Zita Cousens Brown ‘75

Ms. Zita Cousens Brown ‘75 was interviewed by Sunei Clarke ‘24 in summer 2022.

Ms. Cousens discusses family history and her experiences growing up in Billerica, Massachusetts.

Tags: Family

Transcript

Interviewer: Sunei Clarke (SC)

Narrator: Zita Cousens (ZC)

SC: Could you tell me maybe one of your strongest memories of growing up and. Yes. Okay.

ZC: Well, I grew up in a small town, so it was very neighborly. And I grew up as. It was in a white community and we were the only, there were like maybe two or three other families that lived in Billerica. So going through school I was the only Black person in my classes. Until I got to high school. And then there was one young man who was in one of my classes, but pretty much I went through school as being the only Black person. I think growing up in a small, in a town, a small town really creates a sense of community and fellowship. I went to church, I was part of the Girl Scouts, I was part of the ski club. So there were lots of activities that I was involved in. That helped enrich me. My family traveled. My grandparents lived in Boston, and my grandparents were from Jamaica. And so my grandfather, when I did Ancestry.com, I actually found his name in a register on one of the boats that came to Ellis Island. And then my grandmother came after that, and this was like 1917, 1918, somewhere in that. And my mother was born in Jamaica and her siblings and she had, I had seven aunts and uncles. My mother had a lot of siblings. She came from a big family. And what to me was extraordinary is that back in the thirties and forties that my grandfather was able to buy a house and raise seven children. And one of my uncles became a pharmacist. And went to Mass College of Pharmacy right across, right near Simmons, and owned a pharmacy for well over 40 years. And I think that that was at that time, during the thirties and forties, I think that that was extraordinary.

SC: Wow. So you have a very deep understanding of what it means to kind of work your way up and like how important upward mobility is and education in this country.

ZC: Absolutely.