THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: Desegregation in Texas
INTERVIEW WITH: Patricia Smith Prather (Tape 1 of 2)
DATE: 22 January 1994
PLACE: Houston, Texas
INTERVIEWER: Gary Houston
TAPE I, Side 1
H: January 22, Saturday morning, sitting in McDonald's at I-10, in Fifth Ward, speaking with Patricia Smith Prather about desegregation in Texas and Houston history. 'Morning Mrs. Prather.
P: Good morning, how are you?
H: Just fine. It's good to see you. Finally. We've become telephone friends and now...
P: Friends...that's right, and now we know...
H: ...we're meeting face to face.
P: ...we're real people.
H: That's wonderful, to see the face behind the voice.
P: Yeah, absolutely.
H: One of the things that I'm trying to establish in talking to people about history in Houston and Dallas, especially, are the distinctions between Houston and other parts of the state. I know you've lived in many parts of the state; can you tell me just a little bit about why you think Houston might be different or how it might be?
P: Well, that's a good question. I haven't lived in P:Dallas. Of course, I know Dallas is a large metro-politan area like Houston. I think what made Houston and, particularly. the area that we're in now, which is the Fifth Ward, unique was we had a close proximity to the ship chan-nel...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and so, therefore, a number of jobs came out of that area. We also have a very close proximity to the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a lot of your early jobs came out of there. And as you know, in the early days most of the times people worked near where they lived, and so this particular community that we're in now developed because of the indus-try. And I'm sure that's...I'm sure that has something to do with the city as a whole because this was always con-sidered an inland port city. And so, we were always de-pendent on income and jobs from the port system and from the railroad system.
H: Um.
P: Also, I think...of course, we had our churches. I don't think there's anything unique in Houston about churches. I think that's one of the things that throughout the State of Texas as I've travelled makes us part of a network, and that was that right after slavery ended in Texas in 1865 there were churches established, literally everywhere there were black people, there was usually a Methodist Church; there was usually a Baptist Church. In P: this city, for instance, there was the Antioch Baptist Church that was established about 6 months after the slaves were freed, and there was a Trinity United Methodist Church which was established before slavery ended. And there's a whole story about how they evolved from the First Methodist Church. So, I think that we...what makes us so unique, of course, is that we're...always been a larger city, so those are the things that I see making Houston unique. And basically, it's a source of jobs and income and employment.
H: I see. That it has had as a result of that, that job market...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...a stability, perhaps, that other cities might not. P: ...Might not have had. That's right. We're...you had an agricultural situation where people were picking cotton or corn or whatever they were doing, they tended to have seasonal work. But with the railroads, certainly there was steady work; you know, with the ports there was generally steady work. So, I'd say that that had a lot to do with it.
H: Tell me something about your background. I know that you're head of Houston Place Preservation Association, foun-der and director of it.
P: Uh-huh.
H: But your family's background and your own background growing up and your education and professional career as well?
P: Okay. I grew up in Houston, Texas. I graduated from Wheatley High School in 1960, which was right on the...at the beginning of the civil rights movement. My father was Clifford F. Smith, C.F. Smith, he was one of the first, if not the first, Black in the State of Texas to receive a Master Electrician's License. He was a graduate of Tuskeegee; I'm a graduate of Tuskeegee; my daughter's a graduate of Tuskeegee; my sister's a graduate of Tuskeegee. My mother was a graduate of Xavier University in...we came up through the Catholic...they came up through the Catholic Church. Both of my parents were extremely active in the community. My father was a businessman, but they were active in so many things. They were both outstanding in the Scout movement; I was very outstanding in the Scout move-ment, having probably been on of the first Black females - there were two of us that went to a National Girl Scout Encampment in Colorado in 1959, I think, and I was there with Angela Davis.
H: Really? [laughter]
P: Of course,I didn't know Angela at that...later on, I saw a photograph of her. God, I was there. [laughter] So you know, we came up in a traditional middle-class community.
H: Uh-huh.
P: A community at that time was self-contained; everything was here; there was never a reason for us hardly to leave P: this community for anything. Our churches were here, our schools were here, everything that we needed was here. The only time that we ever really left this community as young children was to get on the Nance bus and go downtown and shop at Woolworth. Literally. I mean there was... everything that we needed was right here, all of our friends were here, all of our social institutions were here. Most of our social institutions...most of socialization was at a place called the Julia C. Hester House. And Julia C. Hester House was the first recreational center for Black children in the city of Houston; it was formed in 1943. And most everything that I learned, outside of school and my parents, was at the Julia C. Hester House. We learned to swim there, we became champ...my sister and I both; there were only the two of us...we both became champion swimmers. We learned crafts there, we learned how to dance there, we had Friday night sock hops at the Julia C. Hester House.
H: Tell me who was Julia C. Hester...more about Julia C. Hester,
P: Julia C. Hester is in our Texas Trailblazer's Series. She was a woman who came out of Georgia; she was one of the graduates of...at that time, called Spellman's Seminary. She came to Houston as a teacher; she was one of the early teachers here. Her husband was what they called a cotton classer, so apparently they were fairly well-to-do for Blacks in those days.
H: Uh-huh.
P: They had a beautiful house not very far from here. In fact, that's one of the houses we're trying to save as an historical home. And the story is that she, as a teacher, was very concerned about the socialization and other things that children in this neighborhood needed to learn, and so she would have them at her house. She didn't have any children of her own. She would have them at her house after school, doing arts and crafts, doing neat little things. And so, in the '40s when the - at that time it was called the Community Chest - decided that they wanted to expand some of their activities in the Black Community, they came to this particular community, and they decided they wanted to open a recreational center for various and sundry social, I guess, things. And they were looking for the person who most likely, you know, to name it after, I guess, who'd done that kind of thing for the community. And Julia C. Hester's name came up. So, we spent a great deal of time...anybody who came up in this neighborhood, that was born after the '40s went through the Julia C. Hester House for social things. Also, at that time we had social activities at school. We had sports at school; everything we did, like I said, was either the church, the school, the recreational center, and the park. There was one park in this community, and it was called The Finnegan Park. The Finnegan Park was named after a White woman who gave the land. Her name was P: Finnegan; she came from the Finnegan Family, And so they gave the land for this park out here.
H: And your shopping was done in the neighborhood as well? The grocery stores...
P: Like I said, yes, there was one Garden's Grocery Store and everybody shopped there when I was coming along. Of course before my time, there were little small...almost like the kind of things you see now...the little corner stores.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Everything was done in this community. I mean...
H: Were they black-owned corner stores? Mom and Pop stores?
P: For the most part, no. I don't...there was one - and it wasn't in my immediate neighborhood but on Lyons Avenue which was our main street. This is...I live in the Fifth Ward, still work in the Fifth Ward - all of these communities were almost self-contained. They were almost like little cities. And of course, we had a main street, and the main street in this community was Lyons Avenue. And on Lyons Avenue, starting around the '20s, there was a store called the Louis White Grocery Store, and Louis White was a Black man. And at...of course, he's dead now, and his family still owns that store. They don't still operate it and run it, but that store's still there. It's one of the ...it's probably the oldest, absolutely is the oldest one that's still in existence of Black grocery stores in this P: area.
H: Uh-huh.
P: But for the most part they were owned by other ethnic groups. They were - I don't want to say which ones, because I don't remember - I think Jewish, but maybe some Italians, but they were not really basically owned by Blacks. H: You mentioned that you'd also lived in Washington D.C. for a time...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...and when you returned to Texas from Washington that you had something of a shock.
P: Absolutely a shock. I would come back every year. I left here in 1960 going to college, and of course, every Christmas I would come home. I remember the first time I came to Houston and travelled on Interstate 10, which is where we are right now, and the first thing I said was, "My God, what happened to my neighborhood?" Because I remember that, you know, this was a neighborhood; Interstate 10 was were my friends lived. I had some friends who lived on Farmer Street...I can remember, some of my best friends lived on Farmer Street and right beyond, right behind. Now Farmer Street is still there, but the streets between Farmer and Market Street are all gone. So I remember that where Interstate 10 was were people's homes that I went to visit in my neighborhood that was safe, and I could walk in and go to different peoples' houses. And all of a sudden it was P: all gone. It was quite a shock. I tried to remember. we had a - this is pretty incredible. Again, looking back now that I can, I'm 50 so I can look back and say, "Gee, I can remember this happened...but we took piano lessons from a woman in the Fifth Ward. He name was Mary Ella Price and her family name was Nathan, and so she went to Fiske Univer-sity and was trained in music, and she opened Nathan's Con-servatory. And, of course, I was one of the first kids that went to Nathan's Conservatory as a little kid - about 5 years old. My mother used to put me on the bus to go to Nathan's Conservatory. Well, later we used to walk to Nathan's Conservatory - most of my friends went there, took piano, both boys and girls. And when I came back and I saw Interstate 10, all of a sudden I couldn't find Nathan's Conservatory, because the street that used to go from my house straight to Nathan's had been cut out.
H: Uh-huh.
P: You know...so it was like a shock, it was like, really, what happened? Nathan's Conservatory by that time had closed down. And who knows what else had closed down between my house and Nathan's Conservatory. So it was just a totally different community. Lyons Avenue was almost, looked like a burned out bomb shelter - I mean, many of those buildings were abandoned. And at one time it was a very lively street.
