Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination

A Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination is a literary work that is both autobiographical and biographical in nature and chronicles the lives of fourteen siblings raised in a two-parent household who stepped up to the plate to vividly reveal their early daily lives farming that never yielded any financial benefits. Revealed in each child's account is their personal relationship with each other, their parents, and those family members who lived in proximity. Also there are stories of their reluctance to perform slave-type labor, disdain for their living conditions, dismay from the older siblings of having to raise the seemingly unending stream of newborns, the unrelenting weather conditions, and their father's inability to manage the financial business of renting and sharecropping what little of it that he could control. In the middle of all the strife of living in the South, at this time, and dreaming huge dreams for herself and her family was a woman of great wisdom and acumen-the matriarch who saw fit to encourage her older children to move north and prepare a place for the rest who would come when it was fitting to do so.The children never dwelled on the thought that they deserved better, just dreamed that they could do better. And better they did! They set out to find their places in the world by venturing into another surrounding. Their dream had a plan, and that plan was for one or two of the siblings to go North and be path blazers for the others to follow. The main idea was that their mother was on board with the hope of her children going North to find their places on the world's stage. No sibling wanted to disappoint her. So the entire family made the migration North, leaving the former slave quarters behind. Each day, with the thought of Southern decay not far from their minds, each of the fourteen siblings became their own individual self with ten of them earning college degrees and five of them earning graduate degrees.