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.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

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.

My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.

I just ultimately wanted to be a mother. I love children.

What the American people really want to know is if Jeff Sessions is going to be a good attorney general. Is he going to protect my family? Is he going to make my community safer? The answer is clearly yes.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn't want them to lose friends. He is his family's hero.