One world to another

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Dec 17, 2006 by CAROL McGRAW THE GAZETTE

There are two debutante groups in Colorado Springs -- the Jolly Jills and the Colorado Springs Debutante Committee.

Other than a picnic in 1996, the two groups haven't mingled much.

The Jolly Jills have never chosen a white debutante, but this year they selected a girl who grew up in a white world. The Colorado Springs Debutante Committee went four decades before choosing a black debutante this year.

Amelia Svendsen and Kassandra Haynes have scaled the walls of one of segregation's strongest bastions -- our social lives.

Patti Svendsen was frantically repairing her daughter Amelia's ball gown.

It was minutes before Amelia and seven other black girls were to be presented at the Jolly Jills Civic and Social Club debutante ball at the Doubletree Hotel in June.

A relative of one of the other debutantes suggested, "Maybe you better go get her mother to help her out."

Patti, who is white, replied, "I am her mother."

"Oh," the black woman replied. "I'm cool with that."

And so it has gone for Patti since her adopted daughter was tapped as a debutante. "Everyone was very nice, but I sometimes felt nervous, out of place," Patti said. "It has been my first social experience being a minority."

A HISTORIC STEP

Kassandra Haynes will make her debut at the Colorado Springs Debutante Christmas ball on Friday with 21 white girls, one of them a descendant of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

Haynes' inclusion is a historic step for the group, but organizers have played it down, not wanting to single her out among the other girls. In other years, they have had black escorts along with debutantes from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Hispanic.

Still, the moment is not lost on the young women.

"I was pretty excited when I got the invitation to be a debutante," Haynes said. "Diversity is good. I'm honored to add some diversity to the group."

'THE FINEST FLOWERS'

Debutante balls are Western culture's evolution of the coming-of- age ceremony, signaling a maiden's availability for marriage -- "a demonstration of the finest flowers," as one sociologist put it.

Historically, the practice began in Babylon and was embraced much later by English royal courts. Before the American Revolution, colonists took their daughters to London to be presented. There they learned the "St. James bow" -- the deep, elegant curtsy that is still an important part of the rituals.

Whatever the era, most debutantes were from extremely wealthy families.

"It was a closed circle and everyone knew everyone's daughter," said Karla Ann Marling, author of a history of debutantes and a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

Eventually, debuts spread from the Northeast to the South, and then out West, to include debs who might not have fit into the earlier "high society" mode.

These days, debutantes come from all walks of life and sometimes more modest means. And instead of waiting to be chosen by the white debutante organizations, various demographic groups -- black or Hispanic, Jewish or Polish-American, Catholic or Ukrainian -- have created their own coming-of-age balls.

"You would think there would be less need for racially segregated debutantes today," said Lynda Dickson, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. "The minority groups started their own because of exclusion, but now it is more because there is a comfort level in being with those you know."

The balls are a mirror of how, for the most part, most Americans live exclusionary lives -- publicly integrated, but privately and socially segregated, Dickson said. And it is no different in Colorado Springs.

TWO SNUBS, TWO GROUPS

Both of Colorado Springs' debutante groups were born in 1966. The Colorado Springs Debutante Committee came first, after the Denver Debutante Ball decided to exclude out-of-towners.

The Jolly Jills were conceived when local black women felt snubbed by the Colorado Springs Debutante Committee's first all- white debutante class, they say.

"We found that black girls had not been picked for The Broadmoor ball," said Sherley Hancock, president of the Jolly Jills and a former operations chief for an Air Force contractor.

The women met at the home of Dazzie Bell, who owned Bell's Nightingale, a nightclub. Among them were Mary Lou Foster, a seamstress at the Fashion Bar department store; Esther Wright, a medical transcriber at Fort Carson's hospital; Barbara Mendez, a civil service legal secretary; homemakers Minnie Hunter and Juanita Lallis and several schoolteachers.

"We called ourselves Jolly Jills because we were a happy social club," Wright said.

Their mission was to create a venue to honor graduating high school girls for their academic, church and charitable works. The Jills groomed young black women as their white counterparts had been groomed: in charity work and in manners, including such oldfashioned social graces as how to curtsy and perform the cotillion, an 18th century dance that is the centerpiece of many traditional debutante balls.