Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

It's not a common thing for a Southern white family to go out and seek their black cousins.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I'm a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise now how lucky I was to grow up among kind folk.

My family and I built my whole career from scratch.

My family advocates doing what fulfills your soul. They've always said, 'You're a big girl; figure it out on your own.'

Some of our kids are adopted and some kids are natural-born - I forget which ones are which. Family's just amazing. We think that of everything that we could do in the world... if you don't take care of your family and raise your kids, you lose.