Chapter 01: The Youngest Son in a Sharecropper Family in Texas
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Description
Mr. Brewer begins this chapter by sketching his life as the youngest of ten children in a sharecropping family in the town of Rosser in rural Texas. He sketches his family’s modest means, which taught him how to survive and gave him an appreciation of life in a small community. He then talks about his education in a small school for black Americans during the period of segregation. He then talks about the culture shock he experienced moving to Dallas in 1960. He sketches some of his family’s early history in Rosser, Texas.
Identifier
BrewerCC_01_20190516_C01
Publication Date
5-2-2019
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS, Oral History Interview, May 02, 2019
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Experiences Related to Gender, Race, Ethnicity; Women and Diverse Populations; On Texas and Texans; Cultural/Social Influences
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Let me say for the record that it is 20 minutes of 3:00 on the 16th of May, 2019. And my name is Tacey Ann Rosolowski, and I’m sitting in the reading room of the Historical Resources Center of the Research Medical Library on the main campus of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. And with me is Mr. Cecil Brewer who has joined me for his first session, and we are conducting the first installment of the—his oral history interview for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project. Now, let me just give a few details, and you confirmed earlier, you came to MD Anderson in 1970. That’s correct?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Correct.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And you were hired into what role when you came?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I was hired in the role of a student—as a student nurse.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
As a student nurse, okay. So wow, real early in your career and a whole career with the institution as I understand because you retired officially in 2014, is that correct?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, and at that time, you were serving as quality coordinator for MD Andersons Physicians Network.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Correct.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Cool. Well, that’s quite an arc. Well, I’m delighted, I really am delighted that you’ve come in to talk with me this morning. So let’s start in the usual place, and just let me make a note of my—of the times again for my notes. And so I’ll ask you, please tell me where you were born and when, and tell me a little bit about your family background.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, I was born in a very small rural town called Rosser, Texas.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
[Rolser?]?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Rosser, let me see, R-O-S-S-E-R, Texas. And Rosser is located in—was it—Kaufman County probably just maybe 25, 30 miles southeast of Dallas, Texas, population maybe three to 400 people and—(tapping)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you mind sharing your birthday?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I was born—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And I hope this like tapping—oh, my goodness, yay, I thought they were done for the day. All right, good.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I was born in February 4, 1948, in Rosser, Texas. I’m the youngest sibling of 10.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And my father was a sharecropper.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And his name?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
His name was Willard Senior. And my mother was basically a homemaker because they had a lot of kids to be cared for.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No kidding, she had a full-time job.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Her name?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Mary. So we lived on a farm, and by living on the farm, I was surrounded by all of the things that you do on the farm: from learning how to work with various animals such as cows and horses and goats and chickens and pigs and hogs and all of those things, so—also how to manage these various things that you could eat or enjoy from Mother Nature. There were lots of natural plants and fruits that we were surrounded by, so I became very diverse in understanding how to sort of, if you will, survive in this world if something were to happen, and we didn’t have the—all of the frozen foods that we have today. We had lots of food. So even though my father was a sharecropper, I don’t recall ever being hungry for the lack of any of the necessities of life because we depended on the earth and the ingenuity of my parents and those who lived in the community on how to live—now, not survive but live in that environment.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Was it a close community?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
A very close community. You know such as if you were—it was a communal type thing. We had pigs and all of the things like that, so you would—they would be slaughtered annually. You know you would, but the community would come together and help with the slaughter.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, wow, okay, yeah.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And then part of the reward for helping, you would get a certain portion of the meat that was preserved. And [this is a?] community for that, you know, that hard work. Not only did we do that, we had milk cows for milk, you had horses to play on and ride horses and those types of things. We had lots of ponds and streams, so we learned to fish and gathered fish from the various streams as young boys. We learned to swim. We would learn to swim, and we had [canoes?]. We do our swimming in the various ponds and creeks that were around without very much fear. (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Good, that’s amazing, I mean, considering how people are now with their kids. Where were you in the birth order?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I was the last. I’m the youngest.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You’re the youngest?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I’m the youngest of 10, and I lost my oldest sister a couple of years ago at—and she was 91, I believe, when she passed away.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And her name?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Her name was Ruby.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Ruby, okay.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I mean that’s an enormous family, an agricultural family. Did everybody have chores? Did everybody work hard? Did you guys work at jobs, or did you work on the farm? How did all that work and—?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
