26hix&charming

This quarter, the magazine writing students (like moi) chose one big story to work on instead of lots of little ones like before. I completed my first draft this week, and since I'm excited about it, I'm sharing! It's premature since I haven't even gotten feedback yet (eek!) and will be doing MAJOR rewrites, but since this blog is very much about my progress and what I'm working on, I decided it's alright :)

I absolutely love this woman I wrote about... it's been fascinating and exciting to meet such admirable people. Although I spat the words out in a day, the story took weeks of reporting (and I still have some holes to fill) and it's a pretty lengthy piece, - I guess it's up to you to let me know if you wanted to keep reading and if this works as a long feature!

The sky outside was graying with the onset of twilight. Four girls waited patiently to get fitted for their dresses of satin and tulle, unfinished seams and yet-to-be-sewn-on appliqués or rhinestone straps in the small 2031 S. Indiana St. boutique. There was a chill, but they were too preoccupied with their fascination with the shop’s boudoir décor or their clickity-clack text messaging to notice. “I like your boots,” said one, Tanisha Sampson, a tiny girl who sat a few feet from the white orchid on the windowsill. She had on multicolored Nike high tops and a beige flower headband, and she talked quietly into her iPhone headset. Unlike the others who seemed to come and go alone, Sampson awaited her mother.

The boutique, Bates Designs, is also a studio. The same gathered bronze taffeta that hangs as a curtain in front of the fitting area also hangs from the ceiling to section off the tailors’ workspace. In the back is a dry-erase board that functions as a calendar. Each box held a list of names – Wednesday, May 12: Akila Marshall 3pm, Lauren Johnson 3:30pm, Tanisha Sampson 4pm, Courtney Franklin 4:30pm. Thursday had 10 names and Friday had seven. And so on.

“Every year I say I’m not doing prom!” joked Barbara Bates, laughing. She had dyed her short hair a brownish-red. The sparse salt-and-pepper fuzz that was growing in after her last round of chemotherapy was finally ready for some color. “It’s a madhouse in here. But I just try to stay calm.” She was casual about the annual springtime chaos that falls upon her because of the letters she accepts from underprivileged high school students who explain why they deserve to have her custom-design a garment for their big night – for free. This is the basis of Bates’ eponymous foundation, started in 1999, twelve years after she began this gracious endeavor. She has always had a love for clothing and creating her own designs, and she believes that fashion can help young people whose lives are defined by dire, dismal circumstances.

Sitting behind an antique-looking wooden desk in her cut velvet-cushioned chair, Bates described her path to success – the life she lives now, in which she arrives daily to her office, the South Indiana Street store, where she dreams up silhouettes for the fabrics she collects and then sketches her ideas. She recently got a lot of materials from the closing of Maria Pinto’s business, including the purple silk with a cutout floral pattern draped over a metal rack near the door. On the nearby vintage Singer sewing table, business cards sit in a wire cardholder; these new ones are pink and say, “Barbara Bates, Breast Cancer Survivor…. EARLY DETECTION – ADDRESS IT NOW SO WE CAN DRESS YOU LATER.”

While Bates was born in Chicago and raised for most of her life in Garfield Park, an area that has transformed since her upbringing there from a safe neighborhood to one that reeks of peril, her talent and self-motivation propelled her beyond her modest roots. With her mother, a stay-at-home mom, stepfather, who worked in a factory, and four siblings, Bates lived in an apartment on Jackson Boulevard and South Central Park Boulevard. “We were probably just above poverty, but we never wanted for anything,” she said. She recalls the small wonders of childhood: how her mother and aunts were some of the most beautiful women around, and how she loved Barbie dolls, but even more than that, Barbie’s clothes. This last little luxury, Bates explained, was something she had to go to friends’ houses to play with.

Though her family was not poor, Bates knew the difference at an early age between her life on Chicago’s West Side and the life she enjoyed during the few years she lived with her Aunt Ethel in Pittsburgh. Having been born with club feet, Bates needed costly medical procedures which her family could not afford; at this time, her mother’s sister offered to pay for the surgery and care for her. Aunt Ethel and her husband had just built a new house, they owned a bar called Chappy’s, and their good fortune gave Bates a chance to see past her realm.

This other place, worlds away from home, included alligator purses and high heeled shoes, and little Bates could sense that these things represented something more than money. “You see things as a child and you just know,” she said, scrunching her nose a little as she spoke. “On the one hand, I saw drug addiction and I witnessed the pain and destruction this brought upon people. But I also saw, for example, family members who owned their own business and the joy that was in their lives. I saw devastation and I saw prosperity. Later, I had to decide which road I was going to take.”

Returning to Chicago as a six-year-old, at which point Bates had already discovered her love for fashion, she experienced culture-shock. She now shared a room with her three sisters, and as she matured, she saw the streets outside evolve from a haven for children to play till dusk into an incubator for the increasingly prevalent gangs. By 1968, when Bates started ninth grade at John Marshall Metropolitan High School, the German Jews who had happily resided on the same blocks had moved away, leaving the urbanity to the growing African-American population, much of which was living in greater degrees of destitution.

