From the first time I set foot in North Carolina, I knew this was a place of strong women, because my daughter was among them.  As I watched her dance through the late spring breeze of May amongst a million colorful flowers and a few hundred white dresses, her graduation at Meredith College at Chapel Hill had only just begun her journey as a strong Carolina Woman.  In these few short years since then, I have watched her find love and marriage with her high school sweetheart, find substantial employment at the prestigious Duke University, and be accepted into their highly sought after graduate program.  Only God knows how far she’ll go from there – and only she knows how far she has come.  

Growing up in a family from Deep South Mississippi with seven brothers and sisters, she, being the oldest of them, helped to watch after them and protect them from the years of abuse that I suffered at the hands of the man she called father.  Even so, she struggled unyieldingly to finish high school as one of only two Distinguished Scholars in her graduating class that year.  Shortly afterwards, bursting out of the door of oppression, doggedly following the love of her life into the big wide world out there, she made a determined and clever move to North Carolina.  Since then, I have watched her make one smooth move after another in the game we call life, beating the odds against her in ways that no one would have dreamed possible apart from the hand of God. 

While making her home in North Carolina, she has never forgotten her roots back here in Mississippi, though I know sometimes she would like to.  She has watched over our family in the wake of hurricane Katrina, she has actively encouraged me to overcome my own circumstances and finish getting my masters degree, she has inspired and encouraged her brothers and sisters to finish high school, and contributed financially when needed.  On that bright and sunny day in May that seems now like an eternity ago, I was there not by any of my own doing, but because she cared enough to buy out of her own pocket a bus ticket for her mama to come see her graduation exercises. 

Now, as I journey home from North Carolina a second time by train with my youngest two children, I have come again at her expense.  In this brief but wonderful weeklong visit, I have had the opportunity to learn a little bit about the history and making of North Carolina, in which many strong women participated to make it what it is today.  I only hope that my little girl from South Mississippi, who has herself become a strong young woman in the face of adversity, will be welcomed into the arms of mother North Carolina, as her Mississippi mama must return back home to the deep south from where she came, to burst through the doors of oppression there.  While watching the scenery pass through the train windows, I was reminded of the many scenes in my own life that have passed by so quickly that I hardly had time to see what was happening. Only God knows how far I have to go – and only I know how far I have come.