just trying to learn about life and the people who were so different from the people i knew. and i also had the sense that, come on. i mean, i knew that that we were living a lie in the south. i knew that. i knew that while everything said that i was worth anything and that i couldn't aspire to be anything but a maid. i knew i knew all of that was a lie. and how i know that i knew because the people that that people were representing as being worthless. i knew that they weren't that from my experience of them. and so i was putting together a

landscape perhaps, an imaginary landscape of a world where people were treated, respected, where they were treated more. where they were differentiated as individual and so forth. and that's what reading meant to me. it was creating that world for me, that was different from the world i experienced walking down the street from my house to school where, you know, cars pass by and call me -- and so forth. i was was creating a different world myself, but it, it turns out that this whole business of reading, also building in my intellectual capacity, be building my creativity and helping me to acquire this

magical words that i fell in love with. and so by the time i'm in elementary school and going on to junior high school, i'm completely taken language and how powerful it can be and opening up all these worlds in expressing oneself and in in protesting what people are doing and saying. and so i'm on now on a journey to acquire or not just as many books, but as many words as i. in that there's our challenge. ruth, i want you to you know, it's so interesting. you talk throughout the book about having experiences of to clean somebody else's house or bed, which sounds so odd given your stature today. but when i bring it up because my mother learned to read when she was 3540 years older than you but because she was a child

me and then the house that had books and the woman gave her that chance to to read a book and to come and talk about the book and it was she said the more she read, the better a readership and the better our readership became, the more she enjoyed the experience. but then a girlfriend she couldn't she couldn't get a girlfriend. so reading not to become good enough at it you somehow without having parents who were with books in the house somehow you got into that reading and read well enough that you got all those points how i'm still back there you take it for granted you're brilliant or whatever it is that you just got into that habit. can you can you pinpoint it in any way? because how you got there, because most of your friends were not that i know you had a niece, somebody you were in school with was it. her name was maybe erma that was doing that with albert? yes, yes. yeah. but no, they're doing what she was doing. where that you know, how can you

explain a certain connection that you that you make as a as a human being, something that you encounter that has a deep impact on you? how how does that happen? why does that happen? i don't know. but i will say that probably my loneliness had something to do with it. remember, now i'm the youngest. my family. yeah. and i'm i'm my father's, but i'm not anybody else's favorite. and so what happens in these big families is that they are cliques. yeah. and so you have certain certain siblings that kind of hang out together, that think alike before. and right next to me in the family was a set of twins. yeah. and so you know what it's like with twins they are together. okay. on everything. yeah. and then next to them is is a

boy, two boys and. honestly, the the boys. my family paid no attention to us at. okay. none whatsoever. and don't even don't even approach them as if you want to talk to them or play with them because that was heretical absolutely not. and so so so you had the two boys then twins and so i'm alone at the bottom. yeah. and therefore, since every body in the family had friends in the family we didn't have outside friends. we only had friends in the family. and i was the last one and there was no one left for me. okay, so i had to occupy myself with something and probably there was was a good thing from and by the way, i grew up in a family that treasured physical.

okay that can came from being sharecroppers and and working in fields where you know how much work you were was very valuable to the family and my end work was not valuable at all. in fact, it was to be discouraged. so if you were found sitting around not doing anything or or thinking thinking you were an idler and not worth much. so imagine i came to fall in love with books, the kind of pressure that i got which was there was something wrong with me. so my older sibling siblings constantly worried my mother about doing something about me because were very concerned that i was not a normal child. they felt that that other

children would be out playing, that i was sitting inside reading books and they thought that was aberrant. and so for most of the time when i was growing up, i was thought of as a bookish child who would really never be able to get along in life, because i didn't have social skills and i didn't know how to reach out to people and and do all the things that were busy doing. and i seemed to enjoy the sedentary existence with books as my friends. yes. so it was just it just a fit for me and my personality, i suppose that that i found i rested in in these in these books because of all the things that was learning about in the which of course, my

sisters didn't understand because they were not readers and the no. one really in my family one of the twins was a reader and therefore they didn't understand the world of books at all. it is a fascinating story. and you were there in the fifth ward and were at phillis wheatley high, and you've got a maze teacher at a time. the best of our race were teaching people were teaching in these schools. this was the only place they could go. talk about that experience and what you got from those teachers and from the cultural experiences and the amazing extra things they did to support you when they saw how extraordinary you were and what they did well in yes. in those days, schools were a you know, the proverbial village

that it takes. it was that and then some these are teachers who were the of their generation who just happened to be limited in their employment opportunities. and so they were consigned to teaching in a black schools and certainly couldn't in white schools. okay. and there were not there were many professions that were not open to blacks yet. and so teaching was about the the most prominent thing that could do, although there were some who managed to become doctors and so forth. but it was a very prominent position and so we benefited because these magnificent people were our teachers. every day who cared about us and who helped us understand achievement and who showed young

