We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.

Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that didn't bite you first.

Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.