![]() Miss Winter then served as director of National Kindergarten and Elementary College’s Practice Kindergarten. After graduation, Miss Winter became director of a newly established Kindergarten-Primary school in Urbana, Illinois, where she worked until 1918. ![]() ![]() National Kindergarten and Elementary College trained women as kindergarten teachers, a radical concept that had taken hold in America in the late 19th Century.īefore coming to Michigan, Miss Winter was the director of a number of new schools. In 1913, Miss Winter attended the National Kindergarten and Elementary College in Evanston, Illinois, graduating in 1915. We buy our food now-don't make it-but I wouldn't say the food is better now, or that we got more of it. After the civil rights, we got treated a little better at the stores over in Camden. White folks get a little nicer, laughing with you now, but it's phony. Things don't change too much-maybe a little, but I don't see no great change. Monroe and me had nine children-seven girls, two boys. Then I started working at the day care for Tinnie Dell. Me and my husband, Monroe Pettway, farmed together for twenty years, from 1955 to 1975. When I married and came up here, I married into the same thing-same fieldwork, same crops. Killed hogs, goats-barbecued them goats and they was delicious. Everything we needed we raised it ourselves. Had gardens with different kinds of vegetables-all kinds. Hoed cotton, corn, peas, peanuts, sweet potatoes. I like what folks called "Bricklayer" 'cause you could make it into something pretty with any old kind of cloth.īefore I married, I worked in the fields at home with my uncle Alp Kennedy and my aunt. I couldn't buy pretty materials, so I couldn't make pretty patterns. My aunt had a old book of patterns that she sometime used, but I didn't like no book patterns. Sometimes cousins from Mobile bring us old clothes for making quilts. We mostly made string quilts out of old clothes and overalls we tore up for pieces-khaki shirts and stuff. I was about twelve when I started making quilts on my own. My first quilt was a "Eight-Pointed Star." I kept it until I married and the children wore it out on the bed. Then Little Sis-that's what we called my aunt Seebell-she'd give us lessons on how to cut out pieces and piece up quilts and help her quilt her own quilts, and that's how I learned. We'd do our chores every morning before school, clean up the room and milk the cow, and after we'd get back, we'd do our homework. My mother, Channie Pettway, died at an early age and leave the younger children, me and my sister Lola and my brother Lee Foster, to her sister, Seebell Kennedy, my aunt who raised us. Back then we was walking to school about five miles, from down there to the old school up by Arlonzia house. He wasn't living too far from us, and I run into him a lot. My daddy was Joe Benning, but he never lived with us. The official name then was Primrose, Alabama. The man over the community at that time was Mr. I was born and raised right down there in the White community, they call it, in Gee's Bend. Given the name "J.T." at her birth, the quiltmaker has always been known as "Bootnie"-and since her school days has called herself "Jessie," after her favorite teacher.
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