Celestyne Porter interview recording, 1995 August 02
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Kisha Turner | Hello. Okay, we got it. | 0:03 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. | 0:04 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Can we begin by you stating your full name and when you were born? | 0:04 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. My name is Celestyne Diggs Porter. | 0:08 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 0:14 |
Celestyne Porter | And I was born in Mathews County, Virginia. | 0:14 |
Kisha Turner | What year? | 0:24 |
Celestyne Porter | August the 25th, 1911. | 0:27 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. What part of the state is Mathews County? | 0:34 |
Celestyne Porter | In this part of the state. Mathews County is right up the road from us over to Yorktown, going to Yorktown, across the Coleman Bridge, right on up to Gloucester up Route—What's the road that goes all the way up the coast there? You don't know. | 0:38 |
Kisha Turner | That's okay. | 0:56 |
Celestyne Porter | 17. | 0:56 |
Kisha Turner | Okay, 17. Sure. | 0:56 |
Celestyne Porter | Route 17. Okay. When you get to Gloucester Courthouse, make a right turn and take 14 and down to Mathews County. It's a sleepy, small village. Very few Afro-Americans live there. It's an old plantation system county. The chief occupation is fishing, small farming. Now it has become a very effective retirement community for the military and others, large expanses of land. It is an old county and, as the young people grew up in my generation, they left to go away. | 1:01 |
Celestyne Porter | As the parents, grandparents, and everybody died off, they sold the property. I had just finished selling mine in 1992. Ours was 15 acres on the waterfront, and it was a small plantation in that particular neighborhood. A few Blacks and mostly Whites, we lived in the neighborhood. The property I sold in 1992 was the last piece of the Black property in the neighborhood. | 1:54 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 2:35 |
Celestyne Porter | Mm-hmm. | 2:36 |
Kisha Turner | How many generations had this land been in your family? | 2:37 |
Celestyne Porter | We had to search the title of the land from 1860 because it came to us through my maternal grandmother who was the illegitimate daughter of the plantation owner, and he willed her the place. It was to be her place and her heirs, and that's what took us so long. She had 13 children, my grandmother, 13 or 14 children. My mother was one of her 14. | 2:41 |
Celestyne Porter | My mother had 10 of us. I am the last remaining member of the 10 of the family, the seventh girl. We had five girls and five boys. Great big family, but not many grandchildren. I was suggesting and we always laugh about it and say there was so many of us, we decided that it wasn't any need to having 1,000 grandchildren to continue the family. But this is the way it was. | 3:21 |
Kisha Turner | So your family farmed this land? | 3:55 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 3:57 |
Kisha Turner | Did your family farm? | 3:57 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. My father was a farmer and a fisherman, a small farmer. He farmed the whole area, he and my brothers as they grew up on the farm. And then his main occupation was fishing. He was a fisherman, a waterman they call them now. My daddy just called himself a darn good fisherman, but now they call them the watermen. And then my brothers took after him, and they were watermen until they left home and, you know, got by. | 3:59 |
Celestyne Porter | We kept the place up until '92 because it was home. We went every summer. We didn't have much of anywhere else to go. So you came to the city and went to school. And then from the city, you went back in the summertime to help to make the pickles and do the canning. My daddy would bring the fish in to salt for the winter. And then in the wintertime, they killed the pigs. | 4:32 |
Kisha Turner | What other crops did your family raise? | 5:07 |
Celestyne Porter | He had all the regular vegetables, string beans, butter beans, corn. Potatoes was one of the big ones, White potatoes and sweet potatoes. And then oysters and crabs. | 5:09 |
Kisha Turner | Did he sell the crops? | 5:23 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. Sold the crabs. We having a hard time enjoying crabs now because my brother used to go out in the water, get them in and sell them on the banks for $5 a bushel. Now the man wanted the other day, I wanted some crabs for the retirement party, and he wanted $65 a bushel. This is the crab capital and seafood capital of the world. So you see how it's gone up? I told him, "Never in life would I give him $65 and my daddy and my brothers used to give crabs away." You know what I mean? | 5:24 |
Kisha Turner | What were your tasks? You said that the sons helped him in the field, I guess. | 5:59 |
Celestyne Porter | The girls didn't go in the field, but we had to keep house and work for the people in the neighborhood. | 6:05 |
Kisha Turner | What kind of work did you do for the people in the neighborhood? | 6:11 |
Celestyne Porter | I was the housekeeper for a very wealthy lady, Mr. and Mrs. Perry Williams. He was a retired admiral of World War I. They had not too far from us, up the road and across the bend, a piece, around 25 acres or maybe 30 acres in their land. Their house was called Magnolia because of the beautiful magnolia trees that surrounded it. He was on the waterfront, too. Mr. Perry was a very good-looking man, and Ms. Perry was very nice. I worked for them every summer while I was a student at Hampton Institute. | 6:12 |
Celestyne Porter | I went to Hampton Institute in 1929 when all the banks were upsetting the Depression. Every summer I would go home and work for Mrs. Perry Williams. I cooked and cleaned up and set the table for her and waited on Mr. Perry's military men when they came in. I'm a good cook. Oh, I learned it all, did it all. She would keep my money for me every summer, and she'd give it to me Labor Day when I got ready to go back to college. She would knit me a beautiful sweater. It was an experience. I stayed in the slave quarters many nights because they had their slave quarters fixed up. They had running water— | 7:03 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 8:00 |
Celestyne Porter | —and indoor toilets. They gave their slave quarters' house to Colonial Williamsburg, and it is now at Carter's mansion when you visit Colonial Williamsburg. That's on the visiting list, the Carter's mansion. There, you'll see that beautiful house that they had refurbished and put in. That house was built in Mathews County many, many years ago, many years ago. | 8:00 |
Kisha Turner | And you stayed there? | 8:24 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 8:25 |
Kisha Turner | They had several slave quarters? | 8:26 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. They had the one slave quarters and, of course, they kept it up. When Rockefeller was working on Colonial Williamsburg in the early '30s, they did Colonial Williamsburg. | 8:28 |
Kisha Turner | I think the mic—Okay. | 8:42 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. The Rockefellers refurbished Williamsburg, restored it, and Mr. Perry and Mrs. Williams gave that to the Carter's mansion. When you visit there, you will see all that happens in the slave quarters, beautiful. They refurbished it nicely, that particular part of the world to that little county that we—It's closed in by many rivers, the Mobjack Bay that empties into the Chesapeake Bay and then the York River. The James River comes down and the Severn River and the Ware River, all of them. A little bit of geography. Kind of hard to know. It's 70 miles from here. We can always get home in about an hour and a half, driving up the road. | 8:44 |
Kisha Turner | In addition to working for the Williams family, what other interaction did you have with people in your community? | 9:40 |
Celestyne Porter | We were all friends. We were all very close friends. Living across the bend from us was Ms. Annie's family. They were White. She had the same number of children that Mama had, and we all played together. Then as we grew up and come back home, the grandchildren played together and the aunts and the uncles and everybody. It wasn't anything unusual. We lived as neighbors, and it was just nice. | 9:48 |
Celestyne Porter | People would ask you. I said, "Well, I think rural people looked at race a little different from other people because ours was a survival." You know what I mean? If Ms. Annie didn't have all the flour she needed, she'd send over home and get some. If Mama didn't have all that she needed, she'd borrow it from Ms. Annie. We were close neighbors. We forgot about who was Colored and who was what. Now, our children called Ms. Annie, Ms. Annie, but her children called my daddy and mama, Uncle Wilbur and Aunt Sue. | 10:24 |
Celestyne Porter | We used to have a joke and all said, "White folks would rather be kin to you than to call you Mr. and Mrs." We used to go along like that. As we grew up, we would joke about that. You know what I mean? Really, it's their fault because, for a time, they had a hard time calling you Mr. and Mrs., but they could call you Aunt and Uncle and think nothing of it. You know what I mean? Well, that is a part of the passing down of habits and customs and whatnot through the years. | 11:07 |
Kisha Turner | Were there ever any tensions or do you remember any times when— | 11:43 |
Celestyne Porter | No, I didn't. I didn't, because we only got there for summer. There wasn't anything like that. The White men and the Colored men would go up to the courthouse, and they'd drink their booze. They made something, I don't know what it was, their booze together. Then they would walk on home. We'd laugh about it. A piece of our family is having, on my mother's side, my maternal grandmother, like I told you, her side, the young woman that lives around the corner in this neighborhood, her grandfather and my grandmother was sisters and brothers. So we are all part of the family. | 11:47 |
Celestyne Porter | They're having their second family reunion. The fourth and fifth generation of children are having their second reunion in Boston, Massachusetts, this year. I talked with the young George yesterday. I can't go. His oldest aunt is 92, and she's not going. The other aunt is 88, but she's going. We made a video Monday and talked about the family, the background and everything else, and they're going to show the video to the children of the fourth and fifth generation that are going to be in Boston for the reunion. | 12:33 |
Celestyne Porter | They met here in '92, and it was just spectacular. They did a beautiful job of searching in the family to get it all put together. So they hopefully will have the same thing this year. It makes it all very good. Family reunions are getting to be something real good, too. But the older people, my grandparents and all, had family reunions. They didn't call them family reunions. Everybody came home. | 13:17 |
Celestyne Porter | If they went away to work, they came home in the summertime. There wasn't anywhere else to go but home. People made it home. Then this coming up Sunday, little Ruthie that lives around there, she's going back to Mathews County for homecoming, the church. Homecoming is always a very, very big thing. Everybody comes back as near as possible for that Sunday homecoming, all day meeting and then on the ground. | 13:46 |
