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December 21, 2008

Keeping the faith — for 99 years

By Michelle Martin

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Collenane Cosey displays her faith on the wall, in the form of an oversize marble and resin rosary and a clock with the face of the Virgin Mary. They are mounted over the TV where she watches Mass from the chapel at St. Joseph Village, the Northwest Side nursing home where she lives.

Mrs. Cosey turned 99 in November, and now keeps mostly to her bed, but she maintains an active social life, entertaining visitors from the Anawim Center, which she helped found, and St. Ita Parish, where she is a registered member.

Her son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren also are frequent visitors.

She also communicates by telephone with friends and associates, including the editor of the new book she is writing, “Bloopers from the Cloister.”

Mrs. Cosey, baptized Collenane Gertrude Clark, didn’t last too long in the convent of the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary in upstate New York.

“Deep within me, I’m a free spirit,” she said. “I can’t stand regimentation. It was like boot camp in the military”

Mrs. Cosey is a Chicago native who remembers when she and her brothers and sisters — she was one of 10 children — were not allowed to attend St. Malachy School, only two blocks from their home because their father was Choctaw and African-American and they were therefore “colored.”

“We weren’t Catholic children,” she said. “We were ‘colored Catholic.’”

So her Irish mother, who wanted them in Catholic school, searched for and found St. Columbkille School, which would take them through sixth grade, and St. Elizabeth School, the designated school for African-American Catholics of the time.

That didn’t stop Mrs. Cosey from evangelizing in her home city, once encountering Al Capone as she distributed religious tracts.

“A sister and I were going doorto- door in a building, and at one apartment, the door opened and a man grabbed Sister by the arm and said, ‘I’ll take this one and you take the other one,’” Mrs. Cosey said. “We pulled away and ran out of there, onto the street. We saw a friendly looking door and knocked at it, and we saw a man peek out the window. We must have looked like we weren’t going to blow them away, because he opened the door and asked ‘What can I do for you, Sister?’” After they explained, “he pulled a roll of bills about this big” — she spread her fingers about three inches apart – “and peeled off several. When the cab came, he gave the driver the money and said, ‘Take the sisters where they want to go and take your fare and give them the rest.’ When we pulled away, the driver asked us, ‘How do you know Al?’”

Cosey, who for a time had her own school, was teaching at St. Joseph School, started by the Jesuits near Holy Family Parish on Roosevelt Road. She took some dance lessons to teach dancing to her students, and she was preparing for the dance school revue at the Goodman Theater when she met her husband, Antonio Maceo Cosey, who was playing there.

The two later had a joint writing credit on “The Ration Blues,” about trying to get enough goods during World War II. Contemporary audiences might have heard it on the soundtrack for the movie “My Dog Skip.”

Their only son, Pete Cosey, played guitar with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and in Earth, Wind and Fire.

Mrs. Cosey was active in the movement to start Anawim Center, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Native American apostolate, and she raised money by making and selling nun dolls, creating replicas of the habits for different congregations. Her husband, a master tailor as well as a musician, helped make the clothes, she said.

Cosey, with her Choctaw heritage, has a different background than most Native Americans in Chicago, who are predominantly from Great Lakes tribes. But like her, most — nearly 90 percent — are baptized, Mulkey said, and most of them are Catholic. At the time, there was no Catholic center for Native Americans in the area.

Cosey used money from her dolls and money she persuaded fellow parishioners at Holy Name Cathedral to donate to help the center get off the ground.

Her faith is strong, she said, despite the rejection she felt from the church in her youth.

That rejection led her to leave the church for a period of time, mostly because she got tired of white Catholics looking at her like she didn’t belong.

But she came back because she never lost her faith, she said.

“I always knew it was the one true church,” she said. “Logic tells me that. I have come to terms with myself and with God. I don’t have to pay for other people’s stupidity. I have everything I can do to save my own soul.”