Growing Up in Segregation

Title

Growing Up in Segregation

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Identifier

BrewerC_01_20190516_Clip01

Publication Date

5-16-2019

Publisher

The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

City

Houston, Texas

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Transcript

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

I was born in February 4, 1948, in Rosser, Texas. I’m the youngest sibling of 10.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Wow.

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

And my father was a sharecropper.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

And his name?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

No kidding, she had a full-time job.

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

And—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Her name?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Was it a close community?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Oh, wow, okay, yeah.

C.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)

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Good, that’s amazing, I mean, considering how people are now with their kids. Where were you in the birth order?

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

I was the last. I’m the youngest.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

You’re the youngest?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

And her name?

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

Her name was Ruby.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Ruby, okay.

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

And—

T.A. 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—?

C.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.”

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

That’s amazing, wow, and—

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

And—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

—that’s a memorable thing for you.

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Interesting, yeah. Tell me about school for you early years.

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

What is it that bothers you about that? I’m not quite getting it.

C.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?

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

I was going to ask you about that, the racial context in which—

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

Well, the racial—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

—you grew up?

C.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—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

In kindergarten?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Assigned to somebody else, yeah.

C.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?

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Mm-hmm.

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

And—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Did that bother you at the time? Were you aware of that in any way at the time?

C.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.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

Yeah. It’s looking back that you see—

C.C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS

Looking back,—

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD

—it differently.

C.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.

Growing Up in Segregation

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