H: Um.
P: There was a printing shop on that street that was no longer there, there was an old Woolworth's that was no longer operating. So the community had just changed.
H: When you came back was probably the beginning of true desegregation in Houston and probably the early stages of that. Were there changes that you saw that you would at-tribute to directly to desegregation? These changes in the old neighborhood in Fifth Ward?P: It was gradual. I think the first changes that I noticed were in the schools. Whereas when I'd grown up all the teachers were Black - the principals were Black, every-body...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ... and all of a sudden I'd go back and visit Wheatley High School, which I had a fondness for - it's a whole story in Wheatley High School - and the pride that this community had about that school and how many outstanding graduates came out of there, including Barbara Jordan. And so the high school was kind of a natural place you'd go back to. And I think the first changes I can remember noting was that there were White teachers there.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And that was different, because I'd never seen any White teachers. I think that was the starkest change. The other change was just the fact the neighborhood wasn't as beautiful as it used to be - you know, the yards weren't as P: well kept. Because what happened was the people who were the upper-middle class Blacks had decided that they would move out of the neighborhood and out into suburbia. 'Cause they all of a sudden wanted to have a better, what they perceived of, as a better life. So the people who had been the stalwarts of the neighborhood ... who were the ones who had the nicer homes, the ones who had the beautiful yards, many of them had gone. So there was a visual change. You know, you didn't see the...well, I don't remember us having picket fences, [laughter] since that wasn't a big deal here. I think it was more chainlink fences but you didn't see the fences and the beautiful flowers in the yards, and you all of a sudden didn't know everybody in the neighborhood anymore, because the people my age who were born in the '40s had gone to college and had not come back to the neighborhood. So most of the people that I saw in the neighborhood were people who were my parents' age and older - they were in their 60s and up. So, you see, it was just a visual change in the neighborhood, along with the fact that you...like I saidm there were more Whites involved in things that we had never seen Whites involved in, parti-cularly in the school. Now, of course, the churches have stayed pretty much the same. That's one of the phenomenon I've noticed personally through everything that has happened in my life time - the church has still remained segregated ...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...in all communities. You know, the Blacks go to their churches, the Whites go to their churches, the His-panics go to their churches, the Asians go to their churches, the Vietnamese go to their churches. That's the one thing I noticed, pretty much. There are some churches that are mixed, obviously, but for the most part the churches have remained in the same color thing, you know ... the same people, same families... Even now if you go to the churches in this area on Sundays, you're going to see some of the same families that come back.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So the churches have been the institutions that have allowed us to remain some kind of sense of community. But other than that, most of the people have left.
H: How has the role that Blacks have played changed, since desegregation? You were mentioning seeing White folks involved in different activities than before, but what have Black folks been involved in that's been different?
P: Well, I'll borrow a quote from my father. I came back in 1977 to live. Of course, I never stopped coming, at least once a year and usually twice, but I moved back in 1977. I was hired by Exxon as a public relations profes-sional. I invited my dad to lunch one day, and I had an office on the 41st floor, overlooking Fifth Ward. And my dad made a comment that 10 years before that time, he P: couldn't even come in the front door of the Exxon Building, and here's his daughter with a job on the 42nd floor.
H: Ten years before that time would have been the late sixties...
P: That's right.
H: ...and he felt that...
P: He felt that in the late sixties there would have been no reason really to have come into that building, because there were no Black people working - certainlym his daughters weren't working there. In fact, I can remember working for Exxon, and the man who I worked for took great pains to tell me that he could remember when the first Black secretary came there. So one of the changes was that we now had more opportunities to go outside of our community to become employed.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And so, you begin to see us in different roles. Where-as, before, most of the people that worked in the Fifth Ward - okay, almost everybody that I knew. I'm trying to think about who I knew and what their fathers did, almost all the fathers that I knew, of my friends, my little circle, were business people. One of my father's...one of my friend's father was in the appliance buiding - business; another friend's father was in the plumbing business; my father was in the electrical contracting business; another friend was Louis White's sons - they were in the grocery business. My circle of middle-class friends, most of our fathers were self-employed and they provided employment for maybe 10 other families. But when I came back, that was no longer true.
H: So those were opportunities outside the community that opened up that they were also, in some sense, liabilities.
P: Absolutely. Because what happened was, when the oppor-tunities opened up for my generation, we no longer had to come back in our communities and take up where our fathers and mothers left off. We had an opportunity to go else-where. We didn't live in the community and we really didn'thave a lot to do in this community anymore, except maybe come back and visit our parents.
H: And what was the impact on this community?
P: Again, further deterioration of the communities, you know. We weren't building new homes here, we were buying homes out in suburbia. We weren't keeping up the yards here, we were employing the people to do our yards. We weren't calling the electrician to do our work... Because now we lived in Missouri City or some other place and so, you know, the C.F. Smith Electric Company wasn't working in Missouri City. And, anyway, it would take him an hour to get out there - by the time he got out there and got back, he was in the hole losing money.
H: Did White consumers patronize Black business? Did C.F. P: Smith Electric Company get calls from White customers, as a result of this opening up of opportunities? Did that make a difference in that sense?
P: That's interesting. In our business, it did not. It ...Daddy, for some reason, always had all kinds of customers within this radius of which he worked in. Probably during desegregation, he probably picked up some additional White customers, but at the same time he lost Black customers be-cause they moved out of the neighborhood. He tended to have a fairly contained radius where he would service. That's just kind of the nature of the business, you know, you can only go so far and really make money; so you kind of stayed in your general radius and you worked in your neighborhood. You did...of course he had... he did... I tell people on my tours - the historic tours that I do of this neighborhood - that my father's company literally wired every structure that you see, from the time he was in business to 1945 until he died in 1989. So he really had enough business right in this area. Of course, he worked in the Third Ward area which is the Texas Southern University area. After we became desegrated, many of the Black middle-class people moved to the Third Ward area. There were some homes in that area, called the Riverside Area, and those homes had been occupied by Jewish, basically, Jewish families. They began to move out and Blacks began to buy those homes. Well, of course, Daddy had all of that business because that wasn't P: very far from us, so he got a lot of business from there. His business customers tended always to include Whites. Now, that probably might have been because, as I said earlier, a lot of your businesses in this area were owned by Whites, and Daddy had all of that business. So, in fact, one of our favorite stories in our family was Ninfa Lorenzo who has become well known - Ninfa's series of restuarants - and whenever we got a call in the middle of night... Three or four o'clock in the morning, the phone would ring; my mother would say, "That's Ninfa." [laughter] Because Ninfa used to make tamales not very far from here in her original restaurant, and Daddy was her electrician.
H: Uh-huh. [laughter]
P: In fact, she was at Daddy's funeral. I mean, you know, they stayed friends forever. So, you know, there were people in this radius of all colors who called him because he had a valuable service and because he was close and because he did good work. But his Black customers, by the time I started taking more, by the time I took over his business along with him - I never took it over; I should say we partnered when he became ill around 1983 - I could de-finitely see the volume of business from the Blacks going down, because most of our customers were still in this same radius, they were getting older, they were dying, their children were selling the property, and we just weren't getting the same amount of business in this general P: neighborhood. So you could definitely see the effect on business, on Black businesses, and, I'm sure, other businesses that depended on this neighborhood business began to go down as we became a more mobile and a more desegregated society.
H: You mentioned Ninfa's. I was curious to know whether there, in this neighborhood or in Houston in general, has been a connection between the Black community and the Mexican-American community, and what those relations...
P: Um.
H: ...have been and how would you characterized it?
P: That's real interesting. Right...a stone's throw from here - in fact, right on the other side of the track... Right behind you there's a track, and as long as I can remember, the Spanish always lived on that side of the track.
H: Um.
P: And we always lived on this side of the track. Well, the reason for that is because the Spanish and the Blacks basically have the same jobs - they worked on the water-front, they worked for Southern Pacific Railroad - but we never lived together.
H: Uh-huh.
P: I recently had an occasion to go on a show of one of the city council people here who's Hispanic-American and -she's younger than I am - and I was telling her, "You know, P: it's real interesting", I said, "when we grew up in Houston the Hispanics - we called them Mexicans at that time - but the Mexicans always went to school with the Anglos and we considered them White. We knew they were Mexicans but we thought they were White in terms of what...they always went to school with Whites. They never came to our schools, we never went to their schools. They never even had schools, they were Mexicans. So the relationship was - even though our communities were side-by-side - we were separate com-munities. Now, we did work...like I said, my daddy did work for everybody within the radius, but we never had a social relationship with any Mexicans that I know of.
H: Was there cooperation or tension?
P: I don't think there was any tension. It was just like the whole society - segregation, you know - It was like in your community you were - I call it a safe enclave - you were safe here.
H: Uh-huh.
P: You had everything you needed here, there was no reason for you to go outside your community. For instance, they had their own Catholic Church...
H: Yes.
P: ...which is not very far from here. They all went to their Catholic Church. We had a Catholic Church in this community that was all Black, not very far really from their Catholic Church. So, we never really had a connection in P: our churches nor social life. We didn't go to the same schools, so there was no tension that I knew of, we just didn't...there was no reason for us to inter-act, other than the fact of my father working for them as a business person.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Or maybe they doing some work for us if it was a service they had that we needed - probably a restaurant or like Ninfa's, or something like that. But, no, I don't ever remember knowing about any tension, like gang wars or anything like that. Just two separate communities - one of one side of the track and one on the other side of the track. So much so that as we've been doing research on that cemetery that borders on that same track area, except that it is all on this so-called Black side of the track, at the tip of that cemetery have been buried Hispanics or Mexicans. So there was this dividing line and it was that track.
