she was only 6 years old, around Easter, her mother called the neighborhood kids into the house and taught them musical notes using candied Easter eggs.
“She wrote it out for us to see what it looked like on the staff,” Rashad says. “She said, ‘Four beats to a measure and a quarter-note gets one beat. Now what is a quarter-note?’ Well she held up an egg, she said, ‘Well, this is a whole Easter egg, we’re going to call this a whole note. And in 4-4 time, the whole note is getting four beats.’ She proceeded to divide that Easter egg into 16 parts.
“And I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was learning fractions — and I never forgot it. I never forget the concept, the principle behind fractions.”
At 99, Vivian still tutors young children at the Brainerd Institute Heritage, which carries on the mission of an elite black boarding school that closed in 1939.
With her daughters, Vivian bought the land on which the school stood and revived the institute.
For this clan of women who refuse to slow down, there is no such thing as an impossible dream.