I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house, on the heels of the Great Depression, when cotton was still running the show in the south, and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a window, all but closed now. There were days hot enough to melt lead, and bitter winters that tested and forged the human spirit. And in a way, that's how I felt looking back on it. There we all were, scratching at the ground for our white gold and imagining the world beyond the cotton rows. It's my life and a heritage of pride in my homeland, my view of America, of family, of love, and ultimately of the "House Not Made With Hands."