This is not a candid photograph.

 

No one caught me in the middle of something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. No one interrupted a private moment or exposed a secret.

 

This is how I was presented to the world.

 

I am two years old, seated carefully in a photographer’s studio, dressed in an outfit my mother almost certainly chose with great care—pressed, coordinated, and, for 1961, exceptionally stylish. She had an eye for those things. Before I was born, she spent ten years as the office manager and executive secretary to the owner of the only department store in Anderson, South Carolina. He recruited her away from Ivey’s in Greenville to help him open that store from the ground up. She knew quality. She knew presentation. And she dressed me accordingly.

 

Everything about this image is intentional.

 

The posture. The lighting. The clothes.

 

And the fingernails.

 

Painted pink.

 

My aunt Hazel—my mother’s weekly beauty operator—came to our house every Tuesday night, bringing with her the rituals of transformation: shampoo and set, careful conversation, the quiet intimacy of women tending to one another. I loved being part of that world. Loved the closeness of it, the rhythm, the feeling that something important—something almost sacred—was taking place.

 

I don’t remember the exact moment my fingernails were first painted. It feels as though it was always true.

 

What I do know is this:

 

By the time this photograph was taken, no one thought it unusual enough to stop.

 

Not my aunt Hazel.

 

Not my mother.

 

And certainly not me.

 

I am sitting there, looking directly at the camera—calm, at ease, entirely unselfconscious.

 

As if nothing is amiss.

 

Yes, it’s pink.