I cannot recall my grandmother ever going to church with a bare head. She always wore a nice simple hat. I can still see her getting ready for Sunday services at our family church and topping off her plain but neat cotton dresses with a hat – nothing especially fancy.
I didn’t remember any stories about my grandmother’s hats or where she bought them or how many she had, so I pulled out my old photo albums to see her wearing them. I came across one photo of her sitting in my uncle’s car after church wearing a white hat, and in the background was one of my aunts in a bigger white hat with a bow in back. I also found two photos of my mother headed to church in hats, one a burgundy chapeau that matched her outfit.
The best photo I found was a 1969 black-and-white Kodak snapshot of my grandmother and another aunt headed out to church, my grandmother’s hat sitting lightly on her head, my aunt’s hat festooned with flowers like a crown. My grandmother also had her white gloves in her hands and her pocketbook on her arm.
The thought of my grandmother and her hats evolved from a trip to one of my favorite auction houses this week. I kept bumping into all manner of hats. Inside the auction house. Outside the auction house. Some still in their fancy department store boxes. Others lying atop each other on tables. A fur hat in a box with a mink (or faux) collar (3 pelts with head, paws and feet). A bejeweled one with white pearls on a stand.
The hats on the auction tables were not my grandmother’s hats, or likely any black woman’s hats. These were too small, too insignificant. They didn’t make much of a statement. These were white women’s hats.
Black women wear their hats big. And elaborate. My grandmother never went over the top with hers, but she would never wear a little number that you could barely see. What would be the point? Dorothy Height, the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women who died a week ago, understood that. Her hats were her trademark and she wore them everywhere.
That was the custom for women of that generation (my grandmother was born around the turn of the 20th century). Today, many of these ladies still do, and a couple years ago, a book called “Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats” celebrated their hat culture. Now, comedian and actor Damon Wayans has written a novel about a woman who joins the Red Hats, similar to a national social group of women over the age of 50 called the Red Hat Society.
As we celebrate Mother’s Day this week, we bloggers at weareblackwomen.com are sharing some aspect of the “mothers” in our lives. They may not be our birth mothers but are women who are just as special.
For me, it was Big Mama and her hats. I called my mother to rattle her brain about those hats. She didn’t remember much, so she called two of her sisters who didn’t remember any specifics about the hats but knew their mother wore them religiously to church. One mentioned that she may have bought them from a department store called Dannenberg in Macon, GA.
As for me, I’ve never been much of a hat person, except for baseball caps or straw hats, the ones with wide brims to keep the sun out of my eyes. I picked up a couple of straw hats at auction a year ago and just love them. This light-colored straw on the left is my favorites.
Here are photos of some of the other hats at auction. To get the best view, click on individual photos rather than viewing them through PicLens.
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