Kisha Turner | At church? | 14:19 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. First Baptist Church. | 14:20 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Over Norfolk? | 14:23 |
Celestyne Porter | No. Mathews County. | 14:24 |
Kisha Turner | In Mathews County, that's right. I'm sorry. Can you tell me a little about your education before you went to Hampton? | 14:25 |
Celestyne Porter | Booker T. Washington High School. Elementary school at JC Price School, it's not even there anymore. That was on the corner of 18th and Church Street. | 14:33 |
Kisha Turner | So these are in Norfolk? | 14:45 |
Celestyne Porter | In Norfolk. I'm in Norfolk now. | 14:46 |
Kisha Turner | So you came all the way? | 14:46 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, no, no, no. You came to live with your relatives. Okay? All right. Two of us came, me and my sister. My sister went first to live with my uncle. She was the first one. I went with my oldest sister. We lived on this side of town. I went with my older sister because I could cook and clean up. She had two girls, so I could help with the work. Well, the school I went to was right up the corner, JC Price School. | 14:47 |
Kisha Turner | You said it was on Church and? | 15:26 |
Celestyne Porter | 18th and Church. | 15:27 |
Kisha Turner | 18th and Church. Okay. | 15:28 |
Celestyne Porter | All of the Black children, Negroes, we called them then. They had to come to that particular school at that particular time because all the schools were separate. There was no going across town. Everybody went on one side of town that was Black. Church Street divided the town. During the age of separate and unequal, all of us developed a society totally our own. I don't think that we had any seriously bad attitudes about living together as Black people. | 15:32 |
Celestyne Porter | We did everything, and we didn't think about it. It was a way of life. You knew that you didn't live on the other side of town. You knew that you had to sit on the back of the bus. You knew that you had your own churches, your own school, your own everything. Everything was yours. For social life, it was your house and friend's house and family's house and clubs. See what I mean? This is where we met, at everybody's house. | 16:18 |
Celestyne Porter | If you belonged to a club, it was your time, one time, another time, another time, each person. There were no places to go, so you went home. As a result, people developed home and home society. That was the way of life in our society when it was separate. Now, that happened throughout the country, not just here in Virginia and not just, say, in one place or another. It was typical of the United States. | 16:49 |
Celestyne Porter | I can remember in 1938, I went to the National Council of Social Studies meeting. At that time, you couldn't stay in no hotel. So the secretary always had a place for the Colored members to go. I was in Houston. They put me to a nice preacher's house. I met the preacher. And then in Fort Wayne, Dallas, we went to a nice principal's house. We met him. And then where did we go? I went to Atlanta, and they sent us to a nice businessman's house. | 17:28 |
Celestyne Porter | They found places for us to go because we couldn't stay at the hotels, and it turned out real nicely. We met other people, and we made good friends. But we were used to this. This is a difference that I think so much trouble comes up now because people are different. They find themselves now they can take part. They can go to the hotels. They can go anywhere they want. Now they have a tendency now to desert the home. So here you get another problem coming up that was so pronounced during my generation. You know what I mean? | 18:10 |
Kisha Turner | How many schools were in Mathews County? | 18:57 |
Celestyne Porter | One for Blacks and one for Whites. | 19:00 |
Kisha Turner | You all— | 19:05 |
Celestyne Porter | But the Black school didn't go any farther than fifth grade, and that's when we left. That's when my mother started farming us out to everywhere else where we could get an education. My mother finished Hampton Institute in the days when it was Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute way back there, and she wanted her children to have an education. Relatives helped each other. Where they had better facilities than you had, then they took you over to do this, to get education. | 19:05 |
Celestyne Porter | An education was extremely important during that particular time. A young lady was telling me today. She works with at-risk students over at Old Dominion. She was telling me how they didn't seem to take, the students that she was working with, they didn't seem to take their education seriously. I said, "Well, they're at an age when it isn't as serious as it was when I came along." | 19:44 |
Kisha Turner | What do you think the difference is? | 20:15 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, it's so much difference. You would have to just go into the whole situation to understand the differences. First of all, with integration, we weren't ready for that at education level. We weren't ready for it when it came. And then the controversy that developed after the '54 decision was extremely catastrophic. On the one— | 20:17 |
Kisha Turner | Was that with the Norfolk 17? | 20:46 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. It was all over the country, but Norfolk is where we were. The Whites, which we called the establishment, they had been so accustomed to their schools on the other side. We were accustomed to our schools on the other side. Then to have to do this from the Supreme Court, which means they would have to do it at some point in time. Now, they took most of their time doing away with the Supreme Court's decision with all deliberate speed. Theirs was how long can we take to postpone this thing? And they continued to postpone it. | 20:47 |
Celestyne Porter | As they continued to postpone it, attitudes built up, what we are going to do, how we are going to do it. What shall we do? How we will do it? Then the news cracked down, and you had to do it. It became very discouraging, but we managed. I had gone down to the central office as a supervisor for social studies in the city of Norfolk when they transferred and changed all the teachers. | 21:31 |
Celestyne Porter | One of the teachers that had taught me, I didn't want her to leave Booker Washington High School. She didn't have much longer to stay there. In an effort to do this thing, they just transferred everybody, moving them from one place to the other. But they made one serious mistake, which I will have to hold them responsible for. They made students do the integration. They should have had teachers first, and they didn't do that. | 22:05 |
Celestyne Porter | At every one of those White schools and at every one of the Black schools, if they were going to send White children into the Black school, they should have had White teachers sent there. If they were going to send Black children into the White schools, they should have had some Black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have been integrated should have been teachers and administrations first. But they didn't do that. They moved the children. | 22:40 |
Celestyne Porter | Now you understand what that would mean. Young people didn't have no business being moved first to have borne the brunt of the segregation process, and it did something to the youngsters. It did something to them. It made them hate. It gave them a sense of nobody's here for me. Most of the students that had moved from the Black schools into the White situation, we as teachers had been there to nurture them, to help them along, to recognize their difficulties, to work with them. | 23:04 |
Celestyne Porter | When they moved into the White situation, teachers didn't know. They didn't know the teachers. They're afraid of them. Teachers were afraid of them. I'll never forget. One young woman came here to my house. She integrated Booker T. She brought her husband here with her. The first thing he wanted to know, "Do all of the children bring ice picks to school?" Now, their idea was that all Blacks would knock somebody's head off with the ice pick. That's some company. Let me see. | 23:43 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. You were saying that you felt— | 24:22 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, yeah, teachers. | 24:28 |
Kisha Turner | —they put too large a burden on students in integration. It should have been teachers. You were discussing the ice picks. | 24:29 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, the ice picks. She brought her husband with him, and she wanted to know. She was afraid. Ice picks. I said, "Where did you get that from, that everybody had a ice pick or a switchblade?" I said, "For goodness' sake, what do you think we've been doing all this time?" Well, she was red in the face. I said, "No. Come on. You meet me at Booker T. We'll see about it." When she got to Booker T., children accepted her. You know what I mean? They went right along with them. | 24:35 |
Celestyne Porter | I spoke with my teachers, and I told them that this was a young woman to integrate the social studies department. She did all right. Then I transferred her to Ruffner. She went over there, and she taught ninth grade world cultures. The children were so proud of her. They liked her so. She learned so well from there. She came to me as I observed her. She said, "Ms. Porter, I want to say to you, I was just wrong. I'm enjoying myself here at Ruffner teaching the ninth grade. That summer, I got a grant from my teachers to travel and study at the University of Ghana in West Africa." | 25:11 |
Celestyne Porter | She volunteered to go, and she went. She made a splendid contribution to writing the curriculum guide. When they came back, I sent them there, got federal money to send them there on a grant, and they got nine credits in foreign study at university. And then they traveled the rest of that time. There were six weeks. They went over to the island of Goree, just off the coast of Africa where the first place where slaves were sold in the opening years of slavery in that part of the Mediterranean. | 26:15 |
Celestyne Porter | I had the grant for five years, and I sent a total of 15 in there each year. It had to be a duration. I had the White and the Black teachers, and they did an excellent job. | 26:55 |
Kisha Turner | What year was this? | 27:15 |
Celestyne Porter | Let me see. I went down in '69, '70, '72, '3, '4, and '5. | 27:17 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. You said that it was kind of noncompliance with the '54 decision in this area for a long time. | 27:27 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, that's right. | 27:32 |
Kisha Turner | At what point did they just have to comply with the ruling? | 27:32 |
Celestyne Porter | '72. | 27:41 |
Kisha Turner | '72. | 27:41 |
Celestyne Porter | By '72, they had to come up. They had to get it over with. The pressure was on by '72. See, it had begun in '54, and that was just the beginning. They gradually was putting one or two people here, like that. But they had to make the whole thing in '72. | 27:41 |
Kisha Turner | We were discussing Huck Finn earlier, and I was wondering if we could talk about what we were talking about again. And also, what was your experience coming up in your education, learning things about Black people? | 28:04 |
