Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

So the whole family relationship and the whole family reunion was very significant
because I got a chance to see a lot of the younger people in my
family. One cousin, she would be my second cousin, has a couple of kids--they
live in South Carolina, her husband's a dentist--and I just looked at her
little girl, who was nine, about nine, ten years old. How very sophisticated
she was and how much she expected good service in a hotel and, you know, just
things that at my age I would never have had.
I remember she said to the waitress, who happened to be white, she said, "Dear,
my sherbert is melting." She said, "They probably left it out too long in the
back. It isn't your fault." She said, "But could you get me a fresh one,
dear?" And when the white lady said to her, "Yes, ma'am," I said, "My goodness,
things have really changed here," you know. And I asked my mother,
"Would I have had that kind of sophistication at that age?" She said, "NO,
we would never have been able to find out because, when you were that age, we
wouldn't have been here with this kind of service." It wouldn't have been
possible even to come in the place.
So, it was interesting just watching the growth and development of America as
reflected through the youngsters in our family and what their expectations
are in contradistinction to what ours were at the same time. So, it was kind
of interesting. So, we had that roots thing and we propose to have another
one next summer.
My mother, incidentally, is the only surviving child of the ten, which makes
her the matriarch of the family. She lives in St. Louis and she is eigbtyseven
now. The original ten are all gone, but her.
Q: What was the denomination of the church that you belonged to there?
A: It was Baptist.
A: You say both your mother and your father were active In the church?
A: Oh, yes.
A: Did either of them enter the preaching at all?
A: No, no one was a preacher. My mother played for the choir for a number of
years. My father was simply a deacon; he was not a minister, no.
Q: Do you remember any particular social activities they had there? Did they
have annual affairs of any sort?
A: Oh, yes, they had annual meetings. I spent a lot of summers with my
grandmother over in Tennessee and there was always some sort of church convention
or something where all the ladies would bring pies and cakes and
chickens and all kinds of meats and all kinds of things.
My own church, we had a divisionalized Sunday school and I was superintendent