Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid

photographer’s studio in Queens. I rented the space. Then I fixed up the basement of the house my parents and I were living in, in Queens, and I became so successful that in 1950 I had to move in to Manhattan. I had my whole family working for me. My husband was doing one thing, my children were doing others. I became an adviser to industry. I had to tell them how to use blacks without offending whites. I had to create from scratch, because there was no place for me to go to find out. I created fashion shows and beauty contests for my girls, so that they could get some experience in how to handle themselves. I made them feel special. At some point, all this will become extinct. As black people integrate, they won’t want to do the special little things that they needed to do in an earlier time to get them across.”
    Miss DeVore showed us a big black book that was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings of her and of some of her famous students. Some of the photographs had captions. We saw a picture of Diahann Carroll. It had a caption that read, “At fifteen years of age, Miss Carroll came under the Influence of the Magic Touch of Miss DeVore.” We saw a picture of Miss DeVore modelling nylons. We saw a picture of Melba Tolliver modelling baby-doll pajamas. We saw a picture of LaJeune Hundley, who at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960
became the second black girl (Cecelia Cooper was the first, in 1959) to win the title of Miss Festival.
    Next, Miss DeVore took us into a classroom, where two small girls were being instructed in wardrobe planning as part of a Little Ladies course. They were learning to tell the difference between Lounge Wear, Sportswear, Dressy, Casual, and Formal. Then we sat in on a class for older girls. They were studying Good Grooming and Health, and displayed much enthusiasm. Then we sat in on Makeup III—Corrective. The women in this class were studying when to highlight and when to shadow parts of the face. The teacher, Mrs. Phyllis Branford, told them how to get “the hungry look” (“Highlight the cheekbones, shadow the jawbone”), how to slim the nose, and how to put on makeup for the stage. “Girls, remember,” she said. “Mascara is a must, must, must.”
    â€” June 6, 1977

Garland Jeffreys
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    We have just had two enjoyable encounters with Garland Jeffreys, a thirty-four-year-old New York songwriter and performer. The first was at a concert in Alice Tully Hall, at Lincoln Center. We had heard his recordings—particularly a song called “Wild in the Streets”—but had never seen him perform. He came onstage wearing black pants and a tailored gray pin-striped jacket (he removed it during the performance), a black T-shirt, and a tan Stetson hat. He danced around the stage for about five minutes before singing anything. The audience stood up and cheered him. He danced on as if unconscious of the cheers. Then he started to sing. He sang songs—all of them his own compositions—about New York, about his mother and father, about interracial love, about growing up in New York, about his own efforts to succeed as a songwriter, about teen-age rebellion, and about politics. He sang some of the songs to a rock-and-roll beat and some to a reggae beat. Whatever beat he used, he used it very
well, and we came away from the concert feeling pleased and excited.
    A few days after this, Garland Jeffreys invited us to drive out with him to Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn. He grew up there, and he wanted to show us part of his old neighborhood. He picked us up in a big black car, and he told the driver to go by the Belt Parkway. We got our first closeup look at Garland Jeffreys. He is a light-skinned black man with gray-green eyes and curly brown hair. On this occasion, he was wearing black pants, a regular black shirt, a blue plaid tie, and the same jacket and hat that he had worn onstage. He said to us, “I’m going