H: Are there significant numbers of Mexican-American kids at Wheatley High School now?
P: There are. And there are indeed. In fact I've been working with them on a history project to try to help them understand how important a cemetery is to the history of a community. And the first day when I went in and talked to the students, half the students were Hispanics and half the students were Black...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and I changed my speech.
H: Ah, great.
P: I changed it from being an African-American history to the importance of studying history of your community in general. And how important cemeteries and churches and other institutions are in the collection of history about who you are. So, yeah, it's definitely a change. And I don't know if there's any tension between the students at the high school level, based on their ethnic backgrounds. I happen to still have a son in middle school, and he tells me - unfortunately and I think it's very unfortunate - but that many of the fights that erupt between the sixth-graders or the seventh-graders or the eighth-graders have to do with the ethnic...
H: Have to do with ethnic...?
P: ...ethnicity, and I don't know why that is, and it's sad, real sad.
H: I talked with Wheatley and someone who occasionally lectures there and is a mother of students, who's been through this. Do you feel that desegregation has changed the whole nature of a Wheatley High School education? What impact has it had on public education in the Black com-munity?
P: Well, I would hope, and this is...one is my dream and one is reality. The dream is that during desegregation that the barriers would have been broken down and that by the fact that we went to school every day together, we would P: learn about each other's culture, and so therefore we would live in closer harmony. I think some of that has happened. But unformtuately not enough of it has happened. And I'll give you a good illustration. About two years ago, I went to speak at an elementary school, and I walked into a class that had what I call Heinze 57 variety of all kinds of children - Hispanic, Black, Anglo, Asian, Lebanese. I mean all kinds of children go to these Vanguard schools and highly intelligent children. So, I opened my speech by asking a show of hands about certain things that I knew were cultural. You know, for instance I know the Hispanic culture has something called a quinceanera, which is something they do for their young girls. And I said, "How many people know about a quinceanera?" Hands went up. "How many children know about a Bar Mitzvah?" Hands went up. "How many children know about rap music?" Hands went up. And by in large the kids from those particular ethnic groups knew about those particular ethnic things within their cul-ture. That bothered me. That tells me that we have to do abetter job in educating our children about each other's cultures. I think one of the reasons we have gang problems is because we don't do a good job in educating children about - it's okay to be different, that we all bring wonderful things from our culture, that needs to be changed. I don't see as much of that as I'd like to. I thought that that's what desegregation would do. Now for my generation, P: it did do that, 'cause I can remember very, very vivid-ly that... I was in college at the time, but when I went to college and desegregation had set in, there were campus visits, there were things that we did so that we would understand each other and get to know each other as students. There was an effort made to get various ... particularly Anglos and Blacks together. So that they would begin to know each other as people and not as somebody they'd seen on a television screen or read about in a newspaper. And it worked. Because most of the people that I know, that are my age, worked very hard at knowing what each other were. And as a result, I've developed some lifelong friends from various communities because of that. That...I can't say that's not going on now, but from my experience, not enough of it is going on.
H: What have been some of the general problems with desegregation in the schools in Houston?
P: Well, from what I can gather, this gang thing - some of it has to do with ethnicity. I think because many of the teachers are not equipped to understand multi, so-called multi-culturism... I think that one problem is they can't so-called relate to all these different children in the school. Because of some of their ethnic and cultural differences. That's a problem. Because when we were going to school, like I said, there was no such thing as Black History; there was just this thing that everybody around you P: was Black and the teachers brought a history of their own families and others, and so you learned about your culture just by the process of being around all these people who were entrenched in the culture. Now you've got a situation where you've got all these cultures in one room, and because we've been segregated from each other for so long we never really learned about each other's culture. So we have to open up our minds and actually teach each other about the culture. So that's a problem. But one that I see has to be overcome. But that is a problem. But I mean it's not that somebody sat down and created it on purpose - it just kind of happened.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Because all of sudden we were forced to understand one another. I think that's a problem. That we all brought different cultures and mores and things to the classroom, and we really didn't understand each other. I think we need to do a better job of... And I think that's one of the things that the Institute of Texas Cultures could do in terms of in their exhibits - where you say they've got Blacks and Hispanics, this exhibit, that exhibit, that other. Somehow we've got to bridge the gap of understanding about each other's culture. And it's got to be a cross-fertilization. That's...we need to do a better job of that.
H: I think there's a movement toward doing that within the Institute. You're going to see a different exhibit floor, P: and in the years ahead...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...has existed for 20 years...
P: For instance, there's a program here in the schools called Young Audiences, and one of the things they do is, they go to various schools performing. And they've got a jazz group and they've got a mariachi group and they got... Well, that helps. Because through our...you teach these children that, you know. So, there's some movements toward bridging that education gap...
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1, ABOUT .. MINUTES.
SIDE 2.
P: ...they're in a classroom, and unfortunately there was not enough knowledge, I guess, on the part of teachers, the educators, to really help the children foster an under-standing. I'm not saying it hasn't been done at all, but I'm saying that not enough of it has been done. Where they need to really understand each other's cultures and respect their differences. I mean, handicapped, same thing. You know, I've taught my children that handicapped is...if someone can't walk, that just means they can't walk; that doesn't mean they're not as good a human being as you are; it just means they can't walk. So, you know, I think we just need to do a better job in training our children to respect another human being, whether they're Black, His-panic, White, or whatever. And I just think that we haven't P: done a good enough job in doing that. And I think that desegregation made us realize that we had to do a better job. So it's not really a...it's a problem but it's one that needs to be solved. You know, it's not like it is going to be a problem forever; it teaches us that there's something we need to do. That we need to really respect one another. We need to go to each other's churches. You know, I mean you go to a Black Baptist church in Seguin, Texas, ...[makes clapping sounds]...you know, they jam it, you know ...
H: Uh-huh. [laughter])
P: ...there's something cultural about the call and res-ponse and the...you know, that happens. Well, I think once people come into your churches and they realize that there's a difference there, they begin to respect that.
H: How has the role of the church itself changed, as a result of desegregation? You mentioned that people have come back to the communities on Sundays to go to church, but the church played such a critical role during the whole civil rights era...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...and even before...
P: Uh-huh.H: ...that...and it's playing, seems to be playing a slightly different role now. Some people have suggested that to me. Would you agree or how do you feel about the H: role it's playing now, as opposed to before?
P: I don't really know the role they play now. But I don't see their role is as critical as it was, or they don't see it as critical.
H: Is that because the community is more secular, or...?
P: Well, again, I think a lot things that we do are based on need or...for instance, if in the days when Blacks didn't have many choices...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...we couldn't go to the Galleria shopping - no, that's not a good example, because the Galleria wasn't there - but, I mean, there were certain things we couldn't do, and so we had to do them in our community. Well, the church provided that; the church provided spiritual, for our spiritual needs. Most of our early schools came out of the churches; Sunday school continued to be a part of the educational process; our social institutions - whenever we had to have meetings they were in our churches, whenever we had to have fish-fries or any other fund raisers, they came out of our churches. That's because of necessity; we didn't have any other places to go. So, I think at that time the church provided a kind of total role for community development. I mean, they were the central part, they had the structure, they had the people, they had the role models, everything was there. Now we have so many other options and oppor-tunities that the church...we no longer need the church for P: the things we needed the churches for.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Some of the churches are beginning to understand their role because of some new problems. And that is, we're now having more problems with gangs, we're now having more problems with crime, and I think some of the churches have realized the fact that we have some new problems and they have gone at solving that. For instance, we seem to have on-going problems - I guess this has been historical - with people who don't have enough food to eat. That's something that I think the churches did then and they continue to do. I guess the role of the church has really been defined to some degree by the changes that have taken place in our communities. Whereas crime when I was growing up was almost non-existent, gangs were almost non-existent. So I think the church's role has had to change based on the times. The other thing that I think that has happened with churches is, because so many people come into the community to come to church on Sunday, I think the parishoners have lost the sense of community that they had in the church, because now they have other communities.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So their sense of community is where they live, as opposed to in the old days, which was where they live now. So I think just the whole nature of people moving out has created a different set of roles for the churches.
H: Okay, you're talking about moving out again. Let's talk about migration.
P: Yeah, let's talk about migration and what that did. I mean, if you're not living in a community you're not going to have the same sense as when you were living in a community.
H: Do you see that migration as a natural process? or is it...
P: [whispers] Natural...
H: ...unnatural in a way? There is a demographic kind of succession that has happened, and Blacks weren't the first ethnic group to live in Brentwood, were they?
P: Right. No. No.
H: And if that's so, if other ethnic groups began to move into Fifth Ward or Fourth Ward or Third Ward or First, is it so horrible that we're going - and this is a rhetorical question - [laughter]...
P: Uh-huh, uh-huh, very rhetorical.
H: ...that we are losing the identity of some of those areas?
P: I hear what you're saying. In other words, you're saying that traditionally whenever anybody's done better, they've moved kind of where they think people who are doing better move...