All of the 10 siblings were not in the—at home at the same time. The older kids, as they got to a certain age, say at the age of 19, 20, either they went out—one—my brother went off to service, my oldest brother went off to service, the older sisters moved to Dallas so that freed up a bed in—just a couple of beds (laughs) in the house. I think when I was growing up in childhood, there were probably no more than my—six of us at one time in the home. Now, the home was very small, it was a three-bedroom home—I mean a three-room home, and so the facilities were kind of cramped, but as a young child, I did not realize I was being cramped. It was just a communal activity because a lot of things were modulated if you will. Your beds were fold-up beds and things like that. There was no indoor running water or indoor facilities for toiletry, so a lot of that was also a chore, so chores were sorted out. Either you were to collect the wood for your fire before we obtained propane to start our fire, or you were required to go and get water from the well, which was a—which was really magnificent at the time because what we didn’t realize is that our water well sat on top of a natural gravel vein. So when we took water out of the ground, the water are like going through a natural filtration. The water was actually very cold when it came to surface. And as a young person, I never could figure out—I never knew that, but I always knew the water was cold and it was—and it tasted so, so good. But later on, many, many years later, after the surveyors came into that same area, they started mining gravel, and what it was, it was a natural filtration system where we were drawing out our water from. And now in that town, I think the motto is “We have the best water—Rosser has the best water in the state of Texas.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s amazing, wow, and—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—that’s a memorable thing for you.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—there’s huge gravel mining going on in that same area, and we sat right there on top of it as a small community and as a family.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting, yeah. Tell me about school for you early years.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, school in the early years was, I would say, very interesting. We lived on a farm, so the school was like, oh, maybe three miles away from where we lived. Many times, we walked to school. And we had very dedicated teachers, I would say very, very dedicated, and we were taught in a very open environment with multiple grades in one classroom. Maybe the first, second, and third grades were in one section, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade are in another section. They were not very large classes, obviously, because of the population in that area, there weren’t 30 and 40 kids, but they were—but the classes were put together. And the teachers sorted out the lessons based on the grade level that you were in, but you were sitting beside a second or third or fifth or sixth grade student. And I thought we learned a lot. We got individual instructions. This teacher was very strict, so we had a lot of discipline in our—but they were very caring. They want to make sure that we understood our instructions, that they were—is the instruction they were giving us, and they were very dedicated to this. And as I look back today, those at—what I know today and when I look back from my childhood, it amazes me the amount of dedication and a lot of—the amount of energy and compassion that those teachers had. There were only three teachers. The principal was a teacher, he had classrooms, and then you had two other teachers who were assisting. The school itself was like a three-room building, and unfortunately, it was located like on the outskirts of the rural community. It was almost set back into, I would call, a grove of trees. I never can figure out today why that happened, but that’s the way—that was the way it was, and as a young person, it didn’t bother me. It bothers me now as an adult.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What is it that bothers you about that? I’m not quite getting it.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
The unequalness of the system. Why was the colored in the back—or the black or the African American, whatever you want to call it, why was our schools in this area? Why wasn’t it up in the middle of the community? Why was it set back over here in a grove of trees outside of the mainstream of the community?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was going to ask you about that, the racial context in which—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, the racial—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—you grew up?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—the racial context when I grew up in the ’50s and the ’60s—I grew up in the ’50s in that rural area because after the—I moved to—we moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1960, so my—it’s like the old adage goes, everything I learned in life, I learned in, you know—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
