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"View Slideshow\n\nCecil Hayes grew up with everything going for her and against her at the same time.\n\nGoing for her were family and community. When she was a child in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she says, \"you had a pocket of African Americans, a small community where everyone knew each other\u2014not like a big city; just small homes, sort of a village. There was no such thing as babysitters,\" she remembers. \"There was an older person in the neighborhood when parents were working\u2014which all of them did\u2014who looked after all the children. Everything was about the love and care of children. I could not say that for today.\"\n\nHayes was the youngest of three children in a family where words like pride, work ethic and ambition were common. \"We grew up with two parents working as domestics, but they had their mind set on the betterment of life for their children. They were determined that we would attend college without having to borrow money or for us to work. My mom, I found out later, was making $45 a week. We all finished college under their dollar and under their leadership of telling us we had to accomplish things in life.\"\n\nWhat Hayes had going against her is quickly said: \"We went to segregated high schools, segregated college, lived in segregated neighborhoods and had parents who didn't have an education. But look at where I am today! I've been able to not only withstand it but come above it.\" Coming above it, however, took spirit, courage and the ability to find a way where others might have said there was none.\n\n\"It wasn't just decorating with colors and furniture. This was truly, truly art, and I created living art for people to be in.\"\n\nHayes left home to go to Florida A M University in Tallahassee, where she studied art education. College, she recalls, \"exposed me to another lifestyle, because under my parents, you didn't have much lifestyle. They were very strict.\"\n\nGraduation presented her with very limited work possibilities in her field. So she found herself working in a federal government program in the flyspeck town of Alma in southeastern Georgia, integrating a tiny school. \"I really never wanted to teach school, even back in the '60s, but there were no other opportunities for African Americans. It was always in the back of my mind to find something else in art that I'd be suited for.\"\n\nThe designer adds, \"It was very isolating, because the white teachers and students really didn't accept me. It took them two years to get used to me. In the black area it was also an experience. They didn't see me as being one of them.\"\n\nSo it was that Cecil Hayes decided to send away for art school catalogues. \"I saw interior designing, and I kept coming back to that,\" she says.\n\nWithout a mentor, she was going to have to make it on her own. \"But,\" she points out, \"I truly believe that it was my mother and my aunt who made me understand that good taste has something to do with a wonderful lifestyle. No matter what they had, they tried to make sure that they kept it nice and made sure that it matched and it looked good.\"\n\nHayes enrolled at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. \"That's when I made my decision to change my career.\" Though she knew nothing about interior design, she took to it immediately. \"I realized it was an art form\u2014it wasn't just decorating with colors and furniture. This was truly, truly art, and I got to use it like a huge puzzle, moving pieces around and creating living art for people to be in.\"\n\nHer studies went well there, but finding a job in her profession was something else. \"I actually sent out resum\u00E9s with all these wonderful things about myself, but it was difficult because I was still down in South Florida, where I was one of the first African Americans in this field.\"\n\nNevertheless, she was offered two jobs. One paid well, a job that \"some people in my class would have just died to get.\" But, she explains, it wasn't right for a first job. \"It was very large and very compartmentalized. I saw myself getting stuck and knowing one thing but not all things.\"\n\nInstead, she took a job with a firm that operated out of \"a big open room, where you could see what everyone was doing\u2014the person selecting the colors, the secretary, the bookkeeper, the draftsman, the renderer.\" The salary was only a quarter of that offered by the first job.\n\nAfter several years the firm disbanded, and Hayes was forced to take a job as unpromising financially as it was professionally. After a year she decided that with things moving so slowly, she might as well \"do badly on my own. I said, I'll open my own company. How much worse can I do?' And that's what I did.\"\n\nFor working capital, Hayes borrowed $6,000 from the Small Business Administration. \"I called it the kiss-of-death money. It was just enough for me to fail!\"\n\nSo there she was, a young black woman in 1970s Florida who knew nobody, with her SBA grubstake, setting out to practice a profession famous for its dependence on contacts, networks, patronage and recommendations. Cecil Hayes had none of these, but she did have a stroke of genius.\n\n\"I opened up a storefront,\" she says. \"I needed to work out of a very visible place where people could walk by and see me.\"\n\nBut how did she get clients in this white, middle-class area, bereft of the billionaires who are the prop and stay of big-time interior design? Hayes recalls that she would come in to work in the window of her store at nine in the morning and not leave until 11 or 12 at night, when the movie theater in the complex let out its last patrons. \"I had renderings in the windows showing what I did, the concept and how I did it,\" she says, so that people \"would come in and ask for something specific, maybe something very simple such as reupholstering sofas and selecting the fabric. Starting off with absolutely nothing, I managed to pay the rent and pay the overhead.\"\n\nAmong the people who walked through her door were a young doctor and his wife, who were building a 4,500-square-foot home. \"They saw me, came in and believed that I was capable and thrust an entire project on me, saying, From the ground up, work with the architect and select everything from the hinges of the door on.' So I redesigned and re-spaced the plan. I had a wonderful time doing it, and the house was published in the Miami Herald, two full pages in 1976.\"\n\nIt's been upward ever since. Today, Hayes has her own line of furniture and has designed homes for Samuel L. Jackson (see Architectural Digest, April 2000) and Wesley Snipes (see Architectural Digest, April 1997). Her book, 9 Steps to Beautiful Living: Dream, Design and Decorate Your Home with Style, furthers her ongoing interest in bringing good design to middle-class homes. \"We can do so much because people are hungry to know how to make their homes gorgeous.\"\n\nAs for the future, Hayes declares, \"I only have a few more years to do it, so I'm getting really busy here!\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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