H: Yeah.
P: ...and that that's not really a Black thing; it's kind P: of like a people thing...
H: Uh-huh.
P: I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. You see, you're forced between...whenever you make a change...what's that thing I like to use all the time? For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
H: Yes, yes, basic law of physics.
P: Yeah, basic law of physics, so that if you...whenever you change the, you know, the scale, you lose something, you gain something. For instance, my generation of people probably had the highest paying jobs and the best positions that Black people had ever had prior to the '60s. Okay. On the one hand that's good, because we were able to buy bigger houses, we were able to have 2 cars in the garage, we were able to send our kids...we were able to pay for our kids' education. And that's all good.
H: Well is it...you said everytime you lose something you gain something...
P: You gain something.
H: How does that also mean now that it's a basic law that everytime you gain something you have to lose something?
P: I think you're right.
H: Oh.
P: You see, what we lost was our sense of community. What we lost was our sense of culture, our sense of history. You see, most of us don't know that our history... Okay, the reason that we did well...okay, I've asked myself this several times, said, "How did a little community like Fifth Ward produce Mickey Leland, Barbara Jordan, Arnet Cobb, my dad, me, you know, county commissioners?" The only Black that's ever been a county commissioner in Houston, in Harris County, came from this community. Every state representa-tive that, just about, has gone to Austin out of Houston, up until recently, has come out of this community. And I've said to myself, "Now how in the world could this one little community with its, you know, little houses, little poor houses, produce so many people?" Because there was such a sense of progress in our communities. We had come up through our grandparents - not my grandparents but my parents' grandparents had been slaves. And there was this natural evolution, you know; they were no longer slaves - we became farmers, first tenant farmers, then owners, then we came to the city. That was a progression up. And this is kind of answering your question about migration... Migration is inevitable, because we didn't want to be tenant farmers forever; we wanted to be farm owners. And once we became farm owners, we sent our kids to school. Then they didn't want to be farm owners, they wanted to go to the city. So there was all this progression.
H: So we've associated migration with mobility.
P: So we've associated, that's right. But out of this Fifth Ward community, which started evolving after the Civil P: War, where Blacks - I think by 1870 half of this com-munity was Black, there were half Anglo and half White, halfAnglo and half Black. We had a city alderman who was Black that came out of this area. So there was this progression, you know; the first Black city council person came out of this area. I guess...where am I going with this? Why did this community produce that? Because we had so many dedi-cated people that wanted us to achieve. Okay, like when I came up in the community there were business people - like I saidm all my friends' people were in some kind of, form of service business. All of our teachers were highly educated - most of them had at least a Master's degreel, some of them had PHDs. They couldn't work at Exxon; they couldn't teach on UT's campus. There was only one university here, and that was Texas Southern University. So all of these highly trained people were our teachers. We had role models, you know - the person next door was a business owner, the person across the street was a teacher - we had all these people around us that were top role models. That was good. Because if you're modeling yourself after people you see, then you're going to become somebody - you want to be a teacher or you want to be a business owner. Kirby John Carwell, who has one of the biggest churches in Houston, recently told me at a meeting that he remembers seeing my father's truck - saying C.F. Smith Electric Co - when he was still in elementary school and that made an impact on him, P: in terms of business, that Black men can be in busi-ness. That's what produced this group of people who achieved, because we had achievers around us. What we lost when we started moving out was this concentration of achievers.
H: Who are the role models for kids today then?
P: The role models of the kids today are mixed - there are still some teachers, there are still some business people here. But in that mix are street hustlers, you know, people who are selling drugs - they know who the drug dealers are; we never knew who the drug dealer was. So there's a...so they've got a wider range of role models to chose from; they've got more bad role models, I think, than we had.
H: Um.
P: I mean, I think that's been...just more bad role models. You know, a person who is selling drugs is a bad role model. A person who is walking the street, a beggar is a bad role model. We didn't see...I don't ever remember seeing a beggar, you know, in our community. I mean, ... we took care of our community. We had...if someone died, for instance, we didn't send our kids to an orphanage. Someone took that child in. So what we lost was a sense of community and a sense of protection, in order to progress to the next level.
H: Could that also relate to an urban, rural difference? As we moved from farms and from an agricultural base to the H: city, did we change at that step which was before desegregation? I suppose what I'm really getting at is whether you feel that there is a difference between Black society in the city and Black society in the country? P: Oh yeah, [laughter] I would say definitely there's a difference. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a kid who grows up in the country or a small town or on a farm, their whole basic life is consumed in farming and taking care of what they have to do from sun-up to sun-down, you know. You get up and you milk the cows, you go out and pick the vege-tables, you plow the fields, you do such and such and such; mostly, your only social outlet might be on Sunday going to church. You might have an occasional baseball game, you might ride horses, but an urban kid, on the other hand, can go to museums. They can go to AstroWorld. They can go... Even in my time, we could go to amusement parks. We had trips to the beach. There were things that we could do for leisure activities. uh-huh. Yeah that's definitely...I think leisure activities is definitely a difference between having leisure activities as an urban person and having very little leisure activities as a rural person. As a rural person you're working, you basically work. So, yeah, I think there's a difference.
H: Was there a difference between Black rural life and White rural life?
P: Probably not that much difference.
H: Would they have had more in common in a rural en-vironment than they perhaps had in common in an urban environment?
P: Probably not. The similarities you have is...does a segregated society in urban...was they...they were segre-gated in urban and they were segregated in rural. Again, they didn't go to the same churches, they didn't go to the same schools. They may have worked together more in a farm setting, they may have worked... I don't know. But, essentially, you had two societies in both a rural and an urban setting - where you never knew each other, you know.
H: Did desegregation take place differently in a rural setting than in an urban? How do you feel about that?
P: I haven't had a chance to think about... Did desegregation take a different...? Well, in one sense probably in a smaller situation, that the disappearance of separate education probably happened a lots faster. Whereas you had only two high schools, 'cause, you know, heaven forbid Black kids and White kids could not go to school together under any circumstances. Once you desegregated, then you had one high school.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Now again, from a sense of history and loss of what we had, Booker T. Washington School and Lincoln High School and schools named after Blacks, you know, all over the state of Texas that were in small communities, became part of the one P: high school in the community. So you lost a whole generation or maybe two generations of people who were graduates of Booker T. Washington High School, because all of a sudden Booker T. Washington High School was annihi-
lated.
H: Uh-huh.P: And you all went to the same high school.
H: It was annihilated?
P: Well, yeah, it was gone. Because once you desegregated society you didn't need...in a small town, you didn't need two high schools. You only needed one high school. And, by and large, that high school always became...the Black high school closed and the White high school stayed. So you had a much faster disappearance of evidence of the strides that had been made by those Black educators in a small town, than you did in a large town.
H: Uh-huh.
P: You see, because desegregation happened in the early '60s of the schools, the high schools, I think, began...in Houston became desegregated about 1960. Well, by and large, you still have schools in the city of Houston that are predominately Black or predominately White or predominately Hispanic. But in a small town, you don't.
H So that it's instantaneous.
P: So it's pretty much instantaneous in terms of education...
H: In smaller towns.
P: ...in smaller towns. But, again, the churches the churches never...churches were, they remained constant; they just never really changed. In fact, I heard someone say one time that the churches in America in the South are some of the most segregated institutions in America, are churches in the South, because they never integrated the churches. I don't think anybody ever really wanted to, because, again, it was the community. You went to your community church, and you weren't really caring whether or not that church was Black or White - it was just your community church - your family has always belonged to Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church - so, therefore, you've always gone to Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church. So that was the constant, the churches, in both rural and urban...your churches never really changed their membership. They may have changed their focus. They may have made attempts to invite various ethnic groups, as choirs, or special programs, or whatever, but the membership has not really changed that much.
H: Another aspect of Black culture is celebrations. Are the celebrations that they had - you were mentioning quinceaneras and Bar Mitzvahs - would you suggest there are any counterparts in the Black community to those traditions in the Mexican-American and Jewish communities, that we have gone...?
P: Well, the one that comes to mind, in Texas, is P: Juneteenth.
H: Okay.
P: That was always an African-American celebration of freedom. It started in 18...if...the slaves learned they were free in 1865; in 1866 there were Juneteenth cele-brations all over Texas. And they were really fabulous events. I mean, they were real; they were coming together of families, there were religious things going on, there was sharing of food, there were top speakers that were brought in, there was the celebrated red soda water that you only got once a year... I found out in some of my research that the watermelons were part of the celebration, not because of the stereotypical Black person eating a watermelon but because that's when the watermelons became ripe - in June.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So that's part of the celebration. I also found out in my research that watermelons were native...really came off the planet of Africa. They grew wild in Africa. So, our connection with the watermelon went back to Africa. So, you know there's so many...
H: Have you tried watermelon juice? [laughter]
P: No, I need to, though.
H: Yeah.
P: They juice it? Okay, no, I'll bet it's wonderful.
H: Yeah, they sell watermelon juice... In fact, the Mexicans drink watermelon juice...
P: Okay.
H: ...in Mexico, and Mexican-Americans in San Antonio. You can buy it on the streets.
P: Watermelon juice, sounds good.
H: Go ahead; I'm sorry.
