“My mom was a very, very powerful woman,” she said with a smile overcoming her face. “ ... I think I have taken some things from her.

She had to be determined to survive. That’s all there was to it.”

Duarte is a renaissance woman. She’s a writer, a pastor and founder of a nondenominational church and professor at Shaw University. She has taken care of two parents — one through a battle with stomach cancer and another through the onset of a form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s.

Duarte has so many degrees — including a masters of divinity from Duke University Divinity School — that it takes her a minute just to remember them all.

She is also the CEO and founder of African American Alzheimer’s Alliance. Duarte said soon she will be traveling around this part of the country to give lectures and inform people about the disease and its effects.

Duarte’s book, published last month, “Yet I Will Love Thee: The Hard Truth of Alzheimer’s Caregiving,” is a collection of stories of many caregivers for those with Alzheimer’s.

“It’s just another part of my journey to educate people on Alzheimer’s disease, in particular, African Americans,” she said. “They are hit hard.”

It was right after her father, Clarence Williams, died that Duarte noticed that her mother, Mary Ellen, was “acting funny.”

“Dad died and all the symptoms started to show,” she said. “We were so busy in another part of our life that we didn’t recognize them.

Eventually, we had to put her in a nursing home, and the doctor called it a form of dementia.”

Duarte would visit her mom in Virginia often in those 18 months that she lived in a nursing home. She always had a spiritual connect to her mom, she said.

“It was going home to see her in the nursing home, and she didn’t know me,” Duarte said. “It was such a traumatic experience that it just changed my whole life ... I cried all the way back to North Carolina, two and a half hours.”

Her mom passed away more than a year after being diagnosed.

“Since then, I have just worked and studied and found out a lot about Alzheimer’s disease. I have realized that a lot of people are hurting. It has such an impact on the family... that’s what led me to write the book.”

Duarte grew up the daughter of share coppers in Cullen, Va. She remembers fondly the countryside, but her family moved to the city while she was still at home.

When she was about 9, her mother went blind from Glaucoma.

“She was an awesome woman because she still got up and made her bed and washed the dishes,” she said. “If you had talked to her, you wouldn’t have even known she was blind. She was able to raise her children, 13 of us.”

Duarte smiles thinking of her mother. She stumbles over words, trying to find just the right description of her mother, repeating the word “awesome” again and again.

Duarte grew up, her mother teaching her the verses of the Bible and a fear, respective, of God.

Perhaps it was partly her mother who convinced Duarte that her path was, in part, to be a pastor.

In 2005, Duarte founded the Tabernacle Community Christian Church in Morrisville, but she had been preaching sermons since 1998.

“I want my church to be a little picture of heaven, and my picture of heaven is multicolored,” she said.

Duarte said she is interested in the soul, and it doesn’t matter what the people look like or how they dress. She welcomes everyone to come on Sundays.

She thanks God every day for her family. And when she finds it hard, she turns to one of her favorite scriptures: “And he said unto me, my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” - 2 Corinthians 12:9.

“It seems like an oxymoron to say, when you’re weak, you’re strong,” she said. “We gain strength through our journey and our test. When you’re literally so weak — like when I was driving back from Virginia and my mom not recognizing me — I totally had to depend on the Lord for my strength. It made that verse come alive.”