In kindergarten?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—in kindergarten. I didn’t get a chance to go to kindergarten, but everything I learned in life occurred from my infancy from 1948 to 1960 in what we call the country or the rural town. That’s when I went through the maturation and the learning process and assimilation and how to be innovative, how to be creative, how to think, and how to be compassionate and respectful, and those things. Because one of the things [nothing?] to do with—that was all taught to us in school, and we didn’t have a lot. You had to learn how to live on—be very frugal and then frugal also went to the school system as well because you didn’t have all of the most modern, at that time, books and instructional materials, but you made do with what you had. The books were passed on from one year to the next year. You could tell that because you would see the—people would write their name in the book because it was assigned to me in this year, and next year that that same book is assigned to somebody else.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Assigned to somebody else, yeah.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And you could see how long that book had been around. And so I thought that was very telling of the time. I only went to elementary school in the country, first grade through the sixth grade. When I entered the seventh grade, my father passed away of lung cancer in 1960, and that’s when we moved to Dallas. Now, I can tell you that in this rural community, we did get a new school during my elementary school days, and I think it was around 19—probably 1956, but I was probably in, what, the first—I was probably in about the second or third grade when we got a—we didn’t get a new school. This is around the time of the famous decision. What—the board of education made a decision about separate but equal facilities. So we got the hand-me-down school, okay?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Mm-hmm.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did that bother you at the time? Were you aware of that in any way at the time?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
No. It didn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me because we were in our own element, and we thought it was great. It was something better than what we had. We got the chance to move into a school with—inside of the main community. It was a little, two-story brick building. We moved out of the little wooden shack out in the middle of nowhere. And it had running water and indoor toiletry and so we thought we had died and gone to heaven. Well, for a, you know, eight-year-old, it didn’t—it only seemed like it was something better than what we had. Like I said, most of these things that I talk about now didn’t bother me as a young person.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. It’s looking back that you see—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Looking back,—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—it differently.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—it raises a lot of questions. And it does raise this whole thing about separate but equal facilities, and we got the hand-me-down facility and —anyway, that’s the way it was. And high school-wise, you didn’t go to high school in this community. The highs schoolers went to Kaufman, Texas, which is another, oh, 20 miles up Highway 34, south—no, just southeast of Dallas, and a much larger community, probably I don’t know at the time, maybe several thousands of people living in Kaufman. It wasn’t a large town.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But this was a big change for you though. That’s a much larger community, isn’t it?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Right, Kaufman. Well, I didn’t go to Kaufman. My siblings went to Kaufman, those who were older, my sister and brother. I only went to the elementary school in Rosser. The only time I went to Kaufman was to observe my brother or sister who may be performing in an athletic competition such as football or basketball or something like that or some type of program that was going on. That’s the only time I would go to Kaufman. But going—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, tell me—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—back to Rosser, you asked me about—tell you a little about my schooling experiences. As a nurse, my first encounter with a nurse was as a maybe five- or six-year-old, and we had to walk to school to meet with the county nurse who would give us our polio vaccines and our DPT shots. I can remember that like yesterday. We would have to go and—because polio was very widespread at that time in the mid-’50s. So I remember getting those shots, and I remember this lady with all this white on, and she would give us our shots. But she was a public health nurse. I didn’t know that—those names at the time; I only know she was a nurse, but in today’s world, she was the public health nurse for the county who would come to the various small towns and provide immunization to the community. So I said—someone asked, “Well, how did that impact you?”—“I don’t know if it impacted me or not, but I think by me becoming a nurse later on in life, it may have had some impact on me subliminally that I don’t know about other than I can remember that so vividly, this nurse coming to town.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Pretty amazing, yeah. Well, tell me about the move to Dallas.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
The move to Dallas occurred in—after my father passed away in 1960. And then we moved to Dallas like in October. Father died in January. My siblings felt that my mother couldn’t sustain us on this—in this environment on the farm, and they all pitched in and moved us to Dallas, Texas, and I started middle school if you—I was in the seventh grade, the seventh grade.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were some of your interests at the time? Did you have a sense that your interests were gravitating in one direction or another in the classes you were taking?