P: So, yeah, Juneteenth has always been a Texas cele-bration. We've always had parades. As long as we've had high schools we've had high school queens. We've had those kinds of things that typically would...the parade person would be whoever the star in our community was at that time. You know, the Black businesses would come out and put their names on the sides of the fanciest cars. There was always this, you know, who could get the finest Cadillac...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...for their queen, you know. So, yeah, I think...
H: Did each Ward have its own celebration, or was that ....?
P: Yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
H: Each Ward. So, there were 3 or 4 different cele-brations?
P: Juneteenth? Now, early on, I understand, because since there was only one park for Blacks - and I think this is a real fascinating story - the Blacks had no place to cele-brate Juneteenth. I think they started celebrating somewhere around Antioch Baptist Church, and a man was lynched over there so they felt like...
H: Which is now downtown?
P: ...which is now downtown, formerly known as the Fourth Ward Area. My understanding is that they started cele-brating Juneteenth somewhere in that area, and a man was lynched over there, and they felt like it was unsafe, and they didn't want to do it anymore. So, five years after slavery, a group of Black people - some of your early Founding Fathers, like Rev. Jack Yates, like Richard Allen that I was telling you about that was a State Legislator -some of your upstanding citizens got together and decided they were going to purchase some land, that they were going to call Emancipation Grounds, where they could go and every year celebrate. Well, now, for a long time...and that park is still there - it's now called Emancipation Park and it's owned by the city...
H: [inaudible].
P: Uh-huh.
H: But that land was actually purchased by Blacks.
P: That land was actually purchased by Blacks. They purchased 10 acres of land; they purchased that land right after the Civil War and...which was a phenominal thing for them to do...
H: Yes.
P: ...'cause, again, they were in a survival mode, you know. They needed to eat every day, you know; they needed to buy a park, you know, but they felt that strongly about P: it. S,o every year, I understand, they would, every-body would converge on Emancipation Grounds, in wagons, by foot, and they would come to Emancipation Grounds and celebrate freedom. I think that's an incredible story.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So, back then, they would all converge on this one park which was, at that time, in the middle of nowhere.
H: Uh-huh.
P: As, gradually, as the city grew and we began to get other facilities, then the celebrations would become regional. But I don't ever...now that I'm thinking out loud...I don't think the Juneteenth celebration ever left that particular location. I think it was always there. Until, you know, in the '60s we kind of got away from Juneteenth celebrations. So, I would say Juneteenth celebration is definitely an African-American festival, a celebration. And, again, like I said, the schools always had their own home-coming queens, their own parades in their own neighborhoods...
H: [inaudible]
P: No, this was probably around football season.
H: School would have been out, of course.
P: No, see, that was around football season when we would have... For instance, in Houston we had what they called the Yates versus Wheatley Football Games ... were very famous.
H: Oh, yes. [laughter]
P: Big, big, big, big, big, big, big deal.
H: Oh, yes. [laughter]
P: So, you know, the homecoming queens from Yates and Wheatley were deals...
H: Where's Kashmere Gardens, by the way?
P: It's not very far; it's just north of here - kind of north, not very far, stone's throw from here.
H: Okay. I've been hearing that since childhood... [laughter]
P: Well, Kashmere Gardens was where people, again, moved out. See, they moved out from Fifth Ward; they moved to Kashmere Gardens which is just right up... So migration... you made me realize migration is just part of a natural evolution of people. They move to different areas. There wasn't either any more space here. I imagine it was a space situation.
H: Kashmer Gardens High School...
P: Kashmere Gardens High School was opened right in the late'50s, early '60s, and probably because Wheatley High School had become crowded.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And they needed more space.
H: Has Kashmere Gardens desegregated?
P: Oh, definitely.
H: Is it predominately Black still? Or is it...
P: Well, see...I don't know. Because, see, there's so much bussing in of students...
H: That's, yeah, that's...
P: ...so, I don't really know, but the neighborhood is still predominately a Black neighborhood.
H: Now, you mentioned Juneteenth was less actively celebrated during the '60s. Was that due to desegregation?
P: I think it was. What I...the information that I have is, yes. Again, we'd moved on to other things, and we were ...there was a real force to try to assimilate into society ...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and we didn't want to do anything that set us apart in the '60s. We wanted to be a part of society. So, part of what we did was, you know, go into society...[whispers]...so that's what we did. We kind forgot about our own celebra-tions, and we became part of society. The other thing I wanted to mention was debutant balls.
H: That's like a coming-of-age party.
P: You see, there's back to this...see, we saw...
H: ...comparable to the Bar Mitzvahs and quinceaneras?
P: We Blacks saw debutant balls in the Anglo community...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and because we didn't have a quinceanera or some celebration that we knew about, we emulated - again, we wanted to be a part of society - so we emulated what we saw P: was going on, and we began to have debutant balls.
H: Uh-huh.
P: We didn't get into Kwanza until - what? - the '70s when ...
H: Ron [inaudible]...
P: ...Ron [inaudible name] decided that we needed to do some things to celebrate our own heritage, which he kind of went back to the harvest in Africa. But Kwanza was some-thing that came up later, when we began to get some sense of what we were connected to Africa.
H: Uh-huh.
P: But from the '60s to that time, we were in an assimi-lation mode - we wanted to be just like what we considered all other Americans. 'Cause we really, when you think aboutit, we've been fighting that battle since the end of slavery.
H: Uh-huh. Absolutely. You think Juneteenth has made a comeback then since...
P: Oh, yeah, absolutely; oh, absolutely. I don't know what spurred the comeback. I think it was just certain communities, like we have; we had a group here called, I think, the Emancipation Association that was headed by Rev. C. Anderson Davis, and he wanted to bring it back. I think he just...he was the person who decided he wanted to bring it back, so it came back in Houston. There was a similar kind of person in Austin - it was a female; I think her name P: was Florida something, because I did an article for Texas Highways magazine, and I talked to these people all over the state. But someone in Austin decided they wanted to start the celebrations back again. Someone in Odessa, Texas, decided... So then they gradually started springing back up. And then Al Edwards got the bill passed - June-teenth - making Juneteenth a holiday. And so that kind of added to the interest.
H: Has it been celebrated differently in rural communities than in urban, just in your own experience, pretty much the same?
P: Um, yeah, I'm sure it's been. I think in smaller communities, it tends to be more like family reunions.
H: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
P: I think so. In urban communities it tends to be parades and kind of a city, you know...
H: Uh-huh, parties and things.
P: ...big deal, all of a sudden, for us to be able to parade downtown...
H: [laughter]
P: ...you know, where traditionally we couldn't parade downtown. So, yeah, I think it's been different. I think it's absolutely been different. I think it's more of a family thing in smaller communities. One of the most famous ones, and I...every year I plan to go back. I used to go when I was a child, but I didn't know what I was doing.
H: Your parents would take you to Mexia?
P: My parents would take me to Mexia.
H: [laughter]
P: You got it. Yeah.
H: That's wonderful. All the way from Houston, huh?
P: I had no idea...
H: [inaudible] Dallas...
P: ...what was going on, you know, but we used to go to Mexia and party, party... [laughter] ...eats lots of food.
H: [laughter] How large were the crowds at Mexia in the '50s?
P: They were huge.
H: I have heard...
P: They were huge.
H: ...estimates ranging from 10,000 to a 100,000. [laughter] P: Oh, I don't think it was that many people. I mean, the park probably couldn't hold a 100,000 people. But there were a lots of people, and it was a big deal. The biggest thing to me was - I was a little kid - and I can remember wanting to be in that dance pavilion.
H: [laughter]
P: Oh, I wanted to get...and, oh, I wanted to do that, but I guess, one...because they didn't allow small children. I don't remember if there was beer being served or wine or whatever, but there was something. There was a wall; you P: know how you had these walls...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...that you knew were there and you couldn't do it... I always wanted to get up on that dance pavilion and hang out with, you know, the older crowd. But I was always too young to do that. But I...
H: But there were tens of thousands of people?
P: There were lots; there were thousands and thousands of people there. And it was like a family reunion. In fact, each family had their own little plot; some families even, I guess, owned or leased certain sites. And that was their site; 'cause we used to go there with the Mitchell's from Mart, Texas. It's a little small town not too long...
far from Waco called Mart [Mott?].
H: Uh-huh.
P: And my daddy and this man had been in the Sea Bees; no, they had been, yeah, I guess, in the Sea Bees together, and they'd been lifelong friends, and we always used to get together with them at least once a year.
H: That's where your father learned the electrical trade, was in the Navy?
P: No, that was after he went... No, my father learned the electrical trade in Tuskeegee.
H: In Tuskeegee.
P: Tuskeegee had a very active department for trades.
H: Yeah, just the reference to the Sea Bees...
P: No, but then, I guess the natural progression was because he had that skill that he went into the Sea Bees.
H: [inaudible]
P: And so, he and this man stayed friends until they both died a couple of years ago. And we used to go to Mexia. And I remember they had their own little, you know, the Mitchells had their little place where we would go and meet up there. And Mrs. Mitchell told me a story, for my Juneteenth story, that when she was growing up - of course, she's probably close to 80 now. And she can remember as a child going there with her parents, and they would leave the night before in a buggy, and they would travel by buggy and they would get there, you know...
H: [laughter]
P: ...at night, and they would sleep in the buggy...
H: Yeah.
