in a seamless sheath dress that fell to reveal all the peaks and valleys of her body. The text around her told the tale of this “exotic beauty” with “dark eyes that reached past the screen into the very soul of those poor suckers in the seats just waiting to fall in love.” She was “a chameleon.” A “goddess from ancient time.”
What Dini hadn’t noticed the first (or tenth) time she thumbed through this magazine the other night—because she hadn’t thought to look for it—was the way this particular page was bent along the spine’s margin. This magazine had been folded to stay open to this page. And the bottom corner had been ripped away. Neatly. Like it was a page in a detective’s notebook.
She handed the magazine gently over to Quin. “There she is.”
He looked, and a low, appreciative whistle came through his lips. “She is gorgeous.” He looked up. “Look, I don’t want to slow your mojo here, but wasn’t Sallie White African American?”
Dini nodded. “So is, was, Thalia Powers.”
One eyebrow arched over the top of Quin’s glasses. “I don’t mean to be…but she doesn’t look—”
“Technically she was biracial. Which, being born around 1890, meant black. But she wanted to be an actress, and so she took advantage of her skin tone. She…passed, is the word. And while she wasn’t successful on stage, she starred in a few motion pictures. Until somebody—probably some actress who lost a part to her—blabbed to the studio executives. She was set to star in a romance. A black woman and a white man—they wouldn’t be able to get it into theaters. But she was still under contract with the studio, so after a couple of good roles, she was bumped to playing housekeepers and slaves.” A new thought took root. “Hold on,” she said, jumping off the couch.
“How do you know all of this?” Her house was small enough for the question to carry. She was still in her bedroom, unplugging her laptop when she answered.
“Once, my mother and I watched this movie, Imitation of Life. Have you seen it? It’s about a young black woman who passes as white, much to the heartbreak of her mother. I loved that movie, and Mom told me about Thalia Jean Powers. And she knew about Thalia Jean Powers because her great-grandfather was in love with her. I think her great-grandfather was J. P. Haley.”
“You think? You’ve never heard his name?”
She held a finger to her lips, shushing him, then kept it aloft as a reminder for as long as it took to open her laptop and click on the YouTube icon. She typed “Thalia Jean Powers” in the search bar and scrolled down to what looked like a period piece: The Rebel Was a Maiden, a Civil War film. “Come watch.” She brought her feet up and angled her body so he could see the screen. He draped an arm along the back of the couch and moved in close enough that she felt him braced against the length of her back. She tapped the arrow to play the video and paused it on the third title card. “There: ‘Photographed by J. Preston Hale.’” She twisted to face him. “That’s my great-great-grandfather. His real name. We’ve always been a show business family.”
She instructed Alexa to stop playing music in order to listen to the instrumental overlay of the flickering images on the screen. Quin shifted, handing her the reasonably warm cup of coffee, and took up his own. From what she could tell, The Rebel Was a Maiden was a story about a Union soldier in love with the daughter of a Confederate general, with all the difficulties such a relationship entailed.
“This is 1922,” Dini said. That magazine is dated, what, 1918?”
“Mm-hmm,” Quin affirmed. “So, this is after the fall from favor.” She felt his response in every vertebrae and considered posing one question after another just to feel him speak.
They watched the couple on screen fall into a kiss behind a rosebush by the door. “And to think,” Quin said, his breath against the back of her neck, “those people are dead now.”
“I had no idea you were such a romantic.”
He laughed, and everything within her liquefied to the consistency of her coffee. Propriety, she supposed, demanded she move away. But, glancing at the clock on the bottom of the screen, they had little more than an hour left to be together. Bad enough they had to spend it watching B-rated silent film