I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Rosenberg, Texas – Immigration Destination

    Rosenberg, Texas – Immigration Destination


    Farmers in early 1900s bringing cotton by wagons to Macek Gin in Rosenberg

    The current flood of immigrants along the southern border between Texas and Mexico follows two hundred years of people who believed Texas was the land of opportunities. Today’s immigrants into the state come primarily from South America and Mexico, traveling thousands of miles to reach the Rio Grande River to cross over it to the Promised Land. In the 1800s European immigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean in sailing ships that often used Galveston, Texas as a port of entry. One of these immigrants, Henry von Rosenberg, was born in Switzerland but came to the United States in 1843 at the age of nineteen, became a dry goods clerk who eventually owned the most dry goods stores in the entire state, the president of a major railroad company, owned a bank, became a wealthy philanthropist who supported the establishment of a library in Galveston. The town of Rosenberg was named for him in 1880.

    “By the turn of the century, local land developers were sending promotional literature to the northern and midwestern states, explaining that ‘the famous Brazos Valley […] has the most fertile land in America,’ and showing pictures of green spaces, fruit orchards, wagons of cotton waiting to be ginned and Victorian homes, all intended to entice more settlers to the area. Soon there were people of German, Czech, Polish and Mexican ancestry flocking to the area.” (City of Rosenberg history)

    On October 20, 1898 my maternal grandmother named Bernice Louise Schlinke was born in Rosenberg, Texas; she was the granddaughter of a family on her mother’s side from Germany who came to Galveston aboard a ship that wrecked in the Galveston harbor and another family on her father’s side that came from Prussia (now known as an area that includes parts of Germany, Poland and Russia). My grandmother, like most of us who live in America, came from a family of immigrants.

    In October, 1910 my grandmother Louise would have had her twelfth birthday. She received a post card from her friend Lydia, and I found it mixed in with my mother’s cards and photos that I went through after her death in 2012. Why did my grandmother keep this card for sixty-two years, or more importantly, why did my mother keep the card after my grandmother’s death in 1972? Maybe for the same reason I can’t force myself to throw it away. The card represents a part of history – my family’s history for sure, but the children of immigrants who saw Texas as their destination just like the families of immigrants along the border today.

    Lydia and her two sisters on other side of post card –

    wish I knew which one she was

    (Lillie and Orrie were Louise’s older sisters, Annie a cousin who lived with the Schlinke family)

    I was a child when I knew Lillie, Orrie and Annie along with two other younger sisters Dessie and Selma – the Schlinke girls. The family usually gathered once a year when Aunt Orrie came to visit us from California. She and my grandmother were always close not only in age but also in character. In 1917 my grandmother married James Marion Boring, a man eleven years her senior, an entrepreneur/wanderer who settled with her and their four children in Richards, Grimes County, Texas where he operated a number of unsuccessful businesses until his untimely death at the age of 51 in 1938. His family also had lineage from Europe but migrated to Texas from places in the east. Louise Schlinke Boring maintained ties to Rosenberg after his death because Mr. Boring (as she called him to me) had a brother Clement Howard Boring and other family there. My mother, dad, my maternal grandmother and I visited my great uncle and cousins periodically during the time we all lived together in Richards in her house, but in 1964 following my graduation from Columbia high school in West Columbia, Texas our connection to Rosenberg shifted dramatically when my father became Assistant Superintendent of Instruction for the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District there.

    Please stay tuned for more of the Rosenberg connection.

  • how do I love thee? let me count the ways

    how do I love thee? let me count the ways


    Last night Pretty and I were watching a new comedy on Netflix when she suddenly sat up and said, tomorrow is the 9th. of February, our 24th. anniversary. This was huge because for twenty-three years Pretty had problems remembering the date. Bravo!

    I usually began the reminder process in January every year with a conversation that followed along these lines. Pretty, you know we have an anniversary coming up in February. Oh yes, she would say. What day is it then? I asked. Time passed as the wheels turned. I could see them turning. Is it the 12th.? she finally guessed. No, I replied with outright disgust. It’s the 9th. Pretty said oh she knew it was either the 9th. or the 12th. but thought she always got it wrong so she went with the one she didn’t really think was right. Didn’t I say I saw the wheels turning? For twenty-three anniversaries, Pretty has never remembered the right date. I always remember because I have it written on my calendar, and I don’t consider that cheating. I consider it brilliant. (Was that a calendar I saw in Pretty’s lap last night? Hmm.)

    Return with me to those thrilling days of yesteryear to meet Pretty who magically changed from being a close friend and confidante (before the spontaneous trip to Cancun pictured above in February, 2001) to a woman who was hotter than the salsa we had with dinner at La Destileria the first night we were there. And trust me, that salsa was hot.

    Pretty was “out” in a conservative state in a tumultuous era. She was ahead of her time with her Bluestocking Bookstore in the Vista in Columbia before the Vista became cool. Her business closed after three years, but her contribution to the LGBTQ community was recognized and appreciated. She served on the original board of directors for the SC Gay and Lesbian Business Guild formed in 1993 and was the second president of that organization. Her passion for equality was the catalyst for an activist’s life, a passion she and I shared as friends over the decade that was the 1990s.

    At the turn of the century, change was in the air. It was like everyone suddenly realized time was passing faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and if Superman and Wonder Woman were unlikely to intervene in the chaos and/or uninspiring sameness of our lives, we needed to make radical changes ourselves.