P: ...and then, I guess, in the morning they'd get up and start barbequeing, and it was like open season. Everybody would barbeque and kind of, you know - family - and they had not seen each other since last Juneteenth, or whatever. But it was a family affair. And there was something for every-body. I guess the older people would kind of sit around and talk about the old days and whatever and kind of share notes, and the young kids like me would run around and eat everything in sight and play games, and the teen-agers would get to dance. And so, therefore, they would get a chance to P: meet each other...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and, you know, have their social thing. It was a big deal.
H: It sounded like, from the descriptions I've heard of it during its heyday,...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...it sounded like a multi-family Black Woodstock. [laughter]
P: It was. That's right, there was music, there were preachers, it was like in the old days - from what everything I've read in the old days of Juneteenth was. There was a preacher there, you know, some great speaker would make a great speech, you know. There was always food, there was always fellowship. And so, it never really changed. It was a family affair. Sounds wonderful, and every year I need... I'm going this year.
H: Yeah, I went for many years in the '70s and '80s, and I haven't been back since the mid-80s, but I...P: Uh-huh.
H: ...I think we need to revive Juneteenth.
P: I do.
H: [laughter]
P: That's right, definitely do.
H: You know, one of the big days that they have there that somebody was telling me about was the selling of the booths. P: Uh-huh.
H: ...of the stands, as they call them. There was a smaller event of...
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2, ABOUT .. MINUTESTAPE II, Side 1
H: [laughter]) We were just saying Juneteenth transcends social class, which is another reason it's such a special celebration.
P: I hadn't thought about that, but you are absolutely right - everybody's there. And it's a big event. It's a big festival. It's a big, like you said, Woodstock - it's music, it's dancing, it's communicating, it's selling things at booths, it's a business. [laughter]
H: Have you found the, or taken part in Juneteenth? Since it's an official state holiday, you know, I wondered about it.
P: That's a very interesting question. I can't answer it. I can relate one thing, though, that I always heard, and that was before...way, way back, there was always this understanding among Whites who had Blacks working for them ...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...that they could forget them working on Juneteenth.
H: [laughter] That's right.
P: Don't you remember?
H: Yes, yes, of course.
P: Everybody knew it. It was an understood kind of thing. So Juneteenth was...I never really thought about it until you and I started talking about it...but it was the cele-bration...Patricia Smith Prather
48
H: How about...
P: ...that was distinctly ours. It was the day the slaves were freed and we were never going to forget it.
H: Something I remember also was that the...Juneteenth was, during the period of segregation, the day that we were considered desegregated for a day or at least...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...in South African terms we might have been considered honorary Whites...
P: For a day.
H: ...for a day. Were there any instances of that?
P: Oh, yeah. I'm writing about that right now. In fact, there was an amusement park here called Playland Park...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and it was out South Main, and, you know, back then there was only one amusement - it was like Astro World - but of course on a much smaller scale - you had a big Ferris wheel and you had, you know, roller coasters and a few things. But the only day that Blacks could go to Playland Park was Juneteenth. And there was an element in our P: community that hated that idea so much that they would refuse to go and refused to take their children.
H: But a lot of folks would.
P: But on the other hand there was this element, including my grandmother,[laughter] who says, "I don't care; I want myPatricia Smith Prather
49
kids to have one fun day a year." And on Juneteenth we would trek down South Main on the bus with my grandmother, and we would go and have a ball.
H: Was that your first ride on a roller coaster?
P: That's right.
H: Mine too. [laughter]
P: And my grandmother used to be...I'm writing this story as we speak...I'm finally able to write about my grandmother because it's so emotional - she was such a wonderful woman. And, I mean, Grandmother, my grandmother was 50 years old when I was born and we were teen-agers, so that means she was in her early to mid 60s...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and Grandmother and Aunt Sugar, we used to sit on the front of the roller coaster with, you know - me and my little sister, we were so little - I'm sure the four of us could fit in there real well. And we'd yell and scream, and my grandmother and Aunt Sugar would have as much fun as we did. We looked forward to it, every single Juneteenth.
H: Uh-huh.
P: You know...and, like I said, there was that element P: that said, "Look, my kids can't but one day a week; I'm not going to let them go at all." My parents, in fact, were part of that element, but my grandmother overruled them.
H: Uh-huh.Patricia Smith Prather
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P: No, we only get to do it one day a year; we'll just have to do it. So that's the only time we ever had a chance to do that. My father tells a story of being out with clients and being in that area and passing by there and telling them what a pain it was for him to try to explain to young children that when we were riding down Main Street and we saw these big Ferris wheels when we were small children - "Daddy, Daddy, I want to go in there." And he says, " No, you can't go in there." "Why?" "Because your skin is a different color,and so, therefore..." That's something really hard to explain to a small child.
H: [inaudible]...most devasting things about segregation.
P: Absolutely. So Playland Park was our reminder that... and that was like our treat, you know, treat little Black children. There was also the story that that was the one day of the year that they made more money than ever during the whole year, was on the day that they let these little Black children go.
H: Doesn't make much business sense, does it? [laughter]
P: It doesn't. They would make so much money on that one day.
H: Yes.
P: I heard a similar story about the Black Exposition that opened at the...
H: State.Patricia Smith Prather
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P: ...the State Centennial, State Centennial, that the one day, or two days, that they allowed Blacks to go to the State Fair in 1936 was the day they made the most money out of the whole deal.
H: It was a regular tradition.
P: Oh, it became a regular tradition? Okay.
H: [inaudible]
P: Okay. But this was during the first...
H: When it started.
P: Uh-huh, when it started. I read a book that someone wrote [inaudible]...
H: But that doesn't make a lot of sense, [inaudible]... suggest to you that some things were more important than profit to certain businessmen, that they wouldn't...
P: They would rather not make the profits than to have Blacks in there, intermingled. It's a very sad commentary on America.
H: How do you feel about those people who wouldn't go on Juneteenth?
P: I probably would have been that way, knowing how I am now. I would have thought about it from an economic stand-point.
H: Uh-huh.
P: I guess the other this is...of course, we have so many more options now. I guess for me that would have been the Patricia Smith Prather
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time for us to start our own amusement park.
H: [laughter] Yeah.
P: You know, knowing the way I think, I'd say, "Well, forget it; I don't need them. We'll just start our own amusement park." But, you know, that's probably - now that I know how I am...
H: It's like acquiescing to the humiliation, to just...
P: Yeah. For instance, I can remember the Alley Theater was here - he only theater in Houston. And they let Black children go; because of my mother and others who belonged to the Jack and Jill, they opened up the Alley Theater es-pecially for us one day a year.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So, again, we went. That's the only time we ever got a chance to go to a theater.
H: [inaudible]
P: And our parents were so concerned - particularly our mothers - that we got a well-rounded...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...education and access to all things that were available to Americans that they went along with it.
H: If you're thirsty you drink out of the water fountain, no matter how it's marked. [laughter]
P: That says Colored, absolutely.
H: [inaudible]...drink out of the water fountain...Patricia Smith Prather
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P: Well, you think about the mind set that that gave us.
H: Yeah, yeah.
P: I mean the humuliation...
H: No, yeah, I understand.
P: ...of saying, when I was writing this book, I mean I spent half my time - not half; I mean I spent a fair amount of time in tears. I'm saying, God, all these things happened...
H: ...just sort of re-living...
P: ...you know, I mean these people were lynched because they went to vote? I mean only because their skin color was different, no matter how much they had in their brain? I mean that's bizarre. So it was...it's scary, Gary, when you think about the mind set that has been put in a race of people for one reason, and one reason alone, and that was because their skin was black. And to me it's incredible, and the reason I spent so much time writing about the heroes in those eras is because when you think about the fact that they made it, in spite of all these restrictions that were put on them. then you have to think that, boy, that's some ...these people were pretty incredible. You know, we had our own tailors, we had our own barbers, we had all these people who allowed us to have suits on, we had photographers - white people wouldn't even take our pictures - but we had our own photographers, so they took our pictures.Patricia Smith Prather
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H: Uh-huh.
P: I have an incredible collection of...not incredible yet, but I'm wanting to do a collection of just photographs that were taken by these photographers around the turn of the century. So, it created some bad things, but it also created just a tremendous amount of strength to go through things that no human being should have to go through. And yet we went through it. You and I sit here as living witnesses that because of the groundwork that they laid, you know, because of the groundwork I'm laying, my son will be able to go to Harvard.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And do well.
H: Uh-huh.
P: My father had no...my father couldn't go to any other school but Tuskeegee. I mean, he might have gone to Harvard if he'd been Harvard material. But basically he didn't have the same, my father didn't have the same chance I had. My children have chances I didn't have. I wrote a book. I mean, I didn't know anybody when I grew up that wrote a book. You know, my son is going to book signings.
H: Um.
P: I never went to a book signing with anybody. I didn't even know it existed. So, there is some progress. But what I'm concerned about, though, is the loss of the reason why Patricia Smith Prather
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we made the progress. There's a definite reason why we made P: progress in a segregated society that prepared us for the next level. Whether it be good or bad, it was part of the process. And it was an important part of the process.
H: Well, that brings us back to what we were talking about originally, is the mixed blessing of desegregation.
P: Yeah.
H: Do you think that...why do you think it has been a mixed blessing?
