By Garrett Bohannan
Reporting Texas
It was a brisk December morning in East Texas when a curious 9-year-old girl opened a JCPenney catalogue and saw that Cabbage Patch Kids was releasing their first African American doll.
Growing up, Cathy Runnels had only ever played with white dolls — Barbies with blond hair and perfect peach skin that her brothers often tore apart. It was 1984, and no matter how much Cathy wanted a doll that looked like her, her small town of Schulenberg never received a shipment.
Now nearing 50 years old, Cathy sits in a cluttered gray cubicle inside the George Washington Carver Museum in East Austin. Children’s books, Amazon boxes and craft supplies crowd her desk, while a faded city of Austin lanyard hangs around her neck.
Cathy currently works as the culture and art education coordinator for the Carver Museum, which strives to be the “heartbeat of Austin’s Black creative community and beyond.” Cathy oversees the education department and leads a variety of community events throughout the year.
“A lot of people go to work and they hate their job,” Cathy said. “This is my life. It’s who I am.”
Cathy eventually left her small town and moved to Austin in 2008 to study education at Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU just a few minutes from the museum. Her childhood was filled with community gatherings of the small Black population in Schulenberg. Her grandfather opened a dance hall in the 1940s and hosted annual Juneteenth, Christmas and Easter celebrations.
“I come from a lineage of people who were doing important stuff in the community,” Cathy said. “In my quest to find out more about them, you just start learning and loving history.”
In college, Cathy began taking courses in African American history and culture, filling a gap in knowledge she had from growing up in a predominantly white town that failed to teach Black history. She was often the only Black student in her class, a reality that stood out in fourth grade, when white classmates called her Medusa for the way her hair looked in braids.
“When you are the minority, a lot of times you’re in the classroom and they’re teaching, or they’re reading stories, and you’re looking and trying to find yourself in those stories,” she said. “I didn’t see myself in those stories.”
After graduating, Cathy worked as a pre-K public school teacher for two years, but she quickly began to notice that the students in her classroom were struggling.
“I saw those kids in school. I knew what they were going through at home, because I went through it,” Cathy said. “Me and my siblings could have easily gone into child protective services because there were plenty of times we didn’t have anything to eat. There were times when our electricity got cut off, or our gas got cut off.”
Cathy’s mother died when she was just 14 years old, leaving her father — who could not read or write — to work multiple jobs to provide for his children. Cathy channeled her pop’s strength, making a commitment to help children she saw herself in.
After leaving the classroom, Cathy worked in drug and alcohol prevention and child protective services, high-stress jobs that wore her down and put a heavy burden on her shoulders.
“I remember saying the next job that I work, I want that job specifically to be something I love to do” Cathy said.
The love she found at the Carver initially came with a price. When she started at the museum in 2019, she made $20 an hour — not enough to support her family and life in Austin — so she had to work two jobs.
She would clock out at 6 p.m. and drive home, sipping a Monster energy drink to prevent her from falling asleep. At 11 p.m., she clocked in for an eight-hour shift in the adolescent wing of a mental health hospital in South Austin. When her shift ended at 7 a.m., she would drive home, shower and lie in bed until another museum shift at 9 a.m.
“I’ve done all kinds of community work for decades, but I got to a point where I really felt like I needed to rest, and I needed to not worry about saving everybody else,” Cathy said, sitting in a dull conference room on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.
At home, Cathy dedicates time to a variety of personal projects. She collects Black dolls for a living history museum, a habit she said helps to heal the 9-year-old girl who never played with a doll that looked like her. Since 1999, she has collected over 400 dolls created in the last 100 years.
“A lot of times when you see people that collect, sometimes there’s trauma behind the collecting,” Cathy said.
When Cathy was 5 years old, her childhood home burnt down, destroying her small collection of dolls and Holly Hobbie play oven. In 7th grade, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She was forced to grow up, never fully experiencing the joys of being a child.
“This is a time when you’re still young and you really should be enjoying your young life,” Cathy said. “ I was forced to kind of become an adult at a much early age because of my circumstances.”
Cathy honors her late parents through dolls she keeps in her home. Her father lives in a doll holding a fishing pole and a bucket of worms, a nod to his love for fishing. Her mother lives throughout her collection as well. One doll wears church clothes and a fancy hat Cathy made herself. After having her son, Courtney, when she was 20 years old, Cathy dreamed of having more children that never came. The dolls heal that part of herself, too.
“We’re looking at reflections of ourselves with these Black dolls,” Cathy said. “You know, Black is beautiful.”
By collecting dolls, Cathy has also created a better sense of work-life balance, taking time to indulge in something she was never afforded as a child.
“It’s hard for us because it’s like we’re expected to do so much with so little and it’s not just in this environment. As a Black person in this country, we are always operating like that and we always make a way out of no way,” Cathy said. “It gets tired.”
After clocking out at 5:30 p.m., Cathy heads home to her husband, Allen, and 29-year-old son, Courtney. Cathy and “the boys,” as she calls them, unwind by watching historical documentaries and TV shows centered around Black culture. They enjoy travel and cruises, but they always visit museums and absorb as much knowledge as possible. Cathy’s son, Courtney, is on the autism spectrum and has his own unique affinity for history.
“She’s brave, she’s dedicated and she does not give up on life no matter what obstacles are in front of her,” Courtney said. “She inspired me to be the person that I am.”
“What’s the phrase I would always say to you?” Cathy asked, passing by Courtney’s bedroom. “God always what?”
“Made the difference?” Courtney asked.
“God always makes a way,” Cathy said.
“Makes a way,” Courtney repeated.
Cathy’s future at the museum is not clear. As budget cuts and threats from the federal government cast a dark shadow over museums, Cathy and her team are working harder than ever to shine a light on Black history.
“We have Juneteenth coming up, and we’re going to do it like we never did before. We’re thinking that we may not even be able to do this next year, and that idea makes me want to cry,” Cathy said. “ I don’t think anybody can ever stop us from teaching and preserving who we are.”
In the quiet months after Black History Month, Cathy and her team spend their days planning 10 weeks of summer camp, the Carver’s annual Juneteenth festival and end-of-the-year tours for schools across Austin. Cathy was promoted in March and has begun training as the new culture and art education coordinator.
“The takeaways that she leaves me with, I can only imagine how those can develop and strengthen as she steps in to this new role,” Cathy’s co-worker, Christine Pasculado, said. “I can only imagine how it’s going to help elevate what the museum does.”
On Friday, payday for the Runnels family, Cathy might go out to eat with her husband and son at their favorite cajun restaurant. They might watch a family movie or go across town to watch the sunset at a nearby park. When the weekend ends, though, Cathy will be back at the Carver Museum, ready to keep fighting — to keep healing the part of her childhood self that never learned who she was.
“This was my dream job: to be in a place where you know this is what you wanted, and you’re there,” Cathy said. “I’m not making six figures, Lord, I don’t know if I ever will, but I’ve come to the reality that God always makes a way.”