Celestyne Porter | My experience? Well, I had a very good experience at that because Dr. Carter Woodson was a friend of our family's, Dr. Carter G. Woodson. He was a friend of our family's, and he stayed at our house every time he'd come to speak. We had an unusual Black history. My aunt, Ms. Fanny Jones, she was a member of the family. She taught us all about the Blacks. That was a part of her English course. You had to learn about that. And then Dr. Wilson would come to speak each year to a group of Black teachers and professionals called The Book Lovers in Norfolk. | 28:17 |
Kisha Turner | What year? | 29:07 |
Celestyne Porter | This was in the mid '20s through to the mid '30s, early '40s. You could go up that far. But now, we had learned about Black history before I finished high school because my aunt taught— | 29:08 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 29:27 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, she taught about it. | 29:28 |
Kisha Turner | What kinds of things did she talk about? | 29:30 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 29:31 |
Kisha Turner | What kinds of things did she talk about? | 29:32 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, she talked about men like Benjamin Brawley, men like Du Bois, Washington, all of the people who contributed things to the development of the American story and Black history. We could call names. You know what I mean? We could drop names of people. And then Booker Washington High School was the outgrowth of Norfolk Mission College. After Reconstruction, the Whites of the Presbyterian church, they came down from the North. The Quakers and Presbyterians came into Norfolk and established the Norfolk Mission College. | 29:33 |
Celestyne Porter | It was not a college as people thought of, but it was higher education for the freedmen, people who had been freed after the Civil War during the period of Reconstruction. It was here that you got the foundation for the Black experience in Norfolk, because Norfolk was a trading city. People moved in, and we had lots of free people here who were never slaves. You see, historians forget sometimes when they're writing, large numbers of Blacks were never slaves. They weren't. | 30:25 |
Celestyne Porter | Large numbers of Blacks owned slaves in other areas. Sometimes we don't get the whole story. What historians, I think they miss the point on showing to the Western civilization that the Civil War as slavery as it happened in 1619 coming into our country, was the last vestige of the Old World because the Old World was the one to practice slavery, not the New World. 1619, the slaves came. But when the New World opened up, that was the very last vestige of the Old World, which was slavery, of the Old World transplanting its ideas into the New World. Historians, to a large extent, don't remember that. They forget that. | 31:10 |
Celestyne Porter | I had a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the best teacher. He'd written the book. I use his book all the time when I have to give references for things. His book was called The Disruption of American Democracy, and it was a story of the Civil War. | 32:06 |
Kisha Turner | What was his name? | 32:28 |
Celestyne Porter | The Disruption of American Democracy. Here, he traces the beginning of the democratic story and then slavery as it disrupted it. The ensuing years gave the basic foundation for the democratic processes as they moved into the century. | 32:29 |
Kisha Turner | Who was your professor? | 32:54 |
Celestyne Porter | Dr. Roy Nichols, and he has the same name as the superintendent in Norfolk. He was Dr. Roy Nichols, and I always wanted to ask him was he named after him. But I hadn't had a chance to meet him, the one in Norfolk. We had good examples of transplanting of ideas. It's like large numbers of the immigrants came in the early years for religious persecution, getting away from the changes that are religion and coming into the New World, just like slavery. | 32:55 |
Celestyne Porter | To a large extent, it was totally a way of life across the world. We weren't the only people who've been slaves, by no means of the imagination. If you study anything in Jewish history, you'll get that idea of what slavery meant even in biblical times. In biblical times, when one tribe captured the other, they married the women and took the men into slavery. It was a way of life. | 33:43 |
Celestyne Porter | Some people fuss and say, "The Black kings in Africa sold slaves." I say it was a money-making process. It was money making. It was a lucrative trade during those particular times. As soon as they opened up discovery, the age of discovery and movement and people started moving across the world, across the continents, of course, they carried their ideas with them. Slavery was very, very lucrative. They got a barrel of money from that. Of course, people who are making money, people make money. | 34:17 |
Kisha Turner | When did you go to Penn? | 34:55 |
Celestyne Porter | I went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1938, summer. I got my degree in '43. | 34:57 |
Kisha Turner | What was Philadelphia like in '38? | 35:04 |
Celestyne Porter | Philadelphia was beautiful then. Philadelphia, I would love to have lived there. It was typical Benjamin Franklin style. But I tell you what we had to do, we had to take a course in the history of the university. | 35:05 |
Kisha Turner | Really? This is for a master's degree in history? | 35:26 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. I took a master's degree in history and research. | 35:28 |
Kisha Turner | History and research. | 35:31 |
Celestyne Porter | You had to write your dissertation. It was mandatory to learn the history of the university. I fuss with these schools here now. Norfolk State has beautiful history. It ought to be mandatory for those children to take that history. Old Dominion has a good history. Norfolk State is an offshoot of Virginia Union University, a private school built totally on the training of ministers. Old Dominion is an offshoot of William and Mary, one of the oldest colleges in the country, but children don't know that. | 35:33 |
Celestyne Porter | You'd be surprised. They sitting up there, I had told them many times, "You ought to be mandatory to take the history of your institution so that you will have respect for your institution. You'll know its background. You'll understand its growth, and you can show its perspective in the society." They don't want to do that. They want to forget about it. Look at them and I said, "Did you know that this school is a result of one of the oldest schools in the world, William and Mary College?" Never heard of it. | 36:16 |
Kisha Turner | I live in Philadelphia now, also. Were race relations any different? How did you find interactions with White people in Philadelphia? what area of town did you live in in Philadelphia? | 36:53 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, I lived close to the university right behind Franklin Field. A lot of Polish people lived in that area. We didn't have any trouble, the Colored family that we lived with. We did not stay in the dormitories that summer. It's summertime. Because at the university, the winter students left all their stuff in the dormitories. When the summer schools opened, you had to get a place to stay. | 37:04 |
Kisha Turner | Now, why did you go in summer? | 37:33 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 37:34 |
Kisha Turner | In the summer? | 37:35 |
Celestyne Porter | Because I worked during the winter. How are you going to get to school if you don't work? You worked in the winter, and you went to summer school. | 37:36 |
Kisha Turner | School in the summer. Okay. | 37:44 |
Celestyne Porter | You know what I mean? You could take enough courses and, three or four summers, you could get your—We liked to go away in the summertime. We teaching school, and we didn't have any trouble going to the bank and showing your contract and get enough money to go to summer school. Come back and pay it back. Next summer, go do the same thing. | 37:46 |
Kisha Turner | I see. | 38:02 |
Celestyne Porter | You met a lot of strange men, and you met friends. You enjoyed yourself. | 38:03 |
Kisha Turner | Did you ever go down on South Street? | 38:08 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 38:09 |
Kisha Turner | South Street? | 38:10 |
Celestyne Porter | Fifth Street? | 38:11 |
Kisha Turner | South. | 38:12 |
Celestyne Porter | Of course, we went to South Street, old postal card, the restaurant down there and the bar with postal card. Everybody went down there. What you talking about? Child, we had one good time down in South Street. Oh, my goodness. Go down there at night, just really dance. Then the Piccolos and all that stuff was going on. We had a good time. | 38:12 |
Kisha Turner | Do you remember the names of some of the establishments you would visit on South Street, the businesses and stores? | 38:36 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, what did we do to go down there? Well, we really went down there at night was when we went down there. But the YWCA was down there, and the YMCA was around the other side. And then a number of small shops, Black, were in there. But, of course, we went downtown and outside where the big shops were. But, at the same time, South Street was real nice, moving pictures or theaters. | 38:42 |
Celestyne Porter | It was typically most of the Blacks associated down there. You know what I mean? They associated down there. Nightlife was real fancy there. | 39:11 |
Kisha Turner | Was it? | 39:23 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. It was really nice. Of course, we were all Black. Everybody was Black. Very seldom you'd see one or two Whites mixed around, but as a general thing. The sororities and the fraternities had their parties down there. I'm AKA, and AKAs were very big in Philadelphia then. You know what I mean? Everybody had a good time. We had a nice time being segregated, as much as—Yes, we did. We really had a good time. | 39:23 |
Celestyne Porter | That's all the good time we knew because it was with each other like that. So we organized our clubs. We did things for people. I worked with the King's Daughters Children's Hospital. Of course, it was not a children's hospital like it is now. You know what I mean? But they had a Black wing and a White wing. As soon as I came out of school, I came here, Norfolk, to work. | 39:57 |
Celestyne Porter | I found out, as I went out in and out, volunteer work, they treated the Black children with serious diseases just as well as they treated White children with serious diseases. | 40:36 |
Kisha Turner | Were most of the doctors still White, and nurses? | 40:48 |
Celestyne Porter | The doctors were all White. Wasn't any Black then. But it made its impression on me as a young woman. That is my favorite charity right now. That's my favorite charity. I really do. If I have anything to give, I give to them because I saw those children, children coming from ordinary homes and they were Black, and those doctors paid just as much attention to them as they did to the Whites. And then, of course, the main disease at that particular time in there was infantile paralysis, where kids would come in for that. You know what I mean? Until Salk come up with his cure. | 40:52 |