None of the students who come to Barbara during prom season through the Foundation are white. Most of them are black, some are Hispanic. Their stories range from having been teen mothers or being too full-figured to find a pretty dress to having lost a parent or not having a place they call home at all. Some have been shot before and others have been abused by drug-addicted mothers or abandoned by their fathers.

For too many of these youngsters, the sheen of the jacquard sofa and the flicker from the ornately carved mirror frames inside Bates Designs are the most they have seen of any kind of beauty. They are not as lucky as Bates, who, with a congenital physical deformity and a loving family with the resources to fix it, got a glimpse of what more was possible for her. They have been wholly left out of the sphere of the good and the beautiful – professional success, financial freedom, social mobility – and taught to believe that these things are neither meant for nor are accessible to them.

“They are aware,” Bates said, “even if just through television, that there is something else out there. But they are not aware that they have the opportunity to grab a hold of it. Some know the road to get there. Most don’t.”

In 1970, Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little black girl, Pecola Breedlove, growing up in Lorain, Ohio who desperately longs for blue eyes. With the backdrop of an impoverished town in the heart of the Midwest after the Great Depression, the story painstakingly portrays Pecola’s internalization of American poverty, racism, oppression and self-image. This last element, which Morrison symbolizes with the iconic Dick and Jane Basic Readers that were an integral part of early education throughout the 20th century, perpetuates the erasure of poor minorities from the idyllic standard of Americanism.

Pecola’s dark eyes take in what she sees around her: the popularity and envy of certain peers, such as Maureen Peal, who Morrison calls a “high-yellow dream child,” the hatred and disgust exuded from lighter-skinned members of her own black community seeking to elevate themselves in a racist society, and the tenderness with which her own mother handles the preciously innocent blonde girl she cares for at her job in an upper-class white household. Pecola learns to equate her blackness with ugliness, worthlessness, and disgrace.

Morrison uses the point of aesthetics to illustrate the inexorable connection between the dominant ideology of what American childhood innocence looks like – glowing skin, golden hair, blue eyes – and the inherent flaws of our supposed national meritocracy. Our belief that, on American soil, all people can acquire wealth and happiness with a little sweat is ultimately ruinous to historically broken and subjugated communities. But, she pleads in her narrative, this fact is largely ignored.

The exclusion of children like Pecola from the bigger picture of American prosperity, opportunity, and beauty leads them to blame themselves for their degradation and keeps them anchored to their pervasive sense of hopelessness. Thus, the cycle of squalor and suffering, for many born into it, proves to be unbreakable.

“It was different because I got exposed to the good life when I was so little,” Bates said. “That always stayed in my mind: there’s another life beyond the ghetto. That’s the life I’m going to live.”

But Bates’ positivity and broad perspective did not protect her from some of the hardships associated with young life in deprived communities, such as adolescent motherhood. As a sophomore in high school who had always excelled academically and been a favorite amongst teachers, she found out she was pregnant. “I had to work up the courage to tell my mom,” she said. “She fainted. It was devastating for everyone, including myself.”

On top of the shock, shame, and fear that came with the news, Bates was faced with the decision to either drop out of school or attend an alternative school for pregnant teens. With a supportive mother who nurtured and raised Bates’ baby Eugene as if he were her son rather than her grandson, Bates was able to attend the alternative school and return to Marshall High School as a junior.

“Everyone was like, ‘she’s going to have another kid the next year and another the next year,’” Bates said. “But I refused to be a statistic. I had to prove them wrong. It was important to me to keep excelling even though I had made a mistake. My determination had to do with my upbringing – I was around people who were educated and I knew what comes from working hard and finding your passion. There was more for me.”

She graduated that June with honors, finishing high school in three years. After this, she moved out on her own, leaving Eugene with her mother, worked at Sears, then had a series of stints as a secretary at various corporations and universities, and later held a job at General Motors in Detroit. In 1981, she returned to Chicago to work at First Chicago Bank. Though her role as a secretary in the International Banking department was defined by her typing and communication skills, it was at this time that Bates’ fashion career began to blossom.

Never leaving her creativity behind, she had been sketching her own garments and finding tailors to make her designs. She had had no formal education in fashion nor could she sew, so her imagination and sense of style, which she said comes from her mother, were all she had. But her outfits turned heads in the office and women slowly starting approaching her to inquire about where she shopped. This led to Bates running a small business out of the ladies room at work, getting to know her colleagues with her tape measure and then paying tailors to construct original pieces. At the age of 30, she quit her job at First Chicago Bank.

At Bates Designs, a girl of average height and dark brown skin sat on one of the purple damask-print slipper chairs. “It’s so pretty in here,” she whispered to her friend, a skinny teenage boy in a striped cardigan sweater. Her name is Akila Marshall, and she goes to Neil F. Simeon Career Academy on Chicago’s South Side, a public school that is 98 percent black and known for its national basketball star Ben Wilson, who was shot and killed in 1984, the day before his senior starter game at Simeon.

