Miss Queen Elizabeth sits in the soft pink revolving chair and waits.
It’s her biweekly visit, so she knows what to expect, but that doesn’t numb the stinging sensation.
“Hurry up, honey, that’s burning. That’s burning!” the 83-year-old squeals. “Oooh. Oooh. Get the hair blower or something.”
Her beautician, Gwen Walker, calmly pulls out the blow-dryer.
“Let me cool you down, cool down,” Walker says in her Caribbean accent.
The blow-dryer cools off Miss Queen Elizabeth Powell’s scalp and the two can continue reminiscing about Powell’s first birthday party.
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ADDITIONAL CONTENT |
Click here to see photographs from Gwen Walker's salon.
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During one of her routine visits to Blessings Beauty Salon in St. Petersburg, Fla., Walker, along with the help of a few others, planned Powell’s first birthday party two years ago.
This is only one act of Walker’s kindness to her clients. For 20 years, she has tended her customers’ hair as well as their hearts and souls. She’s known to give her customers rides, to buy them tickets to a show and to give them advice.
As a result, her tiny shop on 34th Street South is an oasis where women feel free to cast down their burdens, drink from its cool refreshing waters and gain strength.
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Walker, 49, a native of Trinidad, moved to St. Petersburg 20 years ago with her family. Shortly after she arrived, she began training to become a beautician. Walker says she has always liked doing hair and sees her profession as a form of ministry.
“It’s the one place people talk to you about their family” and other personal matters, Walker says. “You become quite close to your customers.”
The pink plastic chair is one of the first things they see when they walk into her salon, an indicator of how long they have to wait until Walker styles their hair. Here, they share details of the various facets of their lives. Walker offers advice or kind words.
Eight years ago, she became a business owner and purchased the salon. She found the pink chair in a Tampa warehouse, or at least, she thinks so. But where it came from is not all that important, it’s what the women share while sitting in it.
She wanted to incorporate her Christian faith into the salon’s atmosphere and even its name, Blessings Beauty Salon. Walker wanted her clients to feel blessed when they entered her salon and that they were “going to get special care and service.”
Walker has had the opportunity to care and serve most of her customers for the 20 years she has been in business. She has about 50 regular customers.
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A gold-colored octagon-shaped clock says 10 minutes to 11. On the shop wall hangs a picture of a contemporary beauty salon bustling with women combing, curling and talking unlike Walker’s shop, which only has two customers on this Friday morning.
But, her customers like it that way.
While Walker rolls Ann Franklin’s hair, they talk about Walker’s flight back from a recent cruise. “Anytime you get on a plane, you better be praying,” she says.
They talk about unsafe pilots and people afraid to fly, but Walker had no fear.
“The same God on the ground is the same God up there,” she says. “Whether we are in the ground or in the air, we’re in his hands.”
The clients nod their heads in agreement. They too are Christians.
Franklin, 57, said their conversations aren’t just “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
They talk about life and how things should be, and it’s during these conversations that their faith occasionally comes up. Walker became Franklin’s beautician in 2004 when she moved to St. Petersburg from Detroit.
“This heat was tearing my hair up,” she says. “I had a press and curl then.”
Franklin’s hair didn’t stay manageable in the Florida heat and humidity so Walker gave her curl, which remedied Franklin’s hair woes.
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The clock reads 11 o’clock and a yellow magnet below lists the warning signs of a stroke. Walker’s father had a stroke a decade before he died of natural causes. His death prompted her to think about her own morality and she became a Christian. She was 30.
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It’s midafternoon when Lenora Morris, a certified nursing assistant, enters the salon after a long, hard day at work. She playfully jumps on Walker, who is resting momentarily in the pink plastic cornerstone of the small salon.
Morris, 45, says God brought her and Walker together. She first met Walker when she was working in a beauty salon on First Avenue.
“When we met, I knew it was going to work,” Morris says. “We were going to be together like peanut butter and jelly, cookies and cream and the middle of the Oreo cookie.”
Morris, who has been Walker’s client for a decade, looks forward to her Friday visits to Blessings Beauty Salon. “I have so much fun when I come in here,” she says.
Walker has become more than a beautician to Morris. She is a close friend. Morris, too, has been a recipient of Walker’s kindness. She was surprised when Walker bought her a ticket to see an outdoor play.
“She wasn’t expecting anything in return,” Morris says. “She just really appreciated me as a friend.”
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It’s almost 5 p.m. Walker rests in the pink chair for a few minutes before her next customer arrives. It’s been a long day, and her body is tired.
She has shampooed the hair of seven women, given one a body wave and another a hair color, and from the pink chair retouched Miss Queen’s relaxer.
She’s brightened the spirits of one client undergoing a bad day, she’s weighed in as clients discussed who should host the “Price is Right” after Bob Barker retires and she’s assured Miss Queen she would have a ride home.
She pauses to reflect on what her life would say if it could speak for her.
“I hope my life would say that I value people more than things and gave of myself to others,” she says. “Making a job is more than making a living, it’s being able to exemplify a life of Christ.”
