Bonnie Taylor-Williams’ book details grandmother’s life, successful hair salon chain

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-with-these-hands-bonnie-taylor-williams-20150723-story.html

When Bonnie Taylor-Williams was a child, she sat in the orange-and-cream leather barber chairs of Selena’s House of Beauty on the South Side and listened, absorbing, like a sponge takes in water, her grandmother’s beauty salon.

Call it osmosis — or simply just a good memory — but keeping her ears open paid off for Taylor-Williams. She recently self-published “With These Hands: A Country Girl Came to Town,” a biography of hair stylist Selena Williams, born Selena Green, who rose from being a teenage mother living in the Robert Brooks housing projects to owning and operating a chain of beauty salons with locations on the South Side, the Loop and Detroit.

“To be a woman and go through what she did, and to become a success, is phenomenal,” Taylor-Williams said. “Selena always persevered. She followed her dream to own a beauty shop and ‘married her business,’ as she likes to say. She soared; she never let things stop or stifle her. I’ve always admired her tenacity.”

“With These Hands,” available on Amazon.com, takes readers to Williams’ childhood in Clarksdale, Miss., where she dropped out of school after becoming pregnant at 14. She and her then-husband moved to Chicago in 1941 during the Great Migration, carrying just her daughter and a suitcase, and eventually settled in the Robert Brooks Homes, where she completed her GED before attending Madame C.J. Walker’s beauty school.

In “With These Hands,” Taylor-Williams writes of her grandmother’s “inner gift” as a beautician: “She knows how to make a monster feel pretty and she can sprinkle enough confidence on the spirit of any bowed-down head that she has ever come in contact with in her line of business.”

Starting off as a “kitchen beautician” charging 15 cents a head, Williams would open her own shop in 1956 in the Mansfield Hotel on 64th and Cottage Grove. Along the way, she developed and trademarked Hair Weev, a method of weaving one’s natural hair with commercial hair extensions. Her business booming, Williams opened a second salon within a block on 63rd Street.

“It was historic for a woman, especially a black woman in that era, to own two businesses in the same block,” said Taylor-Williams, a third-generation Hair Weev technician whose Beautee Inc. bus service serves as a subcontractor for Dunbar Transportation.

Williams’ clientele included everyone from working-class folks to African-American celebrities and beyond, including a young Carol Moseley Braun, who contributed a blurb for the book and frequented the Chatham location on 83rd Street.

“My grandmother was attractive, had great style and sense of dress. Her whole persona” contributed to her popularity, Taylor-Williams said. “If they couldn’t be her, they settled to be with her. People would come just to hear her advice and opinion.”

And yet, the story may not have even seen the page: Taylor-Williams initially began writing a book about her great-grandmother, a cotton picker in Clarksdale who turned her home into a roadhouse on weekends before eventually joining Williams in Chicago in the 1940s. Her death before Taylor-Williams could finish shifted the story to Williams, a writing process that was “20 years in the making” and coincided with a cancer diagnosis for Taylor-Williams.

“I kept stopping. I would write a little bit and then I wouldn’t look at it again for the rest of the year,” said Taylor-Williams, who cites Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as her inspiration for becoming a writer. “It’s hard when you’re working around the clock, but like my mother tells me, don’t lie to yourself and don’t fool yourself by telling people you’re writing a book, so I said ‘I gotta finish it.'”

Taylor-Williams finished the book in 2013 and began shopping for editors. In October of that year, she came across Dr. Maxine Thompson of Black Butterfly Press, who said she immediately saw the book’s potential.

“Bonnie is a great storyteller,” Thompson said. “I fell in love with Bonnie’s grandmother, her strength and her wit, and felt like I was right in the middle of the family.”

The story’s relatability also struck a chord with Thompson, who edited copy and helped Taylor-Williams reorganize portions of the book.

“It’s a period piece that made me think of where I’m from and life growing up in the ’50s,” she said. “Other than the church, the beauty shop was the big gathering place for African-Americans, a place where they could socialize and be there for each other.”

Williams, who celebrated her 90th birthday July 5 and was unavailable to comment at the time of writing, had clients up until about three years ago, Taylor-Williams said. Upon showing her grandmother the book, Taylor-Williams said she was showered with hugs and kisses from her grandmother and family.
“Everyone was shocked I remembered a lot of this from childhood,” Taylor-Williams said, laughing. “I helped bring back a lot of these stories to her mind. Even the cover — my favorite picture of Selena — she had forgotten about it.”

“With These Hands” completed — and leaving readers with a cliffhanger involving an obsessive church parishioner — Taylor-Williams is hoping to write two more books to make it a series.

“I want people to see her at (beauty) conventions and how her grandkids started working in her salons,” she said.

In the meantime, Taylor-Williams wouldn’t be opposed to her grandmother’s life story becoming a movie, saying with a laugh, “Oh, I’ve already got actors picked out.”