    Both Pretty and I were in long term lesbian relationships that experienced seismic shifts as the first year of the new century came to a close. Our partners began looking for love in other places. Pretty had the additional drama associated with making a home for a fifteen year old son who she adored, an athletically gifted teenager who was the quarterback of his high school football team and the starting pitcher for their baseball team. She mixed her real estate appointments in her new career as a realtor for The Hubbard Group with her tennis league schedules and her son’s games.

    The trip to Cancun was the launching pad for the most adventurous ride of my life. I had no way of knowing then that the gorgeous intelligent intellectually inquisitive woman with the wonderful sense of humor who grew up in New Prospect, South Carolina would marry the woman from deep in the heart of Richards, Texas and that we would be together for the next twenty-four years sharing a life unimaginable to me as a child. Yet, here we are – still laughing at each other’s jokes, still loving, still standing. And yes, still eating Mexican food as often as our older appetites allow; but now with the additional delight of sharing fajitas and quesadillas with our growing family that makes our love richer, more joyful, more playful.

    How do I love thee, Pretty? Let me count the ways, and let me begin with the spicy salsa you have always brought to our family life together for two decades plus now. On that first trip to Cancun, we walked along the beach in the moonlight and I said I would give anything to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary together in 2026. Unbelievable. Inconceivable. That seemed like such a long, long time away then, especially since I was fifty-five years old and you were fourteen years younger. We’re almost there, but the years have passed faster than a speeding bullet, our love more powerful than a locomotive.

    Happy 24th. Anniversary, Pretty. Let the good times roll.

    ************************

    granddaughters Ella and Molly at Mexican restaurant

  • Impasse

    Impasse


    “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” United States Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, War of 1812, September 10, 1813, following his strategic victory in the battle on Lake Erie over the British Navy. Hooray.

    Walt Kelly’s political satire captured the imagination of the public on Earth Day in this country with his 1970 Pogo cartoon that coined a re-phrase of Commodore Perry’s words in 1813. Hooray?

    Helen Lewis argued in her article The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote or Work. Or Have Opinions. that a movement of “masculinism” in America seeks “to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” (June, 2026, The Atlantic) What? Seriously?

    We have met the enemy, and it’s women. No Hooray, please.

    ************************

    I published the following piece on June 10, 2019, seven years ago. I had a personal painful reminder of old tapes played too often in my life. Helen Lewis’s words opened old wounds.

    Impasse

    Webster’s Everyday Thesaurus has these words for impasse:

    deadlock, stalemate, blind alley, bottleneck…dead end, dilemma, predicament, quandary, standstill, standoff.

    This past week I had a heavy dose of impasse which intermingled with my increasing preoccupation about the American Civil War. I look more and more frequently at the map of the red states and blue states that make up our United States and wonder anew at Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to keep the country united as one. I understand the problem better for sure. I always wondered how brother fought brother on different sides during the Civil War. They were family first after all, right? Not so fast, my friend.

    The American people are a “duke’s mixture” to quote my granddaddy who used the words for his Saturday barbershop customers in the 1950s when my grandmother asked him who’d stopped by the barber shop that day.

    George, who all came by for a haircut today?

    Well, Betha, it was a duke’s mixture.

    To which she would shake her head and look at me and ask, What does that tell you? Duke’s mixture.

    My granddaddy would laugh as if he’d told a funny joke, and I would laugh with him. My grandmother never cracked a smile.

    Today I find myself not laughing, either. Rarely cracking a smile at the impasse among the citizens in our country which must surely have my grandparents spinning in their graves. My grandmother invented social media via the telephone party line we had in our little town as surely as Al Gore invented the internet. She relished listening in on other people’s conversations and delighted to repeat juicy gossip at her kitchen table… but please dear God, don’t ever mess with her family.

    This week I did something I almost never do. I responded on Facebook to a post made by a first cousin twice removed who has a world view that I have long ago accepted as different from mine. Most of the time I hide his offensive posts from my timeline and move on.

    I can’t bring myself to “un-friend” him because I truly love the little boy I remember visiting us in Richards so often with his grandmother who was my grandmother’s sister. But this week he posted that liberals must have a “mental illness” to think the way we do, and that struck a nerve for me.

    You see, I grew up during a time in the 1950s and 60s when being a homosexual was considered to be a mental illness. Think about how you would feel if you grew up believing that you had a secret mental illness and, if exposed, you could be institutionalized. Lock her up. Throw away the key. I heard an old tape begin to  play in my mind.

    Somehow our thread on Facebook took an unpleasant turn, as I already knew it would and we got into a discussion regarding a prevailing Muslim  belief in some places that gays should be killed. Unfortunately, one of my cousin’s friends chimed in with the following comment: “We knew someone many years ago that would probably want to buy a plane today, load them (gays and lesbians) up and drop them off over there (wherever Muslims live). I sure miss him.”

    Wow. I was transported to a conversation I had in the early 1990s with a client who sat in my office and said, “If it were up to me, I’d take all those queers and put them behind barbed wire in Kansas and tell them to stay there.” I didn’t respond then. The old tape was playing louder now.

    One of my mother’s most infamous quotes for me was that she wished all those gays would go back in the closet where they belonged. She would be happy to slam the door shut. The old tape was so loud now I could barely hear myself think.

    Luckily, I didn’t accept the old tapes as I don’t accept my cousin or his friend’s thinking about who I am today. I’ve spent my entire adult life working for equal treatment and fairness – my liberal social justice beliefs.

    In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. I was 28 years old. In 2017 at the age of 71, I am personally declassifying liberalism as a mental illness.

    I resolve to limit my social media interaction with my first cousin twice removed to Happy Birthday wishes. No need going up that blind alley again.

    I feel better already.

    *************************

    June is Pride Month – celebrate with joy!