P: Well, because like I said, on one hand we progressed, we were able to get jobs we were never got before, we were able to get positions we never got before. But on the other hand, we regressed in terms of our cultural base. Every ethnic group must have a cultural base that it can, that becomes its foundation. I mean, it's just part of, you know, the reason why we go and study the history of great Europeans and other people is because that's their founda-tion.
H: Um.
P: That from which they were allowed to, or they had sprung. And we have to keep a foundation in which our children know that the struggle got them to where they are. That there were some beautiful people who picked cotton, who ...There were some beautiful people who cleaned houses, who learned how to develop accoutrements to help them clean Patricia Smith Prather
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the house better...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...so therefore they developed the broom. There were people who helped with... This Black man named Norbert R R... [inaudible] from Louisiana, who was the first person to ever figure out how to...what do you call it?...where you take the sugar from the sugarcane and make it into regular sugar - some kind of vacuum plan, vacuum pan, evaporation process...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...a Black man did that. He was the first one that ever did it on a basis where it could be commercially feasible. So, you know, the people who do sugar now in Sugarland and all these places can thank a Black man.
H: Uh-huh.
P: What children need to know... I was asked when I was at Exxon, I found out that James Audubon was a Black man and when I mentioned it to some people at Exxon, because they were giving money to the Audubon Society, they said, " Well, why is that important?"
H: Uh-huh.
P: I said, "Well, because it's important for children of all colors to know that people of all colors made a difference in society." So, what I'm concerned about is in the loss of our community, we somehow lose our base. We Patricia Smith Prather
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must have that base. And I think that's one of the reasons why people come back to the communities for church, or they come back to the communities for other things. We still P: have to have the roots. See, Alex Haley had the right term, and that is no matter how far you go, you still have the root. And our communities have become our roots. Where we can know that we have some time that was laid, a founda-tion - the churches and the schools and the institutions and the businesses and the cemeteries - all of these things are the basis from which we sprung.
H: And if we're losing those communities, we won't have?
P: We will lose a certain amount of our identity. You know, no matter how much people talk about assimilating into society, there's no such thing as assimilation of cultures.
H: Uh-huh.
P: You see. We respect each other's cultures, but we will never become White, White people will never become Black, Asians will never become Black. They still have Asian culture, they still have Hispanic culture, there's still Jewish culture. And we need to keep African-American culture.
H: What do you feel is going to be the future, then, of those Black folks who are not into their roots, who don't come back to Fifth Ward except for, perhaps, on Sunday?
P: Well, I may be wrong, but I think there's a certain Patricia Smith Prather
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loss of self-esteem, knowing who you are, being able to be proud of who you are. I think self-esteem definitely...the word never even came up when we were growing up, 'cause we had self-esteem.
H: Uh-huh.
P: We were proud of our community, we were proud of the people that we saw in our community that got in their car and went to a job, or came home and fixed up their houses. Or my father built the Scout hut that we could hold our head up to...
H: Going to Playland Park once a year didn't take away your self-esteem, it enhanced it, huh ? [laughter]
P: Absolutely. No, I mean... So, you see, this...the whole thing about self-esteem was never even a question when we had cohesive communities; we had self-esteem. We had our little church programs, where we got up and became the star of the church program, or we were the lead singer in the choir...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...or we were the captain of the football team, or we were the cheerleader, or we were the queen. One of the things that I said to my daughter when she got ready to go to school...and again this is not a criticism; this is a fact...when my daughter was going to college and we didn't know where she wanted to go, but one of the things I sug-Patricia Smith Prather
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gested she do is go to Tuskeegee. And the reason I sug-gested she...and this sounds bizarre...but I felt like if she went to the University of Houston or the University of Texas she could never be Miss UT...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...she could never be the president of the Debate Society at that time - she might have been, but it was an exception rather than the rule.
H: That's right.
P: She went to Tuskeegee and her self-esteem, I think, went higher than it was when she left, because all of a sudden the people that she saw - the scholars - were black. You know, the school had been built by Booker T. Washington. There were so many things - George Washington Carver's museum was there, showing what this man did out of the pea-nut. It's important for her self-esteem to know that, be-cause people that look like her did this, that then, in fact, she can do it. Now that sounds like segregation, as a Black person saying that, but it's not. What we're after is assimilation, and yet we assimilate but still retain what our gifts are. For instance, I'm writing a trunk show called The Gumbo Pot, and the reason I'm writing it is because I want to show children that when you put together a gumbo pot, all the ingredients that go in there depict certain cultures. You know, the sausage comes from a Patricia Smith Prather
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culture, the okra comes from Africa, the tomatoes come from South America, the onions come from a culture, the green peppers come from a culture. And when you put it all in that pot, you have what? - a wonderful, wonderful dish. The seafood comes from the Gulf of Mexico; they probably didn't have that when they built soup pots in some other parts. P: But to show them that we all come together, and that sounds pie-in-the-skyish but that's the only way we're going to make it, to respect each other's differences. Because we're different. You know, I'm Black; I'm never going to be anything but Black, so you respect me because I'm Black, or because I have something to offer. We were the cooks, we were the people who brought certain things to the fore. We brought many of the farming techniques, as Black people.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Someone told me that the word corral really was an African word, because they had a word in Africa called kral and they used to kral their cattle. And they...I'm told that this is something that we brought to the range. Well, that's fine.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Everybody brought something to the table. And I think that's what we're after. And if we lose our communities and we lose our churches and we lose our history and we lose the memory of the Julia C. Hesters, of the A.K. Kelleys, of the Patricia Smith Prather
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Nor...[inaudible], we lose a certain part of Texas heritage. We lose it. And the Jim Bowies are fine, but we had some people who were on the range, and we had some people who fought at the Alamo. I just found out the other day we had some people who came in with Moses Austin - two or three people came in who were 'of color', who were just like everybody else seeking a different life.
H: Jim Bowie was, in fact, a slave-trader.
P: Big time.
H: [laughter]
P: I just found that out. I just read a real interesting book; it talked about how he made his money by illegally slipping slaves in to...
H: He and Lafitte worked together.
P: That's right. So, I mean, is that a hero? You know. I mean, we have heroes. You know, there are heroes in all cultures and that's what we're after; we're after retaining those things in the memory of all children, that everybody contributed to society. So, we're after respect. You see, we're after respect. And the only way you can respect people is respect things they have brought to the table.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And somehow this mythical Black that's always been on the dole is a lie. It's absolutely a lie. It is not true in any form or fashion. I've even read something recently Patricia Smith Prather
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that said, if Blacks hadn't introduced vegetables into the diet of Europeans here, who were basically eating meat and potatoes,...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...they might have died of malnutrition. Many times Blacks were the ones who saved the lives of Whites during epidemics - like, I think, yellow fever. Some people have said we were immune, our people's blood was immune to yellow P: fever, so therefore when those things hit, our people were able to nurse them back. We came over here with know-ledge of herbs and things that were medicinal. And really were, we were a part of the pioneering spirit; we definitely were a part. If we look hard enough, we're going to find things. And that's what we're after. We're after retaining those things.
H: You were mentioning your daughter at Tuskeegee...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...and so that the social life of campuses or on, as high schools are even called... Do you think that deseg-regation has...are there any examples that desegregation has actually changed the social life of some of those campuses? I know...
P: Yes.
H: ...you occasionally hear questions about debates over school mascots and whether the Confederate flag or some Patricia Smith Prather
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symbol of the Confederacy or the Indian symbol or whatever, that we're newly sensitive to these things... Are there examples of that around Houston or in your memory where the social life and the school has become political?
P: I think, yes. I had a recent experience that was pretty scary. I had occasion to visit a campus that at one time was predominately Anglo and is now rapidly getting more Hispanics and Blacks...
H: This is high school?
P: Oh, no, this is college.
H: Oh.
P: On a college level.
H: Okay.
P: And I was surprised; I got...I asked to...I was supposed to be doing a campus visit because of all the racial violence that has erupted on campus...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...and I asked to visit with not only administrators but also to meet with students of various ethnic back-grounds. And unfortunately I found...and this may...I don't think this is for this one campus...I can go into...that's a whole different story which I'll try to be brief with, but on the White campuses or the so-called traditionally Anglo campuses...
H: Uh-huh.Patricia Smith Prather
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P: ...where the Blacks are moving in and the Hispanics and the handicapped, my understanding by and large is that socially they still don't integrate. They have their own sororities and fraternities. When they sit in the cafe-teria, I understand, they sit together, by and large; of course, you know, by and large the ethnic groups sit to-gether. I don't know if that's so true on the historically Black colleges, because my understanding is, in many of them - not all of them - because you just talk to... I think, more at the graduate level there are more Whites beginning P: to go to these campuses, but at the undergrad level by and large the historically Black colleges...Am I right?... are still historically Black. So it's going to be harder to see, in fact, if the Anglos coming to these historically Black campuses are being accepted and being taken in as part of the social structure. I would suspect that they are. Because traditionally, we've always accepted Anglos into our social sphere, even in our churches. I can remember when if an Anglo person came to our church they were accepted.
H: Uh-huh.
P: I remember a couple of Anglos that were in colleges where I was, they were just part of the...they were accepted as part of the group. But it is disturbing to find out that in traditionally Anglo campuses, there's still been this Patricia Smith Prather
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division, socially. And one of the little Anglo girls was ...I thought this was real interesting...she said to me... I said, "Well, don't you all have, like in fraternities and things? Don't you all have like mixers, social mixers?" She said, "Yeah, we tried a lot of that," she said, "But what happens is," she said, "the Black kids danced so well [laughter] that we..."
