New Folklore Society Voices

"I enjoy barrel racing. I enjoy being feminine. I enjoy being a lady. I don’t want to do what the fellas do; neither do the fellas want to do what I do. It’s a woman’s thing to get on a horse and barrel race, and you come out of there as fast as you can, and you’re doing your thing,..."

Hanifah Bermudez, Atrion Raimundi, Aaron Coore, and Deon Pierre are interns with the Mind Builders Creative Arts Center’s Community Folklife Program in Bronx, New York.

NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted December, 2000.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Fall/Winter 1999

FALL/WINTER 1999 VOICES MAIN PAGE

Manhattan Cowgirl
Rosetta Garfield
with
Hanifah Bermudex, Atrion Raimundi, Aaron Coore, and Deon Pierre

Cowgirl and Manhattan executive, Rosetta "Cookie" Garfield was born on a Maryland farm, where her father taught her to ride horses. When she was a little girl, she was consistently called a tomboy because she loved to ride, wear jeans, and play the life of a farmer. She left the farm at age 18 and joined her sisters in New York. They nicknamed her "Cookie" because of her sweetness and charm. In New York she attended college, graduated and began working for Bristol Myers Squibb.

During a fundraiser to support the Urban Western Riding Program in the Bronx, Cookie met its founder, Cuban-born Carlos Foster, who managed and directed the program’s rodeos. The meeting with Mr. Foster rekindled her memories about riding and her respect for the cowboy tradition. Realizing how much she missed horses, she began helping Carlos by performing and assisting him with his youth group. He took Cookie under his wing and taught her everything he knew from how to saddle a horse to how to speak like a cowboy. Over the years, he shared his knowledge of cowboy history with Cookie as well as thousands of other people. Carlos passed away in December of 1998, shortly after being honored at the Mind Builders Folk Art Festival.

Cookie is now an expert rider and barrel race competitor, and she releases the bulls for the roping contests. She keeps the cowgirl tradition alive by performing regularly on the rodeo circuit and giving lecture demonstrations. Riding, she believes, is therapeutic and removes tension, hostility, and animosity; it builds character and helps keep her fit. As a result of her cowgirl experiences she was interviewed for the documentary, "The Black West," aired on Turner Network Television.

An African-Native American, Cookie regrets that she didn’t get to learn more about her family history because of the death of her grandmother when she was just a small child. She is doing her part in transmitting a folk art form to the next generation by sharing her pride in being a cowgirl with her daughter, Joy. The following are some of her reflections on being a cowgirl:

I was born in Maryland on a farm on the Eastern Shore. I am the baby of nine brothers and sisters, and my father worked very very hard to get the girls to be ladies and the boys to be men. And me, I didn’t want to be a lady. I wanted to be the tomboy. So my father worked very hard with the ladies. To this day I cannot whistle. Why? Because at the age of five or six I heard my father say, "A whistling woman and a crowing hen can come to no good," and that was not going to be me. Being a girl child, I was crazy about my father. I was my father’s pet
. One day I graduated, left Maryland, and came to New York. I lived in Brooklyn, went to Brooklyn College, moved to Manhattan, and at some point went to Hunter College. I wound up at a pharmaceutical company, which has been my home thirty years.

When I was president of the PTA, we wanted to do a gigantic fundraiser. That’s when we met Mr. Foster, who came in and told us how we should put on a rodeo. And in the process, he mentioned he needed more black cowgirls. I said, "I’ll ride," and he said, "Great."

The part for the women in the rodeo is the barrel racing. In barrel racing there are three barrels in a clover-like position, and you come out on your horse and go around the barrels as fast as you can. There would be fifteen to twenty women in this event, and of course, the first one out sets a pace or a time for the rest of them to beat.

I enjoy barrel racing. I enjoy being feminine. I enjoy being a lady. I don’t want to do what the fellas do; neither do the fellas want to do what I do. It’s a woman’s thing to get on a horse and barrel race, and you come out of there as fast as you can, and you’re doing your thing, and that’s good, because all the guys are watching you.

What happened to me one time was that I had my horse Thunder run away with me. I had just acquired Thunder. He was a rebel. I pulled back on his bit to stop, and he didn’t stop. He just kept going, and I had to go with the horse. I mean we went up the valley and down the valley, across the highway, and down the road. I just went with him. He wound up coming to a stop under a carport. He must have gone three, four, five miles, but it seemed to me like it was 15 or 20 miles. I had to let him go, because the more I pulled the further he went. He wasn’t used to my signals.

How did we get the name, "cowboy?" Mr. Foster tells it that they stole it from us. Because in slavery they never called us by our names. So he was the "boy," he was the "house boy," he was the "kitchen boy," and he was the "yard boy." And when you were out with the cows, you became the "cowboy." That’s basically it. They dressed it up with TV and movies, but in those days, to be a cowboy was derogatory.

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