Always Wear Joy

Chapter One

Here's Josephine

"Breathe in!" my mother commanded in her low, smokier-than-Bacall timbre, as she took a puff on her cigarette and cinched my lean, as yet unblooming fourteen-year-old physique into the pearl-gray peau de soie ball gown. "I bought this dress years ago, in Paris, from my friend Jacques Fath, one of the great designers." Each of my mother's gowns told a story of her life, her performances, and her travels. As she drew the zipper up, the dress's whalebones rose and folded over my pitifully underdeveloped bust, encasing me in femininity. Though just a few years earlier, white women had declared their emancipation in a bonfire of brassieres, in our home such garments represented neither bondage nor second-class citizenship, but rather glamour and its almost infinite transformative power. To my mother and her bevy of beautiful black diva friends and fellow performers Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, Carmen De Lavallade, and Cicely Tyson, women who had survived segregation, the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, and many a bad romance, it was creativity, illusion, and high style, not gunnysacks, earth shoes, and the dreary truth, that set you free.

"Your waist was tiny!" I exclaimed in ... read full excerpt from Always Wear Joy ebook