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Odessa (Windmon) Cook Vincent
Odessa @ 23 years old
Odessa Cook Vincent, her life a lot less complicated as from as family dynamics but nevertheless our parents lives were
not without many controversy life challenges.
The time period our parents were born into
had great challenges for black families. There was Jim Crow laws, lynchings and appalling experiments on black men and their families (the Tuskegee Study) just to name a few.
Odessa Windmon was born to Hughie and Bettie (Phillips) Windmon she is the 11th child of 15 children. Although mama’s family
life was the typical black family in american, life was not peaches and cream. Her parents lost five children at young ages, their first born Stella, Rosy Mae, Emma, Willie Lee and Jessie Cornelius were called back heaven. Undoubt- edly all their deaths Emma’s had to be to most painful due to the fact that Emma’s die at the tender age of 16, the longest to live of the 5 children that die. Although mama was only 6 years old when Emma die, she has some won- derful memories of her sister.
Mama says she believes that she was the
only one to graduate with a 12th grade
education of the 11 children that attended
school. From what I have learned so far, negro education only went to 8th grade for must black children. Perhaps the rules had changed by time Mama got to high school. Most children were expected to get a job working in the cotton fields, helping their parents make a living. Yes I said cotton fields, Arkansas had cot- ton fields and our mom, aunts and uncles and grandparents worked in these fields like many of our ances- tors did doing slavery. So when you look at mom consider this she came up in a time period where she had no freedom to drink from any water foundation (colored people only), she worked in the fields before and after school and during her teen years she had to help take care of her younger siblings due to the act her mom, was put into a sanitarium for the treatment or experimental of Tuberculosis she came down with.
Ihave discovered the names and places were her and our ancestors came from at least here is the United States. I have traced origins so far to Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi with the Windmon, Phillips, Gates and Montique.
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