LETTERS FROM HOME: JANE BARNETT; A WOMAN WHO WALKED IN BEAUTY

May 15, 1997

Dear Julie,

Jane Barnett was a singular Cape Girardeau personage for almost 60 years, a colorful woman who did not live life in the browns and grays of conformity.

At her memorial service last weekend, a friend broke down trying to read the poem "When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple." Miss Jane, as she was known to some, wore purple and whatever other colors pleased her all her life.

And eyelashes the size of butterfly wings, and plenty of costume jewelry. She was always "put together."

In her youth she had the striking looks of a '30s movie star, the remarkable cheekbones, the peek-a-boo hairdo. She could've been a femme fatale but she hadn't that kind of heart.

She did have a taste for the dramatic. Sometimes she worked in her boutique downtown adorned in a red feather boa. She smoked with the aid of a cigarette holder or sometimes a dainty pipe.

She was a school teacher for awhile in the 1930s, then with her partner Tommie opened a drug store that turned into a boutique.

We shared a passion for fashion, another friend said at the memorial. She wore a Chinese-style dress and red spiked heels.

As teen-agers, DC and her sisters bought most of their makeup and jewelry from Jane. The boutique was an essential Saturday morning stop before a Saturday night date.

When I was a college student working at a convenience store precursor called the Pak-A-Snak, Jane and Tommie lived nearby and often stopped off for provisions after work. She kept us entertained while Tommie shopped.

Miss Jane had a way of praising someone's looks without embarrassing. She simply had an appreciation.

Far-off admirers of hers who couldn't attend the memorial sent letters. One wrote: "She could hug you with her eyes like no one I know."

The memorial was held at the university theater because Miss Jane and Tommie were big backers of the school's theatrical productions. They established a set of awards that mean as much to the students as any Oscar, one said.

In keeping with Miss Jane's embrace of New Age ideas, Native American flute music played before the ceremony. She was adept at palmistry, knowledgeable about crystals, considered herself a psychic.

She was, as the head of the theater department said, "delightfully exotic."

A shrine of sorts was erected in a glass case in the theater lobby. It contained pictures and artifacts from a life amply lived. There she was in a 1956 newspaper photo, wearing a flowing white dress and performing solo -- harp, it was -- atop a float in the city's sesquicentennial parade. There were her cigarette holders and her pipe, the small red and black one with the rhinestones circling the stem.

An Indian version of the 23rd Psalm and her favorite Indian prayer were read at the memorial. "Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset," the prayer began.

In material terms, she probably didn't have much to show for 88 years. She was living in a nursing home at the end. Still reading palms when she had the strength, feather boa in place. It is an image of a life lived from start to finish, from head to toe.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.