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East Flatbush Journal; With Easter a Week Away, Bonnets Come Alive at Mildred's Hat Shop

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By ANDY NEWMAN APRIL 13, 2003

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Marjorie Pettiford was looking for one that would make her feel springish but proper. ''We shop how we feel about loving the Lord,'' she said.

Agnes Alleyne wanted something a little more flamboyant even though it was for Palm Sunday --

 

''You don't have to be all doomy because Christ died.'' Daphne Campbell just needed to set off a new ivory-and-green dress.

 

Out of a blank canvas of mesh and straw, Iolyn Green had spun the perfect hat for each of them.

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If a black church toward the end of Lent is one great pageant, a place like Mildred's hat shop on Utica Avenue is the dressing room.  Not that there are too many places like Mildred's. There is another fine hat shop just a few doors down, Politte's Customized Millinery Plus.

 

But otherwise, there are precious few spots in the city, where a church lady can walk in, pick out a shape and her choice of decorations and walk out a few hours or a day later with a hand-blocked Easter hat as delicate as a meringue or as bold as a Cadillac.

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And so yesterday, as the sudden arrival of spring drew crowds onto the sidewalks of East Flatbush, Ms. Green, a graceful catlike woman with kinky hair, was buzzing them in, one after another after another.

 

A church from Georgia was on the phone. ''How many hats do you want?'' Ms. Green asked. ''Sixteen?''

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In the back rooms, amid the clutter of hat-forms and fabric and scissors and ancient wooden hat blocks -- low wide ones for the brims, head-shaped ones for the crowns -- the fingers of Ms. Green and two assistants were flying, tying bows, gathering pleats, cutting petals and giving the glue gun a vigorous workout.

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In the cramped showroom out front, Ms. Pettiford, a woman ''past 40'' with a bearing befitting her job as an eighth-grade teacher, was trying to toe the line between festivity and excess. She had come to pick up a simple lilac hat to match her new jacket, a shimmering creation starring interlocking squares in three shades of light purple, and while the hat looked right, she wanted something more.

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''I think I'm going to ask her to put some rhinestones right back here,'' she said, fingering the hatband. ''That wouldn't look tacky, would it?''

 

The situation called for gentle guidance. Ms. Green's 18-year-old niece and seasonal cashier, Nancy Blake, relayed the boss's recommendation. ''She said it would be fine just like this, not to put rhinestones all the way round,'' she said. ''Not all the way round,'' Ms. Pettiford said, afraid she had been misread. ''Just in the back. Like one here.''

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Ms. Green looked skeptical but smiled as she took the hat back for its final alteration.

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From the outside, Mildred's -- squeezed between a driving school and a braiding salon -- isn't much to look at. The yellow ceramic tiles that haven't fallen off since the store opened in 1936 are badly faded, and the ''R'' has fallen out of the sign. Mildred herself -- Mildred Goldstein, that is, the wife of Herbert Goldstein, a voluble man known as the Mad Hatter of Utica Avenue -- died several years ago.

 

But Ms. Green, who has been making hats since she was a 14-year-old girl in Jamaica an undisclosed number of years ago and was hired by Mr. Goldstein in 1989, has kept up business and then some since he turned the store over to her in 1994. The secret, she said, is endless novelty.

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''People don't like to see themselves going and coming.'' she said. ''Some people will go to church and if they see someone else in the same hat, they'll go home and change. So they like buying here because they know we don't make a lot of one kind of hat.''

 

Custom couture has its risks. Yesterday, while a woman was waiting for a final adjustment, her hat was left on the heated hat-stretcher too long and the material -- an off-white synthetic mesh called horsehair -- melted clean through. A $55 hat had to be scrapped.

 

But the customer satisfaction is worth it. When Pauline Yorke, 62, a telephone operator, tried on a silver crown of hundreds of leaf-shaped petals, she could practically hear the oohs and ahhs at Friendship Baptist Church. Ms. Campbell's crenelated, celadon-green creation was as diaphanous as a spring bug's wing.

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Ms. Alleyne, a 49-year-old home attendant from St. Albans, Queens, came to pick up two hats -- a floppy, beige broad-brimmed number with two rolled roses for Palm Sunday, which is today, and a tall pink strutty one with a horsehair top with a kettle-edge brim for Easter. ''Remember we do death and resurrection,'' she said.

 

Ms. Alleyne pulled the pink one on and tilted her head appraisingly in the mirror. The hat came alive. ''It's talking, it's talking!'' She clapped her hands. ''Calling my name.'' Ms. Alleyne did a little turn. ''Work it, baby,'' she said. ''Mmm mmm mmm. Here I come.''  

 

With a little creativity, even mistakes can turn into miracles. During a lull, Ms. Green sat down with the hat that had partly melted and cut it in two. She squinted at the pieces for a moment, then took the bottom half and folded its walls down onto themselves to make an open-crowned summerweight hat.  The top half looked like a sort of large skullcap with a petal-leaf pattern dangling from it. Ms. Green started to pull the petals off but then stopped. ''You know what?'' she said. ''If you ask me . . .

 

'' She bounded across the room and practically squashed it onto the head of another assistant, Valerie Graham.

''Valerie,'' she cried. ''Look at that. That's a hat! I'll sell it just like that.''

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