by Mariam I. Williams

The day she converted me from fat seven-year-old with an overbite and gapped front teeth into the model I wanted to be, Faith wore a hot, peppery orange lipstick. On Faith’s skin— Fashion Fair’s Ebony Brown, a “chocolate brown with red undertones,” per the company—that color was bold, even for the 80s. It could arrest passersby, command their respect, banish old adages about black women, monkeys, and red lipsticks into forgetfulness.

Before she walked in with hair so long and full of body I imagined the relaxer ads in Ebony had cut themselves out and puffed themselves up with helium, I don’t think Faith had ever entered our little church “way out” by unused farmland that would sprout into suburbs by the time I reached adulthood. But the congregation was proud of her, even if we could claim her only by proxy. Her father remarried and began attending church with his new wife when Faith was already grown, living in New York as a professional model. But the church ladies nodded, applauded, said, “Amen,” when it was announced Faith would lead the style show. She was ours.

When Faith arrived, she lived up to how we had imagined a Black Kentucky girl who had made it in the big city would be: elegant, precise, demanding, and humble. She showed us how to walk the runway, how to stop at each end of the capital T that made up the center aisle and space before the altar, then turn, and pose. She helped us write descriptions of the clothes we would model so the announcer could add sizzle to the show.

My final piece was a winter coat in fuchsia and a wool scarf and gloves set in teal. The scarf ended with a heavy knotted ball and strings of fringe. The coat was average, 1987 puffy, its lining pillowy, its hood unadorned. But that color made it stylish.

Between sets, the women and girls walking in the show—models, Faith called us— changed in a room in the church’s basement. As I removed my coat it from its hanger, one of the grown models said, “What a lovely coat!”

“I know!” I purred, extending “know” too long as I smiled and caressed the coat’s lapel.

A nanosecond of silence. I blinked, shook my home training back into myself, corrected too late, “I mean, thank you.”

My mother, in the room to help me change, covered her face as howls and echoes of, “I know,” filled the room.

I had spoken as if possessed by Sandra Clark, and up the stairs she fled from me, cast out by the me who knew no other girls who shopped in the Pretty Plus section, the girl unsure she matched a coat so lovely, uncertain her turns could adequately express its glamor. Photos show that girl walking with shoulders closer to her ears than the coat’s puffiness can account for.

Faith was unswayed. She wanted me to lead the closing of the show, when all the models walk the runway single file in the last item they wore, circle back, and either line up single file or form two lines and part for the designer. In lieu of a designer, our show would make room for Faith.

This was unrehearsed, a change from the original plan. Something I was unprepared for and the responsibility of which—leading my teenage cousins and grown women in the right direction, while not falling—overwhelmed seven-year-old me. Downstairs in the dressing room, gasping for breath and near tears I told Faith, “I can’t do it.”

Faith grasped my shoulders then turned my chin up to face hers. “Mariam, yes you can. I wouldn’t have asked you to if I didn’t think you could do it.” Anger, exasperation, and disappointment absent from her kind eyes. Words firm and indisputable out of those fiery lips.

“She knew,” my forties tell me, that I had misheard the women downstairs, misread my mother’s palm, mistaken encouragement of audacity, delight in innocence as chastisement. For what is more entertaining than a Black girl so confident, so under-exposed to the world, she knows no better than to be authentically herself? Faith saw a Black girl who needed a model to affirm what she dreamed for herself, to edify the beauty and boldness even a grown Black fashion model knew would be constantly attacked.

I believed Faith. I walked that closing in my fuchsia coat and with my shoulders back.

Mariam I. Williams writes to find answer and dances to find joy. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Camden and is seeking representation for her memoir. Mariam’s work has been published in Apiary, Longreads, The Common, and Salon, and can also be found in the anthologies, Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (White Cloud Press 2015); Nothing to Lose but Our Chains: Black Voices on Activism, Resistance, and Love (Justice Matters Press, 2018); and Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019). As she pursues her longterm project of amplifying Black women’s stories to inspire Black communities towards healing and collective liberation, she works full-time in public history.