Marshall tried on her fuchsia charmeuse strapless dress and talked to the tailor about a pleated train she wanted as he pinned and tucked the silk. Her prom was a week and half away. She had written to Bates at the encouragement of a teacher because she could not afford to buy a dress, but her letter didn’t include details about her home or personal life. “She was just like, ‘You can’t afford it? I got you.’ That was all,” Marshall said of Bates. She chose to apply for the Barbara Bates Foundation over going through The Cinderella Project, another organization that gives away donated prom dresses, because she felt special being picked to have something unique made just for her. “It’s valuable because it’s from her; I think what she does shows a lot of character,” she said.

As the cornerstone of the Foundation is education, Bates requires that the students she works with are ready to graduate from high school. Marshall plans to attend Northern Illinois University in the fall to study psychology and one day become a social worker, but the road behind her was hardly paved with the values that lead to what she has already accomplished. Her actions show a lot of character as well. Having lost her father in a car accident at the age of four, she’s been living on and off with a guardian in Evergreen Park with her two younger siblings because her mother is unable to care for her. Marshall said squarely, “My mother is not in the picture. She abuses drugs. She went away with that.”

But prom time at the boutique also means business from clients whose parents buy their dresses. “These students come from a completely different walk of life,” Bates explained. Still, these customers get deep discounts on what Bates would normally charge for the toil and craftsmanship that go into the garments.

Sampson, the girl in the candy-colored sneakers, approached the corner of the room where Bates and the tailors were taking measurements. She had one photo on her iPhone and another printed on paper to show them which elements of each design she wanted. “This is Roberto Cavalli,” Sampson said, pointing to the digital image of a voluminous white ball gown floating down a catwalk. “And this one is Rami Kashou. He’s from Project Runway,” she explained, holding up the sheet.

One of the tailors began to discuss what he thought was suitable for Sampson’s petit frame when a woman of equal stature but propped up in black patent peep-toe pumps came in. She touched Sampson’s hair with a look of disapproval, and her hand was promptly swatted away with a look of adolescent irritation and an “I know! I just came from rehearsal, that’s why I look like this!” Sampson’s mother’s arrival instigated a bout of “No, mom”s at the repeated insistence of a matching jacket or shawl, and Bates playfully threatened to throw her out of the shop.

But even minus the couture conflict, Sampson stood out from the other girls. It wasn’t merely her perfect posture or turnout from the Joffrey Ballet. She had known beauty in her life. And she knew she deserved to go after it.

Bates officially opened her studio space and boutique in 1986. She put some ads in the paper for tailors, and a friend who was also a designer took her shopping for sewing machines, equipment, and fabric and trimming supplies. “I knew nothing, I just knew I loved designing clothes, so I did what I know how to do,” she said, throwing up her silver-polished hands. “I still don’t know how I’ve come this far when so many talented individuals didn’t make it through these past two years. I know it’s a blessing.”

The next year, she got a call from someone who had seen a story in the Chicago Sun-Times that talked about a West Side girl who made clothes for Michael Jordan. Bates had, at that time, begun to take on clients like the Chicago Bulls star and others such as Oprah, Whitney Houston, and Mike Tyson. The woman on the phone believed that she and Bates had gone to high school together and was now working in alternative school. She asked Barbara to come speak to the soon-to-be teen mothers. Bates agreed. “But I had no intention of actually going,” she laughed.

She went, though, on a whim, and without a speech prepared. She had never told her story before, but when she saw the auditorium full of girls, it poured out. She saw herself in all of them. “I felt there was something I had to do for them,” Bates said. “I said, ‘This neighborhood you live in, there’s something else outside of it, and I want you guys to see it. Going back to school is the only way out. If you’re willing to help yourself, people will be willing to reach out and help you.’” That was in 1987, long before the Barbara Bates Foundation actually existed, but it was then that she started making the dresses.

Today, much of what surrounds her is in stark contrast with the penury that permeates Chicago’s depressed communities. When the harsh realities of some of these teens’ lives come into focus, the enormity of change that is necessary is overwhelming. A party dress seems like it would hardly matter.

But Bates’ vision, always inspired, always with a glint of style, showed her something different. “I had no money, so I thought, ‘What can I do in my small way?’ And it is really small,” she said. “I’m not giving them scholarship money or grants or sending them off on trips. But what I can do is take someone who thinks that beauty is just not even in their world, that their struggle is an ugly struggle, and give them a little beauty by making a dress for them that they couldn’t have afforded, and even if they could have afforded it, they wouldn’t have a clue what beauty is because they’ve never been told that they are beautiful or they’ve never been surrounded by it. They’ve been surrounded by so much hell growing up. That’s where the Foundation came from – trying to instill something positive into the lives of people who are lost or forgotten.”

The sky darkened behind the buildings across the street on South Indiana. The girls arranged times to come in for photographs for the Foundation website with Paula and Rayna, who work in the boutique. Bates scurried around in her black flats with ruffled leather on the toes, tape measure in hand, pins held between her lips. “Is this organza or netting?” she asked the tailor about a photo. As the last girl on the schedule, with a big smile on her face, stepped back behind the bronze curtain to slip off the shell of her sweetheart neckline dress, Bates yelled, “Last call for alcohol!” and chuckled.