Photo by Tom Jenz
Shirley Jean Masters - Marlin, Texas
Shirley Jean Masters
Are we all hopelessly tribal? Will the races finally get along? Can all the different ethnic groups, who seem to separate themselves into neighborhoods and cultural communities, get along in Milwaukee and in America? I’ve been writing about this subject for a while, trying to get a handle on what makes us gather in herds, especially in urban areas. The core question: can Blacks and whites blend in harmony? In a majority of situations, it will take patience.
In 1999, I took a six-month road trip across the southwest, the west, and Midwest America. I wrote about the people and towns I encountered. On that trip 22 years ago, I found a town in Texas that was dealing with the same issues as Milwaukee is today. But the population was only 6,000.
Here is my dispatch.
Wednesday, May 12, 1999, Marlin, Texas
Late afternoon, and I’d been driving a while and was looking for a place to stay. It might be among the 6,000 residents of Marlin, Texas, which came on as down on its luck, half black, half white, a lot of churches, a deteriorating downtown, and a back street where unseemly types shuffled around in guilty poses. Drug dealers, I figured. In a survival effort, the productive end of downtown devoted itself to antique stores and gift shops.
I went inside Bargain Masters, a large store that sold crafts along with secondhand furniture and appliances. I walked past some used refrigerators and found a black woman with curly-tight, dyed blonde hair sitting at a desk among dried floral arrangements. She was reading the Bible. Wasn’t long, and we got acquainted. Her name was Shirley Jean Masters, 59, and she was a juvenile corrections officer who also helped her husband run the store they owned. A short way into our conversation, a round plump black man with a roguish grin entered, and Shirley waited on him. They were old friends, and she teased him about his weight.
I walked over to the window display and took some pictures of a lineup of beautiful Afro women dolls. The dolls were quite large and dressed in Victorian-style hoop skirts with tight bodices. But the dresses were patterned in traditional African colors, deep blues and dark greens. Their hair was done in braids as tight as shoelaces.
“I made those dolls,” said Shirley, coming over to the window.
“Really?” I said. “I’m knocked out by those colors, very nice choice.”
She smiled. She had a smile they line summer skies with. “Actually, I was inspired by how the women of Kenya dress.”
I said, “And I love the way you made the dresses to look like flowers with petals.”
“Thank you but let me show you the surprise.” She lifted up the tallest doll, and it suddenly became shorter. The high hoop skirt consisted of layers of hard, clothbound bowls with flower designs inside.
“Nice touch,” I exclaimed. “But the tragedy is what you are charging. Eighty dollars for this doll? That’s all?”
“I know. Even my son said I should get more money. I just charge for materials.”
The Sum of What is Known
It seems like really good artists who don’t know they’re good artists rarely get what they deserve for their work. I shot a photo of Shirley holding her favorite doll. Then, she went back to her desk, and I sat across from her in an old, overstuffed chair. She was wearing a T shirt that read: Knowledge: The fact or condition of apprehending truth or fact. The sum of what is known.
“Is there some significance to your T shirt?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, yes,” she said, beaming. “My mother told me that knowledge is the one thing no one can take away from you. Bless her heart. She has passed on.”
Shirley grew up poor in Chula Vista near San Diego, diverse neighborhoods of black, Hispanics, and Chinese. I asked her if she had experienced prejudice. Two incidences have stuck with her. The first: A white man opened a restaurant in the neighborhood with a sign in the window: No Coloreds Allowed. “He didn’t last long. Nobody ate there.” The second: When she was in elementary school, the children were assigned two to a desk. Her desk mate, a black boy, moved away before the school year was out. A week later, a white boy named Travis was introduced to the class. The teacher told Travis that his seat assignment was with Shirley. Travis said, “I can’t sit next to a Negro.”
Shirley came home and told her mother about the incident, and her mother said, ‘Oh, no. Not here.’ “That’s why we left the town.”
I asked her why she had chosen to live in Texas.
“Years ago, I came back to Dallas to visit relatives. I fell for a man.” She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, a man is what did it. Wouldn’t you know.”