H: [laughter]
P: I thought this was so interesting, but, see, there's a cultural. She said, "The Blacks kids danced so well, we were embarrassed to get up on the floor."
H: [laughter]
P: There's no way we can do the hip-hop, [laughter] you know. So, so we go back to another cultural thing that we ... You know, our dances have always been part of our culture - our dancing, our adeptness at dancing, and showing off - it's a cultural thing. There's nothing good about it and nothing bad about it. It just is.
H: Uh-huh.
[Tape noise]
P: It's something that's uniquely our culture. And so, here's this one little blond White girl that's saying, "I want to be a part of...we have these social mixes," she said, "but I'm always embarrassed because they dance so much better than we do. I don't want to get up on the floor."Patricia Smith Prather
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H: [laughter]
P: So, you know, [laughter]...and she was honest, you know. So, I would say that socially we still have such a long way to go.
H: Uh-huh.
P: We may mix in classes; we may, you know, but socially it seems to me that we're still not doing as well as we should. And desegregation was supposed to take care of that. I mean, we're supposed to be able to socialized together and bridge a lot of gaps that we hadn't bridged together - that was part of it.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Some of that has happened. I mean, I serve on state P: boards and county boards, and lots of things that I do in this city they're, you know, we...there's lots of different kinds of people in the room, and we all get along very well together. But at the level of students, I was pretty concerned that...I felt like it...I was really appalled. Because I said, "Oh, gee, in the '60s I thought that this was going to be a done deal."
H: Uh-huh.
P: That once we got over the desegregation hump that we were...when once we got to college we're just going to kind of all work together and be social. But that hasn't happened. Again, I don't know if it's...Patricia Smith Prather
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H: Why do you think it hasn't?
P: I don't know. I don't know if it's a natural selection process...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...you know, where likes hang together...
H: Uh-huh.
[Tape noise]
P: [inaudible]...The young girl that lived across the street was Hispanic, the little girl that lived down the street was White - they were three friends, they were three friends in high school. By the time they started dating, their social life changed. They didn't go to...they didn't socialize together.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So has desegregation...?
[Tape noise]
P: [inaudible]... I can't tell you why. Maybe that little girl at Sam Houston State was saying it all, you know, " e want to get together, and we do, but there's some dif-erences there. If you like country, if your whole life you've been brought up... [Tape noise]
P: [inaudible]...music...[Tape noise]...again, I think what I'm after is accepting the fact that you're different and yet respect. And that's what I hope; what I mean, I'm not sure...[Tape noise]...but, certainly, we've gotten in a Patricia Smith Prather
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situation in desegregation where at least we have the opportunity to know about each other's cultures.
H: What do you think's going to happen...[Tape noise]
H: ...White businesses, such as they are...?
P: I think there's a resurgence, I think...[Tape noise])
...there're more and more people realizing, like me, that there was something very positive that came out of these...
[Tape noise])...communities and historically Black institutions that was valuable. Again, I say self-esteem. There're probably many, many, many other positives that came out of that. My sense is that people that have children of two different ages, like, you know, my daughter is 26 and my friends who have children that are 18 and 19, that by and large those 18 and 19 year olds are looking at traditionally Black institutions. And the traditionally Black institu-P: tions enrollments are going up.
H: Uh-huh.
P: So apparently there...somehow, the pendulum is swinging kind of back a little bit...
H: Uh-huh.
P: The generation right after mine - the 40 year olds that came out of college, they came out of high school in the '70s - they all went to Brown University and Yale and Princeton, and that was good. But many of them are sending their children back to Black colleges. You need to talk to Patricia Smith Prather
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them and find out why.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And I think it's a sense of, "Maybe I lost part of my culture; maybe I felt isolated..."
H: Uh-huh.
P: So, again, I think the thing that the bad part of desegregation was that, for awhile, we lost our sense of who we were, in terms of culture and history.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And I think that the pendulum is kind of swinging back. That we realized that there were some good things we gave up. There were some good things we got, but there were also some good things we gave up. And so, now there's a sense of trying to come back and find out what those things we gave up are,...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...you know, but at the same time we want to retain, you know, we want to retain our... For instance with me, I want to retain my relationships with all the other preserva-tionist groups that I work with throughout Houston and throughout the state, and yet I want to have the Houston Place Preservation Association that's dedicated to African-American pioneers. I'm working with the Tejano Associ- ation. We work - Rolando Romo and I are best friends - and yet he has the Tejano Association to retain his unique sensePatricia Smith Prather
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of heritage. The Asian Society here, same thing. The German Society...
H: Uh-huh.
P: So, you know, I think we're all are after the same sense of, yeah, let's all get together! but yet, let's all understand that we all brought something to the pot.
H: Are you optimistic about where we're going from here?
P: Oh, I'm...I have to be optimistic. I have to think that as we become more educated we become more tolerant. Again tolerant is not the word - well, it's... As we become more educated we become more acceptable to each other's differences...
H: Uh-huh.
P: You know, again, respect each other's differences and say, "Hey, we're different, and we accept the difference. We don't want to be like you, we don't want you to be like us, we're not trying, we're not all trying to be vanilla."
H: Um.
P: But we have this mosaic, you know, the mosaic that kind of...we all retain certain things and we all bring something to the social and to every... Yeah, I think, I'm optimistic that as we learn and as we try to learn about each other, I think this whole multi-culturism push is good.
H: Is it healthy?
P: I think it's healthy. Because at least it says we're Patricia Smith Prather
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trying to get to a point where we can be multi-cultural and still retain some sense of who we are.
H: If all of those trends that we've described...
P: Uh-huh.
H: ...as complex as they are...
P: Oh, they are complex.
H: ...continue, where will we be after 10 years, 25 years?
P: We will...I think this is where we'll be is... In Houston, for instance, let's say an African-American museum, which is one of my dreams...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...okay...I think we're going towards a situation where we can shop for what we want. In other words, if we open an African-American museum here in the Museum District...we have the Museum of Fine Arts for the people who like fine arts, we have the Contemporary Arts Museum for people who like contemporary arts, we have Children's Museum for children. I think we need to get into a Hispanic Museum, a P: Black Museum, a Folklorica situation, a rap or hip-hop kind of dance situation where we can sample what we want. I do it as a person. You know, on the week-ends I go to all kinds of festivals - Asian festivals, Festival Chicano - and I'm gradually seeing - jazz festivals - I'm gradually seeing those festivals become more multi-cultural. So, I think where we're going is as our learning curve becomes better Patricia Smith Prather
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we're going to...I can enjoy a jazz festival...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...as much as I can enjoy a symphony festival. We had the most beautiful thing happen two or three years ago - we now have these collaborative arts efforts. And one of the boards I serve on is Jazz Education, Inc. We had a colla-borative effort where we had jazz and poetry and springs and strings. It was the most wonderful experience, because what it was was jazz and poetry, the traditional jazz and traditional poetry coming from African-American perspective, but the background music was symphonic strings, and it was wonderful. I sat there with chills. That's where we have to go. Unless we'll kill each other. I mean, we have to go. The gumbo pot thing that I was talking about is a collaborate effort; it's something I've been wanting to do for a long time but I hooked up with the Harris County Heritage Society. So, the Harris County Heritage Society is providing the expertise, you know, the training of the docents and all that. But my organization is producing the P: actual writing and the idea about what a gumbo is all about. So, yeah, I think we're going into a situation where we can shop more. We have IMAX theater where everybody and the...
END OF TAPE 2, SIDE 1, ABOUT .. MINUTES.
SIDE 2. Patricia Smith Prather
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P: Now we have an African-American museum right there in the Museum. Isn't it in the Museum? What they call the Museum District?
H: Yes. Well...
P: Or is it in the Museum...?
H: It's in what used to be the Museum District; there are museums on Fair Park...
P: Okay.
H: ...but the Museum of Fine Arts is...has moved downtown.
P: Okay.
H: But there are other museums there...
P: But at least you can shop.
H: That's right.
P: I mean, you can go to the University of Houston and see a folklorico dance and the next week you can see the Dance Theater of Dallas there...
H: Uh-huh.
P: I think we're getting into a situation where we know that we all have something to offer.
H: Um.
P: I can now go to a mariachi... My son and I, in fact, switch on the radios now - we make a joke out of it, you know, what are you in the mood for today? Well, let's listen to Hispanic music today. We have buttons on our radio...Patricia Smith Prather
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H: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
P: Admittedly, we're a little bit farther ahead than most people are, but I mean there are other people like us that say, "Okay, well, let's see what their music is coming from today. We've got to... where we're going is...in order for this society to continue where it is that appreciation for diversity, and the fact that it's okay for everybody to be interested in each other's culture, but they don't have to be steeped in it...
H: Uh-huh.
P: In other words, if I'm Hispanic, I don't only have to appreciate mariachi music...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...I can now appreciate hip-hop.
H: Sure.
P: I think that's where we're going; I hope that's where we're going.
H: It sounds like a better place.
P: Gotta go there. [laughter] My son's gotta go.
H: [laughter] That sounds like a good place to stop...
END OF TAPE 2, SIDE 2, ABOUT .. MINUTES.