Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I've never even been to the 'hood. Not that there's anything wrong with the 'hood.

I was a veteran, before I was a teenager.

My dad was a dentist and he moved us across the state of Arkansas to open a dental practice, and then told me to get to work to pay for college and the highest paying job in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1984 was Walmart Warehouse at $6.50 an hour compared to McDonald's at $3.35, so I chose Walmart.

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age.