Celestyne Porter | That was really the troubled disease. Some had crippled arms and bone crippled, you know what I mean, all like that. But Black children treated just as nice as White children. There was three of us that worked with King's Daughters, and everybody's gone except me. We'd go down after school in the evening, and we'd go on Sundays to read to the children and to show them pictures and carrying bunnies and make things. It was quite an experience. | 41:39 |
Kisha Turner | How many Black students were in your master's program? | 42:21 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 42:24 |
Kisha Turner | How many Black students were in your master's program at Penn? | 42:24 |
Celestyne Porter | Two, and these are the first coming out of the master's program, five years. They were Black. That little girl you saw [indistinct 00:42:38] and another little one, she got a job over at Hampton. I had the two, and they did beautifully. | 42:29 |
Kisha Turner | When you were at Penn— | 42:45 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 42:46 |
Kisha Turner | When you were at Penn— | 42:47 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 42:48 |
Kisha Turner | When you went to Penn, how many Black students did you attend Penn when you were working on your master's degree? | 42:49 |
Celestyne Porter | I'm sorry. I was thinking that you was asking me about my students here. No. When I was at Pennsylvania, there were three of us. | 42:57 |
Kisha Turner | Three of you? | 43:06 |
Celestyne Porter | Mr. Taylor from St. Paul College, me from Hampton Institute, and a young woman from Miami, Florida. She dropped out, and it was just the two of us on campus. We made The Philadelphia Inquirer on the front page. | 43:07 |
Kisha Turner | So were you the— | 43:25 |
Celestyne Porter | We were the first Blacks that had been admitted to the College of Arts and Sciences. | 43:26 |
Kisha Turner | At any level? Undergraduate and graduate? | 43:32 |
Celestyne Porter | That's all they said. | 43:34 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 43:36 |
Celestyne Porter | They put us up as the first Negroes. They didn't say Blacks. Be sure you get that right. You know we've been Negroes, Colored, Blacks, and Afro-Americans. What else they going to call us? Do you know? I don't know. Whichever one we get we like, we get the next one. I said, "Why they call Afro?" I don't know. Just call us I don't know what. Why can't we just be American? We are American. A lot of us ain't been to Africa. I haven't. I've traveled extensively. I haven't been to Africa, except my students though. But I haven't. | 43:36 |
Kisha Turner | Did you ever go to North Philadelphia? | 44:22 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, we went to North Philadelphia. Sure. | 44:26 |
Kisha Turner | Now, the buses there weren't segregated. | 44:27 |
Celestyne Porter | No, no. You rode all over the place up on the cable car. The cars. | 44:30 |
Kisha Turner | That's right. Buses, what am I thinking about? | 44:36 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, that's the one thing you didn't encounter above the Mason and Dixon line. You didn't encounter it. But oftentimes, you would just ordinarily go to the back of the bus. Really, you would. | 44:38 |
Kisha Turner | Really? Just from habit? | 44:50 |
Celestyne Porter | Just from pure habit. You'd go ahead to the back and sit down, but nobody said anything to you. The car just stopped and took you on. You paid your fee and went along. You saw them looking at each other. People didn't pay any attention to you because they didn't have that kind of discrimination that we had in the South. They just did not have it, and you didn't look at it. | 44:51 |
Kisha Turner | Were there any areas or stores that you felt uncomfortable? | 45:17 |
Celestyne Porter | No, indeed. We used to go north up in New York, Philadelphia, to shop from here. | 45:20 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 45:30 |
Celestyne Porter | We'd get a busload and go up to buy things because, in this area, you couldn't find a bra. You couldn't find a girdle. No bathing suits. You had to go in the back to try on shoes, and you couldn't try on a hat or you had to wrap it all up with something to put on a hat. As a result, I don't own a hat. You wouldn't think waiting that long, I wouldn't own a hat. I really didn't like hats because you had to go through so much trouble trying to try on a hat. I didn't have a hat. | 45:30 |
Celestyne Porter | You used to have to have one to wear to a funeral and one to go in churches that required a hat. But it had gotten to the place you could go bareheaded. I don't own a hat in this world. You think that's a joke? That's the truth. | 46:01 |
Kisha Turner | Did you attend a church in Philadelphia when you were there? | 46:15 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. We went to—What's the name of that church? I can't think of the name of it yet, but we went on Sundays because the lady that we roomed with, she kept students, Black students or anybody. She kept anybody. Two, three Whites stayed there, right behind Foreman Field. We went to her church on Sundays. She invited us to go. Their names are Mr. and Mrs. Glover. We went to church. | 46:17 |
Kisha Turner | Baptist church? | 46:51 |
Celestyne Porter | Writing and I ain't getting it done for taping and all the rest of the stuff that you had to do. | 0:02 |
Kisha Turner | So you attended an Episcopalian church. What kind of church did you attend here in— | 0:09 |
Celestyne Porter | I'm Presbyterian. | 0:13 |
Kisha Turner | You're Presbyterian? When did you leave Mathews County? | 0:14 |
Celestyne Porter | I left Mathews County in 1923. | 0:20 |
Kisha Turner | So you were 22? | 0:28 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? No, I wasn't 22, I was 10. | 0:29 |
Kisha Turner | I'm sorry, you were 12. 10. | 0:30 |
Celestyne Porter | 10 or 12? It's 11, something like that. | 0:31 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I don't— | 0:31 |
Celestyne Porter | It's either '22 or '24. I would have to work with that. Because I didn't come until my sister—Oh, yeah, my sister, older than me, she graduated from high school. My older sister had her and she stayed with her. But she graduated from high school, she took me. [indistinct 00:00:59]. So I think, well, I was either 10 into my 11th year. | 0:36 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Okay. So you were— | 1:07 |
Celestyne Porter | I went to Presbyterian church because she was Presbyterian. | 1:13 |
Kisha Turner | All right. | 1:16 |
Celestyne Porter | Whole family was Presbyterian. And see she had gone to Norfolk Mission College way back then. And so you just went on with the family. I've been a member of my church or Presbyterian church for 72 years. This is 72nd year. | 1:16 |
Kisha Turner | What Church? | 1:31 |
Celestyne Porter | Presbyterian. United Presbyterian. | 1:32 |
Kisha Turner | United Presbyterian? Okay. When did you come to Virginia Beach? | 1:33 |
Celestyne Porter | I moved down here in 1962. But I had lived in Norfolk all the rest of my life. | 1:38 |
Kisha Turner | All the years. Okay. | 1:44 |
Celestyne Porter | Gantt was opening up Rich neighborhood. Gantt was opening up for Blacks, but it didn't open up fast enough for me because I wanted to live in Gantt. Then this house became available, and the fellow that grew up in my neighborhood and was our paperboy, this was his house. Attorney Jay Hugo Madison, he's my lawyer, who lives around the corner. He had children. He got married. | 1:47 |
Kisha Turner | Whoa, sorry. | 2:13 |
Celestyne Porter | I'll leave that over. I forgot I was on. And he sold this house to me and he built a house bigger for his children. He had a boy and two girls, around there. And he was our paperboy uptown. And he had moved down here earlier. This section was open just after the war. This used to be wooded land. This was just farmland. Whatever, whatever. This was Princess Anne County. And Princess Anne County was rural. We just got to be Virginia Beach in 1963. When Norfolk was trying to annex it. Now, right over there where I showed you Lake Wright, the golf course, half of it said Norfolk and the another half said Virginia Beach. You didn't have any trouble finding it, did you? | 2:19 |
Kisha Turner | Not at all. | 3:04 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. It's just a car difference there on Northampton Boulevard, where you see it. | 3:05 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 3:11 |
Celestyne Porter | And that's Virginia Beach. | 3:12 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah. Let's talk about Hampton. What was Hampton like? | 3:14 |
Celestyne Porter | Hampton which? | 3:19 |
Kisha Turner | Hampton— | 3:19 |
Celestyne Porter | Hampton University? | 3:20 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah. Hampton Institute. | 3:21 |
Celestyne Porter | Hampton Institute? | 3:23 |
Kisha Turner | Yes. | 3:23 |
Celestyne Porter | Hampton Institute is a fine school that anybody wants to ever go to in this world, I'm telling you. What was it like? We went to Hampton, it was really like? Oh, we just thought we were someplace. Just imagine. 1929, you lived in the dormitory, you meet new friends and all that sort of thing. Well, one thing about it, they set up your course for you and you did what they set for you to do. | 3:24 |
Kisha Turner | What did they have you do? | 3:54 |
Celestyne Porter | I was going teach in school. Education. We're talking about Hampton, right? | 3:56 |
Kisha Turner | Hampton, they decided you would teach? | 4:01 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. | 4:03 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 4:04 |
Celestyne Porter | School of Education. I took a double major in history and Bible and literature, and it was the best education that I really have had my four years there. It was really good. | 4:05 |
Kisha Turner | And you pledged AKA? | 4:21 |
Celestyne Porter | Not there. | 4:25 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 4:25 |
Celestyne Porter | They didn't have it then. See, Hampton has not had sororities and fraternities. | 4:25 |
Kisha Turner | I see. | 4:29 |
Celestyne Porter | They got those after the war. Way after the war. They didn't start getting the sororities and fraternities until 1960. It was in the sixties. Somewhere in between there. | 4:30 |
Celestyne Porter | See, Hamptons are a heavily endowed private school and led by the very wealthy New Englanders, and sororities and fraternities wasn't in their line. You know what I mean? They didn't go in for the frills. It was training young people and it was a very good education because they took in consideration that all of you as Blacks, I guess, I'm sure, because they catered to us. We had some Indians, no Whites, but all White teachers. | 4:46 |
Celestyne Porter | I didn't have a single Black teacher at Hampton Institute. They were all White. Just four or five Blacks on staff, but I didn't have any of them. And they took in consideration that children had to know everything for wherever you came from. You had to know everything. If you had a little more than somebody else, you still had to do everything. You had to work for one thing, you had a little job. I worked in the mansion house. I was very lucky. | 5:21 |
Kisha Turner | What did you do there? | 5:52 |
