Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

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Q: Oh?
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'1 A: And then I had a--let's see, I don't remember any more of her brothers or
sisters--there was one named Howell who died before I was born--but there were
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ten of them. Oh, then there was an Aunt Neppy who taught for a period. She
i lived in Dyersburg, Tennessee. All of them, all of my mother's sisters
1 learned to play the piano--they actually learned on an organ that they had at
their house. None of them had music lessons, they just learned to play and
just handed down to one or other. Later, they all learned to read music but
I they originally didn't.
; Q: Did you learn an instrument at an early age?
A: My mother gave me piano lessons when I was about eight, nine years old. I
showed an abysmal lack of talent for it and, ch., within six months or so, that,
was all over. Then a lady had a nephew, for whom she had bought a violin, who
wouldn't practice and the lady brought the violin over to me and said she would
give it to me. So she gave me the violin and I took lessons from the Catholic
sisters there for about a year. When 1 started to learn to play fairly well,
the lady came back and took the violin away and gave it back to her nephew. We
weren't able to purchase another one so that was the end of my violin lesaons.
Very interestingly, I went to a man, a white man, there ro take violin lessons
and he refused to give them to me, you see, a black boy, violin lessons. And
that is when I went to the Catholic sisters who gave me the lessons. Catholics,
of course, in my hometown, were almost as verboten as blacks, you know,
in those days. Particularly in the South, the other white people weren't
very high on Catholics, but those people were just very wonderful to me aad
gave me the lessons and I enjoyed them.
Q: When you visited in Chicago for the Fair, which relative was it that you
visited there?
A: I stayed with one af my mother's nephews, Aunt Neppy's son, whose name was
Claudius Wills.
Q: What did you think when you arrived in the bus here in Chicago?
A: Well, it was the largest place I had seen-at an age that I could really
appreciate it, because I had been to Chicago before when I was about four or
five. I did remember the house and, when I got to the house, I remembered it.
They had a very lovely home on Champlain Avenue. I enjoyed it, it was a very
fine neighborhood. In that block where he lived, most of the people were
professionals, teachers and social workers and postal employees. There was a
lawyer across the street who had three children, oh, a couple of them right
at my age. They had lovely homes and had recreational areas in the basement
with a pool table and stuff of that sort. That was just another kind of
exposure for me. I had never seen black people live as well as those people
were living. So it was very interesting and enlightening.