In my life, I've had estates in Russia, houses in Spain, in Norway, in the deep south of America.

As a little girl growing up in the Deep South, my mother told me that my future lay in my education. And she was right.

Where I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it wasn't the south-east and it wasn't the deep south and it wasn't quite the south-west either.

I loved my time in Deep South Wrestling. We trained so hard and I got a crash course into the world of sports entertainment and pro wrestling.

White supremacy is not confined to strange men in the Deep South who put on white cloaks, it is not confined to strange gatherings of the English Defence League.

The Deep South has the friendliest people in the world. They will do anything for you. They also want to know what's going on and won't hesitate to ask questions.

New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.

I grew up in the Deep South, where sexism, racism, and homophobia were and still are alive and well. I have early, early memories of words and actions of this type being very painful.

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

NXT is huge, being able to be on TV internationally is a big deal, as it means you don't have to work so hard to get noticed as opposed to FCW, Deep South Wrestling and OVW, which were all televised, but locally.

Early on, one of my favorites was Ray Charles. I remember hearing 'I Can't Stop Loving You' in the early '60s and thinking, 'What an unbelievably soulful voice.' In those days, the Deep South was extremely segregated.

I can still remember the first time I heard Tori Amos. It was the fall of 1993, and I was in the back of a colossal '79 Lincoln Coupe Mark V, embarking on some otherwise forgettable road trip somewhere in the Deep South.

Kofi Kingston has always been one of my favorite opponents to wrestle. He and I started back in McDonough, Georgia in 2006 in developmental at Deep South together. So, our careers have come along at the same time. He's incredible.

Being a black male in the Deep South after World War II, you could actually come home in your uniform and be lynched on the spot or be connected to some horses and buggies and dragged on the street in front of your wife and children.

My tryout match for WWE was against Kofi. I was unsigned, and then I got signed by working the dark matches. I wrestled with Kofi in my first TV match at Deep South Wrestling. We've done single matches, tag matches, all the way to producing.

As a kid, I felt I had it bad - and people where I came from did - but if I'd been in a similar position in America, it could've been 10 times worse. We have the NHS. We don't have slums like I've seen in the Deep south, or shocking intolerance.

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, 'Don't ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.' In the deep South in the '50s, '60s and '70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.

I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.

Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.

The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.

Quite a few of The Rolling Stones records have had a great honesty about them. In fact, I would put them side-by-side with a 'Treasury of Folk Music' collection, containing all the prison songs, the farm and road-gang songs that were recorded on the spot in the Deep South.

The problem with Deep South to me is that there was a group that were tight with the boss, and they would always go out and drink and have barbeques. Then, when WWE would say, 'Who should we look at?' Bill Demott would say, 'Oh, look at this guy and this guy.' Of course those were his buddies.

It is indeed fitting for me to make a comment to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child because I have lived in many villages down in deep south, and everyone there who played a part in my stewardship as a young man growing up and as a professional, they have given me unstinting support.

Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.

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