“Hats were a way for these queens to be SEEN, shining a light on the dignity they always had.” There’s a special shout-out to the church ladies who kept Reeves’s business going long after fashion moved on. Along with telling her story, “Mae Makes a Way” is also a pointed lesson about the limits of integration in cities where “Black women were often treated as though they were invisible,” as Rhuday-Perkovich writes at her best. Published to accompany a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this is a biography of Mae Reeves, a renowned Philadelphia milliner who died at 104 in 2016 and received distressingly scant obituary coverage. With contrails of “The Little Prince” and magic-carpet colors, even adults will be transported.Īnother Mae, a character from real life, stars in “Mae Makes a Way,” by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, with illustrations by Andrea Pippins. When he wakes up, he’ll have new reason for optimism. After a long day of resourcefully facing his reduced circumstances, the boy goes to the top of a mountain, sleeps and dreams, falling into a kind of valley of the shadow where his lost things are restored to him, and yet are no longer what is really needed. But in an instant it flips, like the famous optical illusion that shows a young or old woman depending on your perspective, and becomes a container: for drinking water, for cherries, for begged coins. What is a hat’s essential purpose? To protect the head, which this one does: from the sun beating down, and the rain. Waking up one morning, he discovers all his possessions, including bright orange stilts, are gone, except for this one crucial accessory. He is anonymous, though the names of his suddenly absent two best friends, Henry and Priscilla, and surroundings of palm trees and pillars suggest he once occupied a world of lush privilege. In “The Upside Down Hat,” a lullingly spare story by Stephen Barr with exquisite, Bemelmans-like illustrations by Gracey Zhang, a hat becomes a little boy’s entire support system.