The "Hat Ladies" of New Pilgrim Baptist Church

These women are paired together in portraits that honor their importance as cultural leaders and celebrate their desire to praise the Lord each Sunday, crowned with stunning headresses of fur, felt, or straw, which are adorned with feathers, artificial flowers, or clusters of sparkling sequins and rhinestones.

THE SENIOR SISTERS of Birmingham, Alabama's New Pilgrim Baptist Church, located in the African-American community of Ensley, are called "the hat sisters or ladies" in deference to their stunning crowns of fur, felt, and straw. These special creations are customarily adorned with festoons of feathers, cascades of artificial flowers, or bold assemblies of sequins and rhinestones. The regal headdresses attest to the churchgoers' desire to glorify their heavenly Savior each Sunday by outfitting themselves in the most splendid possible raiment.

Although their numbers account for only about five percent of New Pilgrim's entire congregation of 1,300 members, the hat ladies--a self-selected group whose bid to membership is ratified by their decision to wear sumptuous headgear--are conspicuously present each Sunday. One member of this informal club, in particular, Mrs. Pleasant, is gently ribbed by her peers for being "Missy 11:30" because she provides a distinct focal point to this special assembly's requisite pageantry by making a dramatic entrance a full half-hour after service has begun.

Now the oldest generation of a rapidly disappearing matriarchal culture, the hat ladies of New Pilgrim are particularly noteworthy representatives of a nationwide African-American phenomenon. The ones seen in Julie Moos' photographs mostly are retired service industry workers who have been employed as nurses, domestics, and sales clerks in stores appealing mainly to black customers. Fiercely proud, many of them have earned the long-term respect of their fellow parishioners for decades of good deeds that include supporting the church, looking after the sick, and raising money for college scholarships.

Some of them participated in the passage of meaningful Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s by helping to initiate a decade earlier the registration of black voters. At the height of the movement, they were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and thus intimately involved in many events crucial to its success.

The senior sisters' hats are showy and intentionally expensive. Often they are priced at several hundred dollars apiece. They might be seen as their generation's equivalent to the current New York City penchant for shoes, particularly designs by Prada and Manolo Blahnik that are equally expensive and that have similarly inspired collections numbering from dozens to even hundreds of examples. Designed primarily for an African-American clientele, the churchgoers' hats, can be found in a number of Birmingham stores: the specialty shop culled "Fifth Avenue Hats" is a favorite place, and Cotton's Department Store in Ensley is another. From time to time, Cotton's will feature trunk showings by such popular New York designers as George Zamau'l, who sells hats for $200 and up, wholesale. It is a common practice for the senior sisters to place expensive items on layaway for months, even years, and pay for them in installments.

Not content with a special hat for each season, many church ladies have succumbed over the years to the temptation of collecting great numbers of these creations so that their Sundays become fashion opportunities for modeling new designs, and bringing special reserved treasures out of storage. One of the hat ladies, Mrs. Carr, who sold hats for Cotton's, has assembled a collection of over 300 such items that she lovingly and meticulously curates, storing them carefully in their original boxes that adorn shelf after shelf in her home. These collections often represent a lifetime of collecting.

Choosing a creation to wear on a particular Sunday is a serious and concerted undertaking for Mrs. Carr and other members of her group. It involves taking into consideration the total outfit, the season, the known hats of other senior sisters, as well as the dresser's own spiritual mood. Dressing for church is not only an occasion, it is a theatrical event and a moment of grace in which the very real issues of old age, diminishing resources, and concerns about family members briefly are put aside. Mrs. Bryant has described in poignant detail the tremendous boost she receives each week when she dresses for church. Suffering from a number of health problems, she often wonders if she will be able to participate in services. Yet, once she decides on a hat, coordinates it with a compatible outfit, and makes herself up, she begins to feel well enough to complete her ensemble by slipping on three-inch heels!

Although Moos knew neither of these elaborate proscriptions and prescriptions nor the highly elaborate rituals of the hat ladies, she definitely was intrigued when Elias Hendricks--a member of New Pilgrim and a recently elected Birmingham city councilman--invited her to photograph the senior sisters. She remembers that he wanted her to make a historical record of them, something that could be shown at the Smithsonian Institution.

After accepting Hendricks' offer to introduce her to this congregation where the proposal to photograph the elderly women immediately was endorsed with enthusiasm, Moos faced the important decision of when to initiate the project. Although she was urged by parishioners to focus on either the Christmas or Easter season when special regalia would be worn, she thought that less thematic attire would be more characteristic of the hat-lady phenomenon and provide a more convincing image of it. For this reason, she decided to work during the months of October and November and to set up an impromptu studio in the hallway outside the sanctuary. She depended on Mrs. Bryant and the serendipity of whoever would show up, thus leaving open to chance and to the senior sisters themselves which individuals would become pairs.

