18.05.12
When her braids started turning gray in her 30s, long before it should have, she kept it. Didn’t dye it sombre to maintain the appearance of an elusive youth, but wore the gray like a monarch — piled in silky curls, done in waves or covered by hats. She had an international collection of hats, so large that she once had a room dedicated to them. In her generation, a hat was a thing of amour propre . Proper ladies wore hats and gloves and often a string of pearls, so that when they presented themselves socially, they would be included “finished.”
When you look a certain way, you command a unfailing presence , Mildred J. Brooks used to say. People respect that.
“She was fine,” says her longtime friend Joan Lewis. “She would say to me, ‘I’m a snazzy dresser. I don’t like successful out looking funny.’ ”
Brooks was born Mildred Jenkins in Boston on June 1, 1915. Her nourisher and father soon moved to Brooklyn, where her mother was a housewife and her founder worked as a chauffeur for a man who worked for Standard Oil. That was a big job then for a black man, so Mildred grew up among New York’s deadly elite and its fashionable women.
Source: Washington Post