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I think the interest that I had in being raised in a rural community, it’s kind of about a sense of your environment and what you’re exposed to. The most educated person that I knew in my early grade school was the teacher. My teachers, those were my idols. I worked on a farm, so I saw farm jobs. So, I don’t know, at that time, I didn’t dream of being a farmer, but I had the skills to be a farmer or a rancher. But by being taken out of that environment and being exposed to the large city of Dallas, Texas, I began to see a different side of the world. I am now in Dallas in this—living in South Dallas, which is a—Dallas had made its—is organized into different sections, north, east, west, and south at the time, but now, it’s much more metropolitan and much more complex. And that’s where primarily your African American or black populations lived was in South Dallas, and it’s very much about community. You had all types of professionals and businesspeople of color so that I got exposed to just more than just the farm environment. I got to see barbers, and a lot of what I saw when first got there were I could see a—back in 1960, a lot of men were waiters in these country clubs, the women were maids or caretakers. And the bus system, we didn’t—I’ve never seen a bus before, now you go to Dallas and you have all these trolleys and things going on, and people are all dressed up getting on the trolleys to go to work, and everybody’s happy and going to work. I go to school, and the school is massive if you will. There are just like tons of teachers and different types of teachers, counselors and principals and assistant principals, coaches, and—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It sounds like you found it really exciting.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—music teachers. I’m excited because I see choices. I see things that I could do that I’ve never been exposed to if I was only given the opportunity to participate. So when I went into the seventh grade and after going through the culture shock of being around so many students, a class of 30 just a section of the seventh grade, a section. The seventh grade maybe had 10 different sections, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. I was in the section A, and I—so there’s a culture shock, I didn’t “necessarily fit in” at the time because I am a little country boy, you know?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Mm-hmm.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And I was teased by—you know, “So where did you go to school?” The name of my school was Scurry-Rosser, and why it was Scurry-Rosser is because the town combined. The two towns made up the school population, the town of Scurry and the town of Rosser. If you want to pinpoint that on the map and some of the historical side of what goes on Rosser and Scurry is on the famous road of Highway 34 that travels all the way across Texas.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, interesting, okay.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
It dissects. And that is the road that Bonnie and Clyde traveled when they were doing their heroic—that heroic thing with that—their—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Nefarious. (laughs)
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—things back in the... And then 10 miles from Rosser is Telico, Texas, where Bonnie and Clyde met their fate, you know?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, that’s amazing.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Telico, the road dissects. And the other town that’s close to Rosser is Inez, Texas. So you have Inez, Texas, you have Telico, Texas, which is about five miles from Inez, another—maybe about five miles across the river because Trinity River dissects Inez County, Ellis County from Kaufman County, then you have Rosser and then Kaufman. And what makes Rosser so important in the history of Texas is that Kaufman County was the cotton capital of Texas. And one might ask why—how did your family become part of Rosser or—and how did they—and where did they come from? Well, my parents’ parents are from North Carolina and Arkansas, and they settled in Central Texas, in Branchville, Texas. My mother’s maiden name is Branch, and I’ve always tried to figure out was Branchville and Branch connected. And it’s located along the Brazos River in Falls County close to Calvert, Texas, and they emigrated—I mean they moved some kind of way from Calvert-Branchville area to Kaufman area. And I had—know that it was in the early ’20s because my sister who was born in 1924 was born in the Kaufman County, Ellis County at that time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting family history.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
So when I put two and two together and per my studies is that when you study the whole thing about slave trade and migrant workers and all of that, the route for work after slavery was wherever the—which way crops were being planted and grown, and they were always along a river. And along the Brazos River is where work was—where there lots of cotton and corn and wheat, and that is where people settled. And if you study that—when I study the history of my race, I go to Central Texas, and you can find out a lot. Then, they came back up to the Trinity River, Rosser and Kaufman, which had a huge valley, a huge—they call it bottomland—a rich bottomland where when we lived on the farm, my father planted cotton, soybeans, maize, and those types of crops in the valley, I mean thousands of acres. And that’s where we worked and happen to harvest those things, harvest the cotton and all of that. And—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to—I mean let me—why don’t you finish your thought?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
So bringing that forward to the impact, all the way up through high school, these are the things that I was—this is a culture shock for me going to Dallas and trying to assimilate, and the kids making fun. But guess what, what I found out is that I knew more than they did because I knew things that they didn’t know. I knew about how to grow a crop, I knew about fishing, I knew about hunting, I knew how to milk a cow, I knew how to—I knew about how to gather nuts, various nuts, peanuts and pecans and walnuts and all those things.
Recommended Citation
Brewer, Cecil C. RN, BSN, MS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 01: The Youngest Son in a Sharecropper Family in Texas" (2019). Interview Chapters. 903.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/903
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