Celestyne Porter | I worked at the President's house. Looked after the children, answered the door, served the potentates and board and general when they came down, took care of the kids and saw to it that they got out of the way of the grown people. And I could cook and I could set the table. You had to be able to set the table to get that job. So when everybody wanted to get the job, I ran in and set the table, and she said, "Oh, you are all right." Well, I knew how to set the table. My aunt had taught us how to set the table. I knew how. But she didn't know whether I knew about it or not. And I worked in the governor's mansion, mansion house, the President's mansion. | 5:52 |
Celestyne Porter | Had a good time laughing. When Dr. Harvey, who he awarded me his Presidential Award in 1994, I got the Presidential Award for outstanding citizenship. I'll show you my plaque before you go. And I told him that the mansion house was a whole lot different was when I worked in that in 1929 to 1933. I worked in every mansion house. Got a piece of your tuition, you got paid. | 6:44 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. How did the depression affect, if it did in any way, your education? | 7:12 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, we argue about that a lots of time. We didn't feel the impact of the depression. Like some people say, well we didn't have this and we didn't have that and we didn't have this. We didn't feel it. My uncle was a lawyer and he was an outstanding lawyer, one of the outstanding lawyers, possibly outstanding ones in Norfolk, and we lived up there on Boulevard Terrace. A big white house and we had two cars. My aunt had a car and he had a car. I don't know that we felt the depression as such. I mean the saying is, if you didn't have this, you didn't have that. The country people, my father and all the people in the country, we got food. You know what I mean? You could get and afford. My daddy fixed the pig and salted him down and everything for my uncle. | 7:32 |
Celestyne Porter | And we lived sort of on a plain that we didn't look at the situation that a lot of people thought. Blacks then not having a lot of money in no way. They lived according to their incomes. And you didn't sort of feel the depression as such. Because you read about it and you knew that the banks were this, that, and the other and you didn't have much money, but you still made it. We have a going thing saying, nobody said you poor and didn't know you were. So you had to laugh about it sometimes. People who felt, I guess, in different ways, but as a race, we had always learned to live at our level. You know what I mean? | 8:30 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 9:27 |
Celestyne Porter | And so therefore you progressed. The churches helped. You know what I mean? They took care of large numbers of people who did not have anything. The churches took care of them. And you gave to the churches. For instance, in schools, kids didn't mind wearing hand-me-downs. You know what I mean? If the aunt had a nice dress and pass it to you, you didn't mind. It was a nice thing to do. Now, of course, the kids don't want you give them nothing that somebody used, they want something brand spanking new and the highest one, and that it must have a brand name. We didn't know what no brand names was. If a aunt gave us a coat, we were so happy we got the coat. But it was just different age and different thinking. | 9:29 |
Celestyne Porter | And then as the war progressed, you could see as people began to move across borders and into industry and all that sort of thing, then you began to understand what the depression really meant. Because then people made more money and they began to get more economic security. You know what I mean? And things went on in that way. | 10:24 |
Kisha Turner | Now, you didn't have the Greek societies or whatever at Hampton. What kinds of clubs or groups were there in terms of socializing? | 10:47 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, we had lovely social. The fellas had their clubs called the Olympics and the Omicrons. Certain fellas belonged to the Olympics, certain fellas belonged to the Omicrons. | 10:59 |
Kisha Turner | How do you spell that? | 11:11 |
Celestyne Porter | O-M-I-C-R-O-N-S. | 11:13 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 11:16 |
Celestyne Porter | Omicron. Oh, then all the boys had to take drilling, all that sort of stuff. ROTC, all that sort of stuff. And the officers, they would have their affairs. Then we had a group called the Phyllis Wheatley. They were girls. And then YWCA, the Hampton Players, the Dramatic Club, and then now the Debating Society. And I was on that. I was on the Debating Society and the Hampton Club and the Phyllis Wheatley. And we had another club. Can't think that dogone club that we had. You had plenty of organizations and things to go to. | 11:17 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 12:03 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. | 12:03 |
Kisha Turner | Did you ever visit Howard? | 12:06 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes, because my cousin went there. | 12:08 |
Kisha Turner | What'd you think about DC? | 12:12 |
Celestyne Porter | Well at that time—You mean then? | 12:15 |
Kisha Turner | Then. | 12:18 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, yeah. Well they had one nice dormitory at Howard. Slowe Hall. | 12:19 |
Kisha Turner | Slowe is still there. | 12:23 |
Celestyne Porter | Slowe is still there. | 12:25 |
Kisha Turner | I'm staying in Slowe. Yeah. | 12:26 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. You staying in Slowe? Well, Slowe Hall. All right. Well, Slowe Hall at that time was a place that everybody stayed. Well, now we got, what's them called? They could join sororities, they could have sororities. And my cousin went in a sorority while she was there. I had to go in after I got to Norfolk. See, I had to go in the graduate chapter in Norfolk. Because we didn't have it in Hampton. And it was one of those things. But of course, the Howard then is nothing like the Howard now. | 12:27 |
Kisha Turner | In what way? How has it changed? | 13:01 |
Celestyne Porter | Howard is just built up. It got everything now. That one dormitory, you know how that Howard is. | 13:03 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 13:07 |
Celestyne Porter | But the children loved it then, the young people loved it then. And then they had the Howard Players and the Hampton Players, we used to exchange. | 13:10 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Now was Douglass Hall at Howard? Do you know Frederick Douglass Hall? Or is that new? That maybe new. | 13:17 |
Celestyne Porter | I that's kind of new. Well way back there, I'm not so sure it was there then. | 13:28 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I was just wondering about that. Did you ever— | 13:32 |
Celestyne Porter | Tell him to go. | 13:36 |
Kisha Turner | I was going to ask you if you had ever visited Spelman. Did you visit Spelman then? Did you ever have any relatives down there? | 13:39 |
Celestyne Porter | My classmate, the valedictorian of my class at Hampton was Spelman's Dean of Women, 1933 to 1945 I think. And I visited there on two or three occasions. I had one honor student going there this year from Booker T. She got a full-time scholarship to Spelman. Two little youngsters around the corner who lives in the neighborhood, she finished Spelman and she's in med school at Virginia Medical School, Eastern Medical. She's going there. She's a graduate at Spelman. A lot of the kids go from Spelman to Seattle. And she went to Clark. | 13:46 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 14:31 |
Celestyne Porter | And she finished boutique, she was honor student. This was her third year at Clark. And she was out in Minneapolis. So she's in management, I think. Because she was out there on the internship this summer. It's thorough, no doubt about it. And that whole complex in Atlanta, that entire complex, Atlanta University, Morehouse, Clark, and Spelman, it's all very, very good. It is about the best predominantly Black complex that we have. At least I think so or I thought. | 14:32 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I was just thinking about Carter Woodson again. And what do you remember about the man? | 15:14 |
Celestyne Porter | Dr. Carter Woodson? He was a very, very interesting character. I used to laugh about him when he visited with us because he didn't never got married, and as youngsters, we would always look to see if so-and-so bringing his wife, other children. But Dr. Woodson, he was very nice to have around. And I used to have to fix his meals for him. And during that time, my aunt used to have us serve coffee to the guests upstairs. You know what I mean? In the bedroom, before they get up. I had to carry his coffee. He was always so gracious. He left us large numbers of the first edition of his books. | 15:19 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 16:08 |
Celestyne Porter | Mm-hmm. | 16:09 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 16:09 |
Celestyne Porter | He did. And when my uncle died and we gave all those books to Booker T. Washington High School and Booker T.'s Library has one of the finest collection of first edition Black history around. | 16:12 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 16:25 |
Celestyne Porter | They got first editions, Dr. Benjamin Brawley's work, Booker T. Washington's work, Frederick Douglass's work and Du Bois' work, and the younger, what's name? Countee Cullen, his poems, and all of the newer ones. Langston Hughes' poem. | 16:26 |
Celestyne Porter | And Langston Hughes used to come here every Christmas to Norfolk. And a close friend of mine, her brother and Langston Hughes were classmates at Lincoln. Langston Hughes and Winston Tyler. We called him Mike. They were classmates at Lincoln. They were at Lincoln together. And Mike was very bright and it was nice to meet them. | 16:51 |
Celestyne Porter | And Dr. Woodson, he was a lovely person to talk to. He could talk with children just as well as he could talk with grown people. And experienced. He was a very experienced character. I read nearly everything he's done. I've talked to my students about them. I had to read a book for a young woman, the American Historical Society sent me the book to read for her. She had a beautiful resume, you know what I mean? She had done things. And I was reading her book, and it was in the Black experience. | 17:20 |
Celestyne Porter | She made no mention for Carter Woodson. And that's the only criticism I had of the book. And when I wrote back the criticism of the author, the professor let her know what the criticism was. And she wrote me a nice letter and told me she was going to redo a chapter to include Dr. Woodson. And I sent her some excerpts and copies and what's the name? From some of his things to send her. And I saw her book was published and I think Alfred North I think published her book. | 18:03 |
Kisha Turner | What was the book? | 18:48 |
Celestyne Porter | It was a story of the Black experience. She called it, 'A Long Time From Here' or something of that order. I don't remember exactly what it was now. If you loan a book to somebody, I don't remember bringing it back if she was good. And I let somebody have that and I'm mad with somebody— | 18:49 |
Kisha Turner | I know how that is. | 19:06 |
Celestyne Porter | —that didn't bring them back. I really don't. | 19:06 |
