Shirley Palmer
Shirley Littles Palmer was an essential person, one of those souls who hold the world together with gestures of kindness and natural nobility.
I regret to say that I knew her only by reputation. She was the mother of a man—himself a living saint—who has helped manage our Synagogue for over a decade. Keith Palmer, the son, enfolds all of us in his love, the strength of his loyalty, his skills and intelligence. We could not endure without Keith and his team. All of us would say that this is a deeply consequential relationship.
And many people would have said the same about his mother. One of thirteen children from a large Tulsa family, Ms. Palmer died last week after a fall in November. Even though her death unspooled over months, it seemed to go with the pattern of her life: an absence of complaint and no-fuss transitions. She worshipped for seventy years at Morningstar Baptist, one of the great nodal points of Black religious life in Tulsa. She was a stalwart member of Women’s Sunday School Class Number Two and served it forever as a volunteer secretary. After that, she administered the whole of the program. People naturally bent in her direction. That’s what happens when you are a mother of your community.
But her influence went beyond the world of the church. She deployed her gifts for precision and consistency as an administrative mainstay at Hillcrest Hospital. And she made a special commitment to single mothers. Against the grain of institutional racism, she succeeded in acquiring a constellation of rental houses, which she made available to women who needed foundational support. This could have been one of her most significant achievements: creating a source of generational wealth and turning it to pro-social purposes.
All of this was foregrounded at her funeral. But I was also struck again by the patterns of rhetoric, the use of symbol and liturgy, and the formation of community in African American Tulsa. Some of the things were those you would expect: the melismatic gifts of a half-dozen signers, the hypnotic repetitions of the back-up choir.
Ms. Palmer was stylish and beautifully turned out. The women in the extended Palmer family wore tribute clothing to send her forth: red to honor the signature color of her wardrobe, along with the hats that elevate Sunday morning in church. There were turbans and headwraps and a gold metallic bucket cap that served as a kind of lighthouse in the storm.
Pastor Rodney Goss, a gifted orator, spoke with felicity and a lightness of spirit that acknowledged the grief of losing a matriarch and also celebrated Shirley’s celestial homecoming. He assured us that she had reached the gates of heaven, that she had achieved the union she sought during her lifetime and that she had given all she could to her earthly responsibilities. I come from a very different religious tradition, but I found this message deeply calming.
He was also gentle and teasing and hilariously in-group. He spoke last on the program after many others, and he reminded us that he was a Black Baptist preacher who would be making exactly three points. After that, we would go the cemetery and come back for a traditional “repast” of fried chicken.
The audience was with him from the first mention of points and then exploded when he came to the part about the chicken. He also told us that he was shy around Shirley, that he could never quite tell if she loved him or something else (she loved him). And then he danced out their routine of “side hugs” on meeting. He worried that it was somehow all about his breath. Rodney Goss is a beautifully groomed man, but he left us with the sense that he could have used a mint.
What I won’t forget is Pastor Goss’s little dance and the sense of being in an embodied congregation. There was swaying, reaching, and the arcing of heads. It was constrained by the pews bolted to the floor, but it always seemed to be escaping restraint. Ms. Palmer’s brother seemed to snap and spasm. Every speaker called out, and the congregation called back. One speaker schooled us in what she wanted from the congregation: loud affirmation of her messages about Shirley. She told us exactly what she wanted us to say. Even so, it felt real and organic, as if we were also speaking about Shirley. Her words were refracted and enlarged in the space of the congregation in a gorgeous moment of tight communion.
Ultimately, isn’t that the point of worship, the possibility that we, too, will snap and spasm, that we will feel a spirit breaking through our tightness and releasing some measure of love and rapture? I love the style and substance of my tradition, but more often perhaps than I am ready to acknowledge, I really want some of this good stuff, too.
May Shirley Palmer’s memory be for a blessing, which sustains her children, her family, and the whole of her community.