Mingle by Day, Separate at Night
I told her that I had been traveling throughout small-town Arkansas and Texas for a month. “Here's my take. Blacks and whites seem to mingle in town during the day, but at night they go back to their separate neighborhoods. Am I right?”
She said that was true, “but still it’s better than it used to be. The schools are integrated here, at least. And we are doin’ business with each other. Things like that. The other night, I went to a parents meeting at the school, mostly mothers. It’s always the same. The blacks sit in one section, the Hispanics in another, the whites in another. If a black woman goes over and sits with the white women, her friends gossip. ‘Who does she think she is?’ they say.” She paused for a thought. “I suppose we’re all guilty of this.”
Shirley tapped on her Bible. “Matter of fact, at church tonight I am teaching that very lesson. I call it, Let’s Reach Out. Let’s reach out to one another regardless of class or color or circumstance. Let’s stop the gossip and backbiting.”
I told her about the gangsta types I had encountered on the back streets of Marlin. “They looked at me like I was the enemy. Sorry, but I do have prejudice against young black men with attitudes.”
Terrible Hurt
She nodded. “I know what you're saying. I like to think that people with troubles—from drug dealers to dictators to bigots to alcoholics—are in a terrible hurt. Unfortunately, people that hurt, hurt others. But still I believe we need to reach out to everyone. Is that too idealistic?”
“Hey, you’re looking at someone who used to be an idealist, then he gained too much experience.” I laughed.
“You know the story of Job in the Bible?” she said, “Job was once a very rich man. He had 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 oxen, and 500 donkeys. He had seven sons and three daughters. One day, God ran into the devil and asked the devil where he had been. The devil answered, ‘I’ve been to and fro seeing who I can devour.’ God asked, ‘Have you considered my servant Job, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?’ The devil answered, ‘How can I get to Job when you have built a hedge around him?’
“So God put Job through some really tough tests. He took everything away from Job, I mean, money, property, everything, including his kids, and then He put him through some more tests, like disease, pestilence, bad things that can only happen in the Bible. But Job never renounced God. He’s the one who said, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Blessed is the Lord.’ God keeps that hedge around us, no matter how much our experience or selfishness tries to tear it down. We are all in this life together.”
Keep the Faith
Back at my motel that night, I looked up Job in the Gideon Bible. Shirley did not tell me the end of the story. Old Job, he ended up sitting pretty. Lived to be 140. The Lord also doubled his number of sheep, oxen, donkeys, and camels, and he had a bunch more kids. I guess it pays to keep the faith …
Through the Bargain Masters store window, a beautiful young black woman walked by. “Oh, that’s Julie. I wish she would have stopped by. I am so happy for her. She just got accepted into Spellman College.”
I told Shirley that I had watched a talk show on the BET channel, Black Entertainment Television. A roundtable of highly educated black academics and writers were discussing the black upper class. A book had been written on how the upper-class blacks had isolated themselves off from their race. They sent their children to exclusive colleges like Spellman, Howard, Princeton or Harvard. They vacationed in Sag Harbor and Cape Cod. They walled themselves off in gated suburbs.
She shook her head and sighed. “There was this slave master in the 1700s who wrote a letter to the white plantation owners. The letter said that the way to keep the blacks from uniting was to keep them in ignorance. Don’t let them read. And keep them separated. For instance, the house slaves thought of themselves as higher on the social scale than the field slaves. Then, there’s the skin color issue. A lot of blacks think if they are lighter skinned, they are superior. We are separating ourselves. We are not united.”
Later on, I remembered meeting this lovely older black woman on a Sunday morning in a small town in Arkansas. She was dressed in a gorgeous, church-going purple dress. Her son, a young Harry Belafonte lookalike, had noticed my license plates. He and his mother had lived in Milwaukee at one time but moved back to Arkansas. He was now going to college in Louisiana. The mother was charming and exuded such grace. Her son showed a polite respect for her.
And then I met Shirley Jean Masters.
There is something about the power of black women: the strength of the look and the voice blended with the nurturing attitude. I often feel small in their presence. But sometimes, it’s good to feel small.