Kisha Turner | You don't get books back. | 19:06 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. | 19:06 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Can we talk briefly about, you were talking about clubs, I guess social clubs? | 19:13 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. | 19:19 |
Kisha Turner | What were some of the clubs in Norfolk did you belong to? | 19:21 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, I belonged to everything. Let me see what it is that I didn't belong to, I could tell you better. Let's see. Well, I belonged to The MOLES Club. I was a First National President. | 19:25 |
Kisha Turner | Let me tell you this. | 19:37 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, Dr. Capps. Did anybody call Dr. Marion Capps name to you? She set up that scholarship, the Martin Luther King. Oh. And she is inactive now. But Marion did such a good job of setting up with those children. She's bright herself and she just came from Weston Salem. Isn't that nice? That's some old chapter in Western Salem. That's our national project. Okay. I was the first national president. | 19:38 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 20:04 |
Celestyne Porter | Uh-huh. | 20:04 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. So you were MOLES? | 20:06 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. First National President of MOLES. | 20:08 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. What role did the social clubs play? | 20:15 |
Celestyne Porter | Every kind of role you could think of. We were fundraisers for the first thing and we attacked the needs of the community. Now The MOLES gave the first operating table at Norfolk Community Hospital. When the hospital was built, the first Black hospital, we sold tickets for the first operating table and that was dedicated in 1938. Then I belonged to another club, the Kiski's. We were— | 20:17 |
Kisha Turner | How do you spell that? | 20:55 |
Celestyne Porter | K-I-S-K-I. We were all on the Hamptons during the Depression and we met at the Y and formed our club. So we were fundraising and we gave the first ambulance to the community hospital. First ambulance. After we had been organized over a long period of time, we organized another group called the Kiski Connections, which were younger girls to carry on our name. | 20:55 |
Celestyne Porter | And they do fundraising, and they make serious contributions to Children's Hospital because that's my bag. And I sort of work with them on that. Real nice. Then I have a—What's that other club I belong to? I think sometimes where they are. Well, one is a card club and I don't like to play cards, but I just know I don't play cards, I belonged to the club way back there and I just kept on with them. And we have a good time. Those who play cards, play cards and I don't, I just let them come around and enjoy themselves. Then you see the group, the young woman came here? | 21:32 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-hmm. | 22:13 |
Celestyne Porter | She belongs to a club called The Coriander's. And I was their sponsor. And they organized in 1933 when they were senior YWCA girls. They stayed together through high school, through college and back in the community. And they have a one sponsor and that's me. I gave them a plague for this year, and I put everything on there myself. 1933 to 1995. And now they are retired. They've been teaching, they've grown up, they're teaching, they're retired. They're children in college. | 22:16 |
Celestyne Porter | Like I was telling you about her grandchild, her daughter is a member of Kiski Connections and The MOLES. She's a MOLE, the one staff here that came in, and she's a Coriander. And they have the nicest time. They meet and enjoy themselves. And she works with her cousin, Mrs. Peace. And she does volunteer work for Salvation Army. And Margaret's son, Margaret Peace's son, he was valedictorian of my class when he graduated. And he now heads the Department of Planning at University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has a marvelous job. | 23:04 |
Celestyne Porter | So I keep up with all of them as they go along and as they do things, and check on their parents to see who's got this grandchild and how many grandchildren coming up and whatnot. It's very interesting as you follow them through. And it's exciting. It really is. You follow them along. See young people doing things. It is extremely important to me. | 23:49 |
Celestyne Porter | I don't know whether I'm getting carried away over nothing, but I'm so interested in seeing young people progress. For me, it just means a continuous, and especially young Blacks, especially you young women, I'm telling you, you young women are coming on and I'm so glad to see this. I really am. It just enthuses me so. I'm just forever bragging on them and telling them to do this and go do that. And all they got to do is ask me for a contribution and I go run to my pocketbook. | 24:15 |
Kisha Turner | All right. | 24:46 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, let me put it this way. It's nice to be able to be around to see young people do in areas where we couldn't do, you know what I mean? You were just not in anything but teaching school. That's all you could do. And that was the prestigious profession for Blacks. Some could be nurses, but the top line was teaching school. | 24:50 |
Celestyne Porter | And when integration came, large numbers of Blacks left the profession, which bothers me terribly. And now we are trying to get them back into it, but they had every right to leave. They were treated badly. They just were treated badly. And people do have a human consciousness. And though many of us didn't want them to leave the profession, to a large extent, it was their privilege if they wanted to. And with other things opening, then they went into that. You know what I mean? So this is the way it goes. | 25:16 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I see you have Martin Luther King. | 25:56 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. Don't you love that? | 25:59 |
Kisha Turner | That's nice. | 26:01 |
Celestyne Porter | It is nice. Dr. and Mrs. Harrison Wilson gave that to me when the Urban League honored me this year. | 26:06 |
Kisha Turner | Okay, so you were a member the Urban League? | 26:14 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, I guess I am. They honored me. I got the award. I'll show you my awards when you get through. And they gave me that. And let me tell you, when I got it, I was so surprised that thing's expensive. | 26:16 |
Kisha Turner | Is it? | 26:30 |
Celestyne Porter | It is. | 26:30 |
Kisha Turner | I believe it. | 26:31 |
Celestyne Porter | It is. Because let me tell you, I was so surprised because I took out a Christmas savings and I said, "When I'm going to get my Christmas savings I'm going to get me one of those." And when she said that to me, I said, oh, did they really pay $500 for that thing? It was $500. And I was going to get my Christmas— | 26:32 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, oh. | 26:45 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh no, I won't do that. | 26:48 |
Kisha Turner | I can fix it. | 26:48 |
Celestyne Porter | I was going to use my Christmas saving, I was saving for it. And I wrote Lucy a note. I said, "I don't know how you knew that I—I got the little thing under there because it's a company that had not been making the Blacks. And they expensive as they can be. | 26:58 |
Kisha Turner | Were you— | 27:18 |
Celestyne Porter | On the back there he has his pulpit in the Bible, as far as that. | 27:20 |
Kisha Turner | Were you active in the civil rights movement or any civil rights organizations? Or do you remember? | 27:26 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes, the Women's Interracial Council, I worked with them, and the Jewish community. I especially worked with the Jewish community and they have yet to be given the credit that they should have in the integration movement. | 27:32 |
Kisha Turner | Women's Interracial, what was— | 27:53 |
Celestyne Porter | Women's Interracial Counsel | 27:55 |
Kisha Turner | And was that national? | 27:57 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. They have them all over the world. We just had one here. | 27:59 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. It's international. Okay. | 28:02 |
Celestyne Porter | And that contained large numbers of Jewish women as women. And we did very much in trying to ease the situation. I sponsored the National Honor Society at Booker Washington High School for oh, 25 years. And in my chapter, I was a charter member in 1929. We got the first charter member in 1929, Booker T. Washington High School. | 28:05 |
Celestyne Porter | And when I came back to teach, I sponsored the National Honor Society and we'd meet with the children at the other schools, the White schools. And we got to sort of easing the contact between the children. Okay, see we didn't live in White neighborhoods. Black children didn't live in White neighborhoods. Okay. Very seldom did you go to White churches. You went to your own church. So therefore there was no line of communication and going to school, there was no line of communication. And all the White children saw of Black people were domestics. | 28:30 |
Celestyne Porter | You see what I mean? And all Black children saw White folks were those in the shops and around and the plumbers and like that. | 29:12 |
Kisha Turner | Right. | 29:21 |
Celestyne Porter | And it was a strange but challenging lesson in humanity and learning about people. That's how it was. And I should think they did fairly well with all concern with everything else she had to say. | 29:22 |
Celestyne Porter | And the time goes on. And as time goes on, we find ourselves to a large extent getting more concerned. | 29:43 |
Celestyne Porter | You notice now, I don't know whether you young people notice or not, but I notice people smile at you and speak to you. Whites. And White men will open the door and wait for you to come in and you'll talk and discuss things. If you're in the market, somebody will say, "Isn't this terrible that this cost this much?" You go off the conversation and people don't treat people as being something from another world that you couldn't communicate with. | 29:50 |
Kisha Turner | Do you feel that's how it used to be? | 30:19 |
Celestyne Porter | Huh? | 30:21 |
Kisha Turner | Was that how it was? | 30:22 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, as it used to be, you were not engaged in communications with them. | 30:22 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 30:27 |
Celestyne Porter | And therefore, you didn't go on with it. You know what I'm talking about? This is the way it goes. At least that's the way I see it. Over 30 years, I've been here regular little while and seeing it like that. Not just yesterday. | 30:27 |
Kisha Turner | Right. | 30:44 |
Celestyne Porter | Now I go out and I attend, I visit around churches, the White Presbyterian churches downtown on Colonial Avenue. I've been going over there on Sundays, and those people are just as nice. I go in, "Good morning." First name, and you sign the little thing that you visited and then before the week is up, I'll get a card. "How nice that you visited with us on Sunday. Please come again whenever you feel it." | 30:48 |
