A Toast Before Dying by Grace F. Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

thick album held together with a swath of black-and-white kente cloth. The pictures were not fastened in place and spilled out when she opened the cover.
    I studied them, mostly eight-by-tens. The 1985 Thea had paler skin; the smile was softer, more expectant; but there was something around the eyes that the smile couldn’t hide.
    “Were these taken before or after the winners were announced?”
    Gladys put on her glasses and leaned over. “These were taken before.” She paused and sighed. “They hadn’t yet decided that we weren’t quite good enough.”
    I looked at her quickly. She was pouring a second drink and I wondered if she’d had any before I’d shown up.
    “The gowns must’ve cost a fortune,” I said.
    “Not only the gowns,” Gladys said, gathering thepictures and putting them back in the album. “That doesn’t begin to explain the price we paid. You see, every contestant had to have a sponsor, someone to underwrite expenses. My church and my family had sponsored me, and Thea’s voice coach had sponsored her …”
    “Her voice coach? Where was her family?”
    Gladys lifted her shoulders again. “In all the years I’ve known her, that’s one area I could never get into. She always seemed angry whenever I mentioned my mother, or my aunt, or cousins.
    “My family had been in real estate for years, and I was already planning to enter the business. I didn’t need a beauty title as a stepping-stone. My future was mapped. Five years ago, when my dad retired, I took over. Thea didn’t have that kind of backup. If you ask me, she seemed to not have any security at all, except her grandmother, who’d taken ill, and Thea flew home for a day to see her. The only calls she received were from her voice coach.
    “The day before we returned to the city, the grandmother died. I dropped by Thea’s place from time to time, but there were no pictures of family. No albums. It was as if she’d been dropped from another planet to make out here as best she could. One thing I must say: She was gorgeous, but even with that I didn’t envy her. Most of the time she was angry, and I never understood that.”
    She returned the album to the bottom drawer. “And that’s the personal side. At that pageant, there was a lot of pressure. Publicly, we had to keep our coolwhen some redneck cow from one of those one-light towns tried to flaunt her whiteness in our faces, tried in so many words to call us out of our names, smiling as she did it. We had to smile back, grit our teeth, and work hard to keep from acting colored, so to speak.”
    “How did Thea take it?”
    “Early on, she was determined to grit and grin. But then the cows turned up the heat. I’m telling you, there were some slick heifers behind all that lipstick. They tried things like hiding or destroying parts of our wardrobe, shoes, music, makeup, anything to make us misstep, miss a note, sweat, frown at the wrong time …”
    “Losing must have been hard for Thea.”
    “Yes, toward the end she was crying every night, all night, and in the morning I would put ice packs on her eyes to reduce the swelling and redness. I kept telling her not to let those fat cows get to her. After a while, though, I wondered if it was the cows or the fact that no one was there to support her, no family to back her up …”
    “Who’s her voice coach?”
    “Miss Adele. You know her. Everyone in Harlem knows her. Retired from the Met and pulled a lot of weight downtown. Lived in the Dunbar Apartments years ago but she’s across Seventh Avenue in Esplanade Gardens now. She’s in her seventies and still going strong, still coaching. A remarkable woman.”
    I nodded. Her name sounded vaguely familiar. I’d have to ask Dad more about her. Anyone having the slightest connection to the music scene—even if theyonly whistled their way through the
Apollo Amateur Hour
without being booed off the stage—Dad either knew or had heard of.
    “How often did you see