Throughout this eight-week period, Moos took photographs before and after the services, which are scheduled between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. During services, she sat with the congregation. Thirty-one hat ladies agreed to be photographed in pairs with the exception of Mrs. Bonner, who wanted to be presented alone, and Mrs. Lewis, who was worried about getting a ride home and could not wait for a partner. Mrs. McKinstry, Mrs. Dudley, and Mrs. Taylor--whose hats and outfits make them appear to be completely different people--each were photographed on two different Sundays.

After studying the 18 images making up Moos' series, one might ask why the senior sisters' styles seem so eloquently "period." Do the styles of the hat ladies refer back to the youth of their owners? Do they reflect an era of unassailable glamour when hats were still considered de rigueur by broad sectors of the population? Is glamour itself now a mid-20th-century phenomenon that can be conjured up only through knowing references to the past? What exactly is the relationship between this finery and the Civil Rights era? Are the senior sisters claiming a grandeur that was denied to them in the past?

In these photographs, Moos enters into an elaborate and subtle game of self-deception and revelation, a polite conspiracy between photographer and subject in which she reveals their masks as masks, and they in turn revel in them. What is presented in these images is a screen--the grand opera of the southern Baptist African-American faith that is both sacred and secular. Moos supports and undermines the stage on which these mostly retired blue- and pink-collar workers act out imposing and benign scenarios. Instead of looking behind masks for an underlying reality, Moos conveys the cogency and effectiveness of personae that reveal the aspirations and needs of an upwardly mobile and totally worthy constituency.

The majesty of each figure is challenged by the adjacency of its peer since the partner's appearance reveals the elaborate masquerade that the two are indeed constructing. One hat lady connotes individuality; two imply collaboration; and a series of pairs indicates an ongoing practice that superintends all its adherents, making them subscribers to a specific cultural norm, a set of known rituals.

In these photographs, there is a poetic rhyming with the genre of passport photography that Moos' one-time hero, German photographer Thomas Ruff, initiated. References to passport photography imply that the sitter has been granted full rights to the great American dream. This includes an attendant license to participate fully in the unbridled consumerism for which this country has become renowned and the hat ladies now are becoming known.

Yet, if Moos' portraits take their cue from the frontality and apparent neutrality of the passport image, her work undermines that authority through the assertion of pairing. For Moos, individuality only is obtained through interaction. In the case of these images, it is twofold, since there is an implicit connection between the two sisters as well as with Moos herself.

An important subtext is the pan-African invocation of crowns suggested by their hats. Although none of the examples in Moos' series conjures up images of turban and head wraps, such inspirations do appear at New Pilgrim during Black History Month when church members celebrate their roots through dressing in dashikis and head wraps that bespeak a symbolic homecoming. Their ongoing celebration of an elaborate and even wonderfully excessive array of designs no doubt has been justified in terms of its ability to connect present-day wearers with imagined prototypes.

It is a dream that designers, manufacturers, and retailers have capitalized upon. Although none of New Pilgrim's senior sisters in Moos' photographs is wearing a dashiki or felt chapeau that directly copies regal tribal crowns, there are a number of imaginative hybrids that indirectly allude to an imposing African lineage, such as Mrs. McKinstry's dark headdress with ostrich feathers as well as her white one with flowers; Mrs. Merritt's flanged turban with a bronze bow; Mrs. Rose's tilted crown; Mrs. Taylor's crenelated structure reminiscent of Dogon architecture; and Mrs. Arnold's comely turban. In addition, the leopard patterns found in Mrs. Lowe's and Mrs. Brown's hats, scarf, and collar as well as the zebra prints in Mrs. Carr's suit and Mrs. Dudley's hat are telling signs of their family's atavistic place of origin.

Moos has entered into a full collaboration with the hat ladies. She has created straightforward and unblinking views of an upwardly mobile African-American middle class indulging itself in the obvious material benefits of the American dream, while finding ways to symbolize through dress their African roots and aspirations for a more fully integrated world through their hats. Although the photographs undoubtedly are Moos' creations, the hat ladies self-presentation through their dress constitutes their own estimable aesthetic contribution to these works. The two have come together to create a remarkable series of collaborative pieces that reaffirm life as a creative and highly meaningful theatrical performance that we all tacitly agree to orchestrate and then ratify as reality.

The exhibition "Julie Moos: Hat Ladies" is on view at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla., through July 25.

Robert Hobbs is Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. This article was excerpted from the essay, "'I Got Freedom Over My Head': Julie Moos' Hat Ladies of New Pilgrim Baptist Church," part of the Hat Ladies catalogue published by the Birmingham (Ala.) Museum of Art.

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