Celestyne Porter | I was over there Sunday before last. And they had a group that was going to a small town in Mexico. Really, it's very a poor place in Mexico that I passed through it. We passed through it in route to Mexico City. And this commission, these people were going to build a habitat. Help with a habitat program. So they were selling little bricks for $5 to help the program. I said, "Well I went to Mexico and collected all I need. I won't do that." So I gave her a contribution. I gave him a check for $25. I said to help the situation. | 31:14 |
Celestyne Porter | And the young pastor, little young White fella, he wrote me the nicest note and thanked me for contributing to the commission. Well, now here were three families were going. And I sat there and looked at them. One family had two small children they're taken there. Another one had two bigger children they were taking there. And then this girl's uncle, he was a contractor, they were going to show their help. And this is a very poverty stricken Mexican town that they were going to. Because see, I traveled all through Mexico and I could see the town that they were going to. And the Mexican people, they were poor. And when I said, "Now look at this, this, they're going to do this. It's interesting. Really, it is. | 32:01 |
Kisha Turner | You mentioned a job when you were making $59. | 33:03 |
Celestyne Porter | That's when I started teaching in Norfolk in 1934. | 33:07 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 33:10 |
Celestyne Porter | 1934. | 33:11 |
Kisha Turner | And that was your first job? | 33:13 |
Celestyne Porter | First job. My first job was at a one room school just outside of Williamsburg. I made $2 a day. | 33:15 |
Kisha Turner | Now when was this? When did you take this job and what age were you teaching? | 33:20 |
Celestyne Porter | I just gotten out of school. In 1933, I graduated. The first year I went to the one room school, then in '34 I got a job in the city. | 33:26 |
Kisha Turner | I see. | 33:35 |
Celestyne Porter | And that was the sixth grade. And I hadn't had no training in sixth grade, but I didn't stay that long. I moved on to middle school, a junior high and then to high school. | 33:36 |
Kisha Turner | Now were you principal and everything at the one— | 33:48 |
Celestyne Porter | No, no. | 33:52 |
Kisha Turner | —room school? | 33:52 |
Celestyne Porter | No, no. The one room school? Just the teacher. You had no principal. | 33:52 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 33:55 |
Celestyne Porter | You were the whole thing. | 33:56 |
Kisha Turner | You were everything. | 33:57 |
Celestyne Porter | Everything, everything. But all my students were reading when I left there in May. And I had beginners, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. My children were all reading. So I guess I didn't teach them for reading. But, anyway. | 33:58 |
Kisha Turner | And you said you made $2. | 34:27 |
Celestyne Porter | $2 a day. | 34:27 |
Kisha Turner | $2. | 34:27 |
Celestyne Porter | And we always liked the long month. 31 days. | 34:31 |
Kisha Turner | To get you some more money. | 34:37 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, it was near Richmond. And let me tell you, it's in the county, New Kent County. And they're going to have the horse racing up there in Virginia. They have got the concession for the horse racing. So I said I'm going to have to drive back up to New Kent County just to see what's happening. They built a new high school there. These are things that have happened in the 60 some years. They got a new high school, consolidated high school, everything, everything. Oh. It's just marvelous to know how people can make progress if they wish to. Nothing stands still. | 34:37 |
Celestyne Porter | And what bothers me so much is so many of older people, not me because I believe in change, but I get a little concerned with so many of older people who don't want to accept the inevitability of change because it just must come. Nobody's going to be the same thing all along. You can call it a day if you think you going to be the same thing you were. I'm glad of the change. I find myself entirely happy over the change. You know what I mean? | 35:12 |
Kisha Turner | Hold on. It stopped again. | 35:51 |
Celestyne Porter | It stopped again? | 35:58 |
Kisha Turner | I'll make a copy. | 36:00 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. Well you have to redo it and fix it all up anyway, don't you? Or do you just do the tape. It'll be fine. | 36:01 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I wanted to ask you about your mother. You said your father was a farmer. | 36:08 |
Celestyne Porter | Mama didn't work. | 36:17 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 36:18 |
Celestyne Porter | She taught school early when she first came out of school, but with 10 children— | 36:18 |
Kisha Turner | She took care of y'all. | 36:24 |
Celestyne Porter | —yeah, there's much to be done. | 36:26 |
Kisha Turner | Did she ever talk about Hampton when she was there? | 36:29 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, surely that's why she was so happy that I was there. That was her desire that I go to Hampton. She was the one fetching me there. She belonged to the singers. My mother sang very well. And the joke of it was that none of us had no voice, she didn't pass us down no voices. | 36:32 |
Celestyne Porter | And she went to Hampton in the early years. I'm trying to research her years now and I'm doing some work. I'm trying to get into to see when she was there. See Hampton has an archive. They have everybody who's ever been through there for a thousand years. But you have to get a little time to it. And as soon as I can get a chance, I'm going to do a little working around to see the years that she was there. | 36:51 |
Celestyne Porter | But she was there when it was the Indians. See, it was open for Indians and Negroes [indistinct 00:37:37], and they lived in Wigwam. They had a dormitory named Wigwam. | 37:29 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 37:48 |
Celestyne Porter | Mm-hmm. I stayed in Wigwam my second year. First year freshman stayed in Virginia Hall. Second year they went in Wigwam. Next year they went in Kennedy Hall. Like that. They had you go up and down. And Wigwam, when I was over there the other day, it has been refurbished and it doesn't even look like the same thing it looked like when we were there, when we were on campus. Oh, Hampton is just so marvelous. Now, have you been over there? | 37:49 |
Kisha Turner | No, I haven't. I only go around here. | 38:19 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, that's a trip you need to take. Well, how long are you here? Are you just— | 38:21 |
Kisha Turner | Another week. I've been here for three weeks. | 38:25 |
Celestyne Porter | How many? | 38:30 |
Kisha Turner | Three. | 38:30 |
Celestyne Porter | Three? | 38:31 |
Kisha Turner | Yes. | 38:32 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay. | 38:32 |
Kisha Turner | And I'll be here for another week. | 38:33 |
Celestyne Porter | Are you visiting relatives? Or just here on the job? | 38:34 |
Kisha Turner | We're just here working. | 38:36 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, you're here working. And you working out— | 38:37 |
Kisha Turner | We live with Ms. Essie Dozier. She's a friend of Clarice Sharp and— | 38:41 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes, yes, I saw her. | 38:46 |
Kisha Turner | And we're living with her and we're working out of her home. | 38:50 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh yes. | 38:53 |
Kisha Turner | And we just come out and speak to people. | 38:54 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, that's nice. Yeah. | 38:57 |
Kisha Turner | That's pretty much. And we do the paperwork and— | 38:59 |
Celestyne Porter | Okay, well that's quite an experience. Do you get paid or is it— | 39:02 |
Kisha Turner | Yes ma'am, we are compensated. | 39:06 |
Celestyne Porter | Well that's nice. Of course you have to get paid for this kind of work. | 39:08 |
Kisha Turner | I tell you these days, I wish there was more time for volunteer type work. | 39:12 |
Celestyne Porter | Well- | 39:17 |
Kisha Turner | But you have to pay rent. | 39:17 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, well the cost of living is so high and that the young people, you all have a lot to do. And maintaining yourself is not easy. How about that? | 39:18 |
Kisha Turner | It's very expensive. | 39:29 |
Celestyne Porter | No. So those hairdos you all got cost a barrel of money. | 39:30 |
Kisha Turner | Oh man. (laughs) | 39:40 |
Celestyne Porter | You have to think of all these things that you really have to do. | 39:40 |
Kisha Turner | So there were more Native American people there when your mother was there than when you were there? | 39:45 |
Celestyne Porter | Say—oh, Lord. What you mean? | 39:52 |
Kisha Turner | The Indian? Were they Native American people? | 39:55 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. | 39:58 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. And what happened? Did the numbers just go down over the years or what? | 39:59 |
Celestyne Porter | It must have. I can't think of anything else. By the time we got there— | 40:03 |
Kisha Turner | The enrollment went down? | 40:06 |
Celestyne Porter | By the time I got there in '29, we had about five or six. Had one friend of ours named Chiquita Long Wolf, I'll never forget Chiquita. She was from Oklahoma. And then you had one other fellow. Bo Gas. He was from Oklahoma. He played football. We didn't have a big Indian population by the time I got there. | 40:07 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. But where your mother stayed? | 40:24 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, way back then when she was there, the Indians and Blacks—The Negroes, they were the biggest of the population, but not when we lived there. Well see, by the time we got there in '29 out in the University of Oklahoma, admitted Negroes. You know what I mean? They went in— | 40:30 |
Kisha Turner | There were other institutions they could attend? | 40:51 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. Out there they went in close home. And then many of the kids who came to Hampton in 1929, they came from a long distance. They didn't go back home till they stayed there four years. Nobody could go back home. You know what I mean? Money was the main thing. And they took work years. Some of them took a work year and they worked their way through school. It was all done. Everybody was anxious to get a education. And the work year was it. You took a work and worked your way through. | 40:56 |
Kisha Turner | Did you know your grandparents? | 41:39 |
Celestyne Porter | Mm-hmm. | 41:42 |
Kisha Turner | What do you remember about them? | 41:43 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, my grandmother was 107 years old when she died. She lived with us and I remember her very well. She didn't die until 1938. | 41:45 |
Kisha Turner | Did she ever tell you anything about what— | 41:56 |
Celestyne Porter | Everything. | 41:57 |
Kisha Turner | What kinds of things did she tell you? | 41:57 |
Celestyne Porter | About slavery. She could tell you the whole thing. | 42:01 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 42:03 |