people who from abject poverty how to make away through life, by learning certain skills and so forth and. and they would do everything they to give you more work than than you thought you needed. they were very demanding they could be in those days because parents were not so active in the schools. and so when they want, teacher said, you must do x well, you had to do it. and you'd better not come home and say that you decided not do something that a teacher told you to do because you would be executed. that transgression right? so teachers were very prominent in the community. they. greatly admired in black

communities in those days, and they deserved it because the kind of thing that they did, i had i had a teacher in school who took an interest in me and gave me a job cleaning her house. okay, she obviously see that i didn't have any means. and so she basically took me into her family and and allowed me to earn pocket money. but at the same time she would take me around the city and show me different things that she knew i would not be able see or experience otherwise. then when i got to high school i found who had a vision that couldn't possibly have and that they got perhaps that things might change one day and that we

might be able to do different kinds of jobs might be able to go to college. and they prepared us as if they believed that all of what we were living through would fade away. i don't know how they imagine that work. i just don't. but they did. and so my drama teacher vernell, lillie told me, you've got to go to college and you've got to go to college from texas because you would never survive in a newly integrated texas university, because you're you run your mouth too much, you'd get into trouble and you'd never survive. so you've got to go to a black college where they will tolerate your presumptuousness. and so forth. and so she insisted that i go to dillard. that's where she had gone to college, and she convinced them to give me a scholarship and how i ended up going to to because

of her often. then when i got ready to go off to college, mother's gone. i can help me get ready to go off to college and. so my teachers invited me over to their homes and under the guise that i was going to do a little cleaning and instead they invited me into my teacher's closet. and she told to look in there and pick clothes that i wanted take off to college. the bag i have to go off to college was full of my teachers clothes that they had given me so that i would have something to wear when i got to college. i honestly how do you how do you do something like that? well, that's major statement. and what we gotten a chance to talk about all the cultural experiences is they gave you beyond the classroom, taking you out in so many ways. i'm going to ask one final

question. could talk to you all day. this is a question to the consummate college president about her higher education experience. i want people to know that you've spent so much time talking about that foundation for the rest of your life, the childhood experiences of others, so that people could understand why you are who you are today. you make the statement at the beginning of the and the end of the book that you are person, you're not the person you were supposed to be, but rather you are the person you dreamed of becoming. and then you talk in great detail about the dillard experience going after. and then moving from theater to the major in in the languages, and then the wonderful experiences of graduate school before you even get to harvard. but up the danforth foundation. and what i would like you to talk about would be how you combine the study of french philosophers like sartre and

proust to understand the tension you were experiencing between the childhood experience had. and you're moving into a world of the highest levels education how you used appreciation of languages and philosophy and literature to. reconcile the different worlds as you close for. thank you very and thank you for your questions really i very much appreciate you and your achievements. and i feel it's a great honor to have this conversation with you. i, i was lost when i started in college because. i had a fundamental problem i was this person poverty and. and from the outer margins and i was afraid to lose who i was by

educated. it's a typical problem that first generations didn't have as so i'm going off to college and yet. i'm leaving a family mired in blue work and sometimes minimal living conditions. and my mind is going back and forth between the préval. so i have to be educated and to learn so much and my allegiance to this family who has been everything to me for all of my life. and i'm i don't i'm wrestling with how to reconcile all the the those aspects of who i am. do i dare become educated to a certain where i may lose that other of me?

what would i be left with if that were to occur? so i'm definitely looking for ways of trying to reconcile these worlds and. first of all, when i encountered encountered philosophers, they helped me to begin to move away the kind of quoted in concerns that i had to dwelling in a realm i could come to. what i needed to understand. and so that helped me immensely in my young mind because philosophers, of course, are very well the syllogism and everything connected with logic helps you move gradually thought

to thought to to conclusion. and so i was using to a further well, what if this happens then that then that what is the logical of that and so when i got to the existentialist thoughts and they said. frankly that exists precedes essence and therefore look to your existence and what you do every day because that will guide you to your life can be. and so that to me when i was early in my college career to think about what are the things that can do concretely that will solve this problem for me because going to be the sum of the actions that i take and will those action reflect adequately who am as opposed to what

somebody idea is of what i should be and so i'm starting to cultivate an understanding of who i am trying to in everything that i've experienced as a human being and then decide on what life should be like for as a consequence. and so i settled on is that i should have a life of action. it should be a life, contribute something to the world. it should be a life that appreciate so many different people in the world and to be alive the kind appreciate my family for they are and what they have been able do in their lives and give me all of that could be brought to gether and unified under vision of what it is to be a human being. i can be i am with my background and i could also be the realm

of, the most elite and, the most people who are most from me and experience and still feel as human beings. so so that's what how it helped me to begin to evolve into a person who could represent who i am and be afraid all the time that that i was either wrong or was something amiss in the way that i came into the world, the way that i came through my childhood exile, know we could go on and on, on not just because we're both one more president, but and children of the south but because we are human beings who care about people, about education. i think you ruth simmons for for inspiring us. i don't think there are many sharecropper's daughters from

south can be called chevalier of the french legion of honor what? one of the maids in the story you have book is extraordinary. as are you. a poem. thank you. thank you so much. how