[3] She escaped from Haiti following the murder of her husband by the Tonton Macoute in 1963, and returned to the United States.

[7] In the early 1940s, Mason taught youth metalworking skills at Junior Achievement, where she met Art Smith.

Mason received a grant from the Rosenwald Fund to "gather folk material and basic art patterns used by the West Indian Negro and to express these feelings in jewelry.

After working on jewelry at home, Mason opened and maintained a studio in Greenwich Village in the early 1940s.

[13] By the late 1940s, there had been ten exhibitions of her jewelry including one-woman shows in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

[2] Among her employees was Art Smith, who went on to found his own studio and become one of the first significant African-American jewelers.