She got her sense of right and wrong, of honesty and of fairness, from her father, who had a simple but profound, and unyielding, view of those things. It was either or. There were no shadings, no quibbling around the edges, no dances up and down the margins. In matters of right and wrong, honesty and fairness, it was black or white, without discussion.

She was born Nancy Jane Clayton on Sept. 20, 1931, the first child of smart, though uneducated, sharecroppers who would raise her and five sons on six acres of tobacco -- on half of six acres -- and though she learned work, hard work, at an early age, she never succumbed to the dread of it.

She was an athlete as a schoolgirl and could -- and on several occasions did -- hold her own in public fist fights, always with the tip of her tongue clamped between her teeth in abject concentration -- a signal of determination that is surely a genetic trait in that line of Claytons.

She was fair skinned, freckled face, blue-eyed -- but no particular beauty. She was a natural flirt, could dance up a storm, curse a sailor into silence, and could have made a living as a stand-up mimic.

A well-to-do aunt paid the tuition for Nancy Jane to go to Elon College, near Burlington, N.C., and she went and stayed a year. By then she had fallen for a rakish, devilishly handsome fellow who was already nursing a taste for alcohol acquired in the Navy. She came home and married him in 1950 and they bought a three-room house between Roxboro and Oxford. Their first son was born in 1952. Two others followed. A daughter was born in 1961.

While her husband slid into alcoholism, Nancy raised their children. With delight, and with determination. Ball teams. PTA meeting. Scout troops. Piano lessons. Birthday parties. She sewed clothes for them, flogged them to Sunday school, Halloweened with them, sledded with them when there was snow, laughed when they laughed, cried when they cried, schemed with them when they schemed. She taught them which fork to use. And manners. And not to what she called "slouch." And she cooked and cleaned for them. And canned the produce of summer gardens. And she worked a job, not as a career, but for something more basic -- for pay, as a secretary.

She became a community activist before there was such a thing, at least in that neighborhood. She was to be reckoned with. She became an arbiter among the other women. "Well, let's see what Nancy says" would lead a troop of them, all of them older, all of them bewildered by her judgment, to her house for the disposition of one neighborhood case or another. And always she counseled her brothers in the things that matter as they came of age.

She had an astonishing facility for talk, for language in general, and a vast storehouse of what was generally known then simply as "backbone."

In 1968 she divorced her husband -- but still wept when alcohol killed him at 56 -- and moved her four children into an abandoned house that she bought for $6,000. She and her brothers remodeled it and made it a home for them. Nancy Jane was 37 then.

The arthritis began when she was 38. It was not what generally comes to mind, not some minor pain and discomfort thing that old people whine about. Rheumatoid arthritis is a vicious, savage, disabling disease that contorts the recipients of it through the agonies of a slow hell. She became functionally disabled when she was 40. When she was 42 her second-born son was killed in a car accident. The third born was killed when she was 46. The first grandchild, a little girl, Ashlea, died at 22 months.

When she was 50, Nancy Jane put her things in storage, rented out her house and enrolled as a freshman at Longwood College in Farmville -- by then maneuvering with cane, walker, and wheelchair.

She moved into an old dowager's house on Main Street as a boarder but left when the old lady insisted that the "colored" help not be allowed to address her on a first name basis. After all, this was Farmville. They'd close the schools before they allowed such foolishness.

Nancy Jane moved into a girls' dorm. She had a 17-year-old roommate. The professors said "Yes, ma'am" to her.

She made the honor roll for nearly three years in Farmville and then hobbled home to a bedridden life, to a life of emergency rooms and rehab centers, to surgeries and hospital stays, to home health visits and social work protocols, to hospice schedules and DNRs.

While she still had some use of her hands and arms, she took up watercolors and astonished even those of us who thought we knew her. And she patented a Christmas tree ornament. She was clever, this Nancy Jane.

In 30 years she endured 23 surgeries and the implantation of 17 artificial joints. And she never flinched. Not once. Never wavered in her beliefs. Never recalibrated her values. Not once. Ever. She carried her burdens with a grace unknown to me.

In debate, she gave no quarter and asked none. Unable to feed herself, to scratch her nose, unable to attend to the most private bodily functions, verbally she was without match. She would have laughed at what goes here in Virginia for legislative debate, this woman who with nothing but language could easily whip the bark off of a tight-bark tree.

In one memorable set-to with her oldest brother one of her artificial hips dislocated and she had to be rushed to the emergency room. In the later recounting of the incident, his version was that the hip came out while she was "coiling up."

She prepared for the end time, as was her way. She picked out what she would wear and where she would be buried. She had her china packed up. She enveloped her jewelry to her nieces piece by piece, dictating little messages on each one of them. And she left explicit instructions on the behavior she expected when she could no longer breathe on her own.

Of course she stayed engaged, right up to the end. When you're bedridden around the clock you can watch a lot of CNN. She loved policy more than politics. She knew the windbags of C-Span on sight. She hated Clinton. She liked Chief Moose.

I had a last conversation with Nancy Jane this Tuesday past. It lasted all night, deep into Wednesday. The talk was one-sided. The degradation in her spinal column had finally, irreparably, taken away her ability to breathe and she was in a coma. She looked small, somehow shrunken. At sunrise, with but a nod, I removed the machinery that was keeping her alive.

Before she died, mama taught me what I know.