I can still see her very clearly.  She is perched on a chair in a beautiful dress.  I see dark shoulder-length hair, a wide smile, an open face with large expressive eyes that seemed to follow my movements approvingly whenever I entered the room.  She is more than just pretty.  Not even the yellowing black and white photo that held her captive for that instant somewhere in the 1950's could deny the rich brownness of her skin.  It oozed that supple gleam of youth and elan that seems to emanate exclusively from people of color in the prime of their lives.

     "What a pretty black girl," I heard myself say when I entered the den for the first time.  I put my luggage down and approached the lady in the frame, half-heartedly expecting an introduction.
     "That's my mom," Dawn murmured.

     We stood there for a moment, the three of us, and looked at each other with the kind of expectant longing that only dreaming can bring.  We knew that we were on the verge of our very lives, and although The Lady in the Frame had already lived hers, I could feel the warmth of her boundless energy touch me like a fervent prayer.

     We three were residing in a series of bungalows near The Miracle Mile built by movie studios in the 20's to  house directors, stagehands, starlets and other industry folk.  The gay couple who managed the unit turned the courtyard area into a lush tropical paradise filled with palmettos, banana trees and ever-blooming scented flowers. When I awoke each morning to see the world, each window revealed so much greenery and sunlight that after a few days, it was impossible to believe that we were anywhere near the LA that Dawn knew or that I imagined.

     In time, The Lady in the Frame was revealed.

     Who knows when she began to truly hate herself.   It's so easy to mangle your insides when you want to belong. They bounce back with enough resiliency to retain a newlike fervor on the upswing, though, like kudzu that grows stronger when you try to uproot it, refusing to die and angry with you, in a strange way, for assuming that it would.  I suppose that's what makes it so impossible to dismantle who you are to accommodate someone else's idea of what you're
supposed to be.  You simply can't stop being you.  I yam's what I yam, said Popeye, and that's all's that I yam.  How true.  But how do you explain that to the only little Puerto Rican girl in her New Jersey town, lost in the 50's with her heavily accented barely English-speaking parents?

     She hated her brown skin.  She wanted to be white.

     So she told herself that she was white.  She married a white man and when they had children, she told them  that they were white, too.  She refused to teach them Spanish.  She abused them.  She abused herself.   Dawn has fond memories, though, of a grandma who'd put crushed coconut in their cornbread when she and her brothers were little, a grandma who would douse her with Florida water and pray over her bedside when she was sick, a grandma who longed for her to learn Spanish so they could talk to each other.   She died about a year ago.  Her picture is at this altar, too.  She is very old, with high cheekbones, and she is looking past us, off into the distance, as though she can see something that we cannot.

     Dawn doesn't speak Spanish.  Her preference for black men is a constant source of irritation between her and her mother.  Her younger brother has been telling people that he's part Italian and straightening his hair with home perm kits ever since he was a teenager. God only knows what he'd look like if he didn't.

     When the house is empty, I stand before the altar at the mantle and we look at each other, the Lady and I.  We revel in the wonder of  the persistence of a possibility.