Celestyne Porter | Because was a house servant and she could tell you about that. I'm going to give you a jar of pickles, when you go. It's a recipe. Her recipe. The recipe is around 130 something years old for making pickles and they are good pickles. I made them from her recipe. She was a house servant. I got a picture of her. Oh, I'll show you my pictures of me. | 42:04 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. When we— | 42:31 |
Celestyne Porter | I'll show you my pictures. Got a picture of both my grandparents. My grandmother on my father's side, she was a full-bred Cherokee Indian. On my mother's side, I got her pictures. Then I have my great-grandparents picture on my mother's side over there. My great-grandparents picture. I have quite a collection of some of everything. I'm a collector. | 42:34 |
Kisha Turner | I see. | 42:57 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, I travel and everywhere I travel I pick up a doll and then have a picture made. I just go and get the doll and whatnot, and I laughed about them. I said, none of any of the Black people's children I know like dolls. (laughs) I said, so I'll have to leave in my room and my dolls will be sold. Everybody can have them or they give them to the museum. We had to laugh about it. We laugh about the thing that you think about that the children don't even want anymore. Children don't want nothing but green. If you can't show them some green, it is out of their category. | 42:59 |
Celestyne Porter | Every now and then you come across—I have a friend of mine that has a collection of antique furniture. It is [indistinct 00:43:42]. I said, "Why don't you call the man in and sell your stuff and get some money for it?" "Oh, I hate to depart with my antiques." I said, "You ain't got a chicken or a child and none of your godchildren are going to want them." I said, "So by the time you give to the godchild, she going to get the money of the antiques." Because everybody wants antiques now. | 43:34 |
Kisha Turner | Right. | 44:03 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, it's something else. | 44:10 |
Kisha Turner | Do you remember anything maybe that stands out that your grandmother told you? | 44:11 |
Celestyne Porter | Yes. I can remember a whole lot that my grandmother told me. My grandmother was really and truly a very smart, uneducated woman. | 44:16 |
Celestyne Porter | Now, one of the things that she used to do when I was a little girl, I can remember this. Every Sunday she would put—Because my two brothers and my sister, see we were the last of the children, put us in the surrey. An old surrey. You sat in the front and she drove the mule. And people would say, "Ella [indistinct 00:44:49] where are you going?" "I'm going to see the sick and afflicted, the poor and the needy, and the cast down on any kind of trouble." As I said, we used to laugh about it. (Turner laughs) | 44:27 |
Celestyne Porter | Say, "What did grandma say—" | 44:58 |
Kisha Turner | That's great. | 44:59 |
Celestyne Porter | —about sick and afflicted. And everybody when I tell them. "Where are you going on Sunday?" I say, "Sick and afflicted, the poor and the needy and to cast down on any kind of trouble." I said, "Now the sick and afflicted was the sick people." And she would fry these chicken up and everything for the sick people and the biscuits and all. Poor and needy was the folks who needed something. Cast down on a kind of trouble. I said, "That must be the old drunken men who went up to the courthouse Saturday night and got drunk and didn't go to church." We used to laugh about it. | 45:02 |
Celestyne Porter | And then when things happen in the family, when anything happens, she said, "Leave dead dog's dead. That dog died. Leave him dead." That meant, don't you be talking about what somebody done way back there. And really and truly it's the truth. My grandma would say, "Why bring that up? Leave that dog dead. Those dogs are dead. Leave them dead." And she'd tell that all the time. I swear, we'd have more fun with grandma, a lot of the times— | 45:31 |
Celestyne Porter | We had a lady used to stay in her nightgown all the time. You see such a nightgown. Grandma [indistinct 00:46:12] said, "Well, she's Miss Maddie Banks." I'll never forget Miss Maddie Banks. Being children, you listened to all this stuff. Miss Maddie Banks. I don't care what time you went to Miss Maddie Banks, she was in her nightgown. So my grandma would say, "Oh yeah, Maddie's always in nightgown. She stays ready."(laughs) | 46:01 |
Celestyne Porter | So I have some friends and every time they get ready to go in there, when I go out, I say, "If y'all ain't dressed up, I'm going to tell you like my grandma say, "Y'all ready? You got your—" (both laughing) | 46:29 |
Kisha Turner | You're talking about your grandmother? | 0:05 |
Celestyne Porter | Oh, okay. Well, I guess maybe. What else did you want me to? I guess that's about all. | 0:06 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 0:11 |
Celestyne Porter | She was a little cook. She never—I don't ever remember her being sick as a youngster. She was never sick. I don't know, she just could do almost everything. She could do most anything. She did a lot of helping out washing and ironing. Ironing, and then, you iron with the iron. Real iron, iron. Wasn't no electricity or nothing. We had to heat it and all. She could work and wash dishes and very clean person. Can. I learned how to make pear preserves from her. We had a orchard. We had peaches and pears, grapes and whatever have you, and I learned how to make that from her. She had excellent health. Excellent. | 0:12 |
Kisha Turner | Now, she had always lived in that area? | 1:13 |
Celestyne Porter | Mathews County. Always. Her whole life was there. | 1:16 |
Kisha Turner | Was there. Okay. | 1:22 |
Celestyne Porter | I guess maybe that's about all with her. She was very nice little lady. | 1:28 |
Kisha Turner | Thank you. | 1:36 |
Celestyne Porter | Syracuse, reading, and Washington University and St. Louis for reading, Buffalo, University of Buffalo, New York, and University of Havana in Cuba. | 1:38 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 1:54 |
Celestyne Porter | Uh-huh. | 1:54 |
Kisha Turner | When did you go to Cuba? | 1:55 |
Celestyne Porter | I went to Cuba in 1946, '47. Take it back. | 1:56 |
Kisha Turner | '47. | 2:01 |
Celestyne Porter | 1947. Baptista was running. Castro was 16 years old. We'd always know how old he was when we went there. We were en route. We went down there, the state department, a group from the state department, to study processes of education in the Caribbean. We went on to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, to Haiti, and Pepper Dock was in Haiti, and we did all the Caribbean islands, all around the Caribbean area for state department. We worked with the group from state Department. What's that? University of Virginia. Forgot about that. University of Virginia. That's where I took my supervision administration, University of Virginia. | 2:04 |
Kisha Turner | Where did you finish your degree? | 2:57 |
Celestyne Porter | University of Pennsylvania. | 3:00 |
Kisha Turner | University of Penn. Okay, so you worked on— | 3:01 |
Celestyne Porter | All these others were added up. All these places where I studied, I got— | 3:03 |
Kisha Turner | You got the degree from UPenn? | 3:08 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. University of Pennsylvania, where I earned my masters. All I was telling you was after master's. | 3:11 |
Kisha Turner | Right. After your master's degree? | 3:17 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. I was getting—For your PhD, you could transfer your credits anywhere you wish. | 3:19 |
Kisha Turner | Right. Okay. Okay. | 3:23 |
Celestyne Porter | But you had to settle. You had to settle one place to do your dissertation. | 3:28 |
Kisha Turner | Right. Where'd you do it? | 3:30 |
Celestyne Porter | I didn't do that. | 3:31 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. I see. | 3:32 |
Celestyne Porter | I didn't do that. I only got my 30 hours. | 3:32 |
Kisha Turner | I see. | 3:34 |
Celestyne Porter | All these schools, I added 30 hours and I got a certificate for 30. 30 hour certificate. | 3:35 |
Kisha Turner | I see. Okay. | 3:38 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah. I wished I could have finished my master's. I'd be making more money now. I mean my doctorate, I'd been making a whole lot more money as an adjunct member of Old Dominion. | 3:40 |
Kisha Turner | Of the Dominion. | 3:50 |
Celestyne Porter | Yeah, yeah. I do all the work that some of the doctors do, but I don't get the kind of money though. | 3:51 |
Kisha Turner | Right, right. Did anything, I don't know that you can think of, impress you about that comes to you now about any of these places in the Caribbean or when you were in California? | 3:55 |
Celestyne Porter | Well, it would be unfair for me to say I wouldn't want to go down anymore, because I went down there when they were ugly and dirty and what's the name and you had to stay in a cottage. But now they have the fabulous hotels and the motels and people travel in the Caribbean. Bermuda. I've been to Bermuda and Puerto Rico, and yes, old San Juan and all. It was country then when I was traveling, doing a lot of traveling then, when I was working like that in that area, the Caribbean area. Now, when I went into South America, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, and the Middle East, far east, around the Middle East, and then Southeast Asia, through that way, Hong Kong, Japan, Okinawa, oh, down in that area, life was entirely different. It was later on after I retired, I did that traveling. You know what I mean? | 4:08 |
Celestyne Porter | But when I told you about going to schools and down in Cuba and the Caribbean, I was still in working and teaching at high school level. When I retired in 1977, I retired as supervisor of social studies for the City of Norfolk. I was the last person on a mandatory retirement. 65 was mandatory. After that, people could work until they're 90. You know what I mean? All they wanted to. Then I travel, and all these things you see, collections I did when I was traveling afterwards, went on staff at Old Dominion to work. You might got those in Hong Kong. The silks on the wall. They wrapped up silks and I bought them and had them framed when I got home. | 5:13 |
Kisha Turner | They're beautiful. | 6:03 |
Celestyne Porter | A fella that I worked with at Booker T, he was in the department. He fixed them for me. These are the Japanese ones, along with the seasons, all the Japanese seasons. They were folded up, too. First thing when I bought them, they have tourists and everything, and you spent all your money, tourists. I acted like I didn't have good sense because I knew I wasn't going to get back no more. | 6:06 |
Kisha Turner | Get back. Yeah. | 6:32 |
Celestyne Porter | Everything was one—In Hong Kong, I bought 5,000 dollars worth of linens. | 6:34 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 6:39 |
Celestyne Porter | Now, I tell you, I had given practically all of them away. Children getting married. You know what I mean? And people retiring. I got one cloth right there sending a young little friend of mine, she's going in a new house. It's one of those baton lacy cloths and the napkins. You can buy them all around, but that's the last one I bought in Hong Kong. I bought about five or six. | 6:40 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 7:05 |
Celestyne Porter | But you could, and they shipped all the stuff home for me. I— | 7:05 |
Item Info
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