Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid

twenty minutes?” she asked.
    â€œOnly twenty minutes,” he said. “What are you going to drop?”
    â€œI guess I’ll drop ‘Slip Away’ and the encore,” she said.
    After he left, she said, “I only got twenty minutes. I don’t care. I’m not going to feel bad about it. Nothing is going to make me feel bad tonight.”

    Her band—five young men and a young woman, who was the backup singer—came in, and she told them what songs they would be doing. She said, “We’ll do ‘It’s Important to Me,’ not stopping but straight into ‘That’s What Friends Are For,’ and then I stop and talk a little, and then we do’ ’Cause You Love Me, Baby,’ ‘If You Don’t Believe,’ and ‘Free,’ and that’s it.” She asked all the people in the room except the members of the band to leave, so that she and the band could pray before they went onstage. The songs she sang onstage were not as familiar to us as “Free,” but then she sang that, too, and it was even better than listening to it on the car radio.
    â€” April 4 , 1976

Junior Miss
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    Every year, fifty high-school seniors, representing our fifty states, compete in a televised national Junior Miss contest, sponsored by Eastman Kodak, Kraft Foods, and Breck Shampoo. The winner, America’s Junior Miss, receives a ten-thousand-dollar scholarship to the college of her choice. Two days before New York’s Junior Miss, Dawn Fotopulos, of Queens, was scheduled to go to Mobile, Alabama, to compete in the Junior Miss finals, she came over to Manhattan, accompanied by her mother, Mrs. William Fotopulos, and had her picture taken by the News, had a long lunch at the St. Regis, and was interviewed on three radio talk shows. When we first saw Miss Fotopulos, who is just under eighteen, she was standing near a rack of clothes in a shop on East Fifty-third Street, obliging the News photographer with the many poses he wanted her to assume. She was wearing a green wool blazer, green-and-white patterned knit slacks, and a white blouse. She has blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and long light-brown
hair that flips up around her shoulders. Except for a trace of mascara, lip gloss, and blue eye shadow, she wore no makeup, and except for a small pair of pearl earrings she wore no jewelry. After taking the shots in the store, the photographer told Miss Fotopulos that he wanted some shots of her walking down Fifth Avenue. On Fifth Avenue he stood her a few yards in front of him and told her to walk toward him now—first slowly, then fast, then slowly again. He sat her on one of the large planters that line the Avenue, tilted her head forward, and told her to stay in that position. He told her to gaze into a shopwindow displaying an assortment of women’s shoes. He told her to gaze into another shopwindow, which had an assortment of women’s sports clothes. Altogether, the photographer took thirty-six pictures of Miss Fotopulos, and for every single one of them she smiled.
    At lunch at the St. Regis, Miss Fotopulos had roast beef, lyonnaise potatoes, salad with French dressing, a glass of milk, and fruit cup. She said that she had never before been in a place like the St. Regis, or had lyonnaise potatoes. She said, “I feel it’s a dream. I feel I’m Cinderella or something. All this special treatment. Everybody has been treating me as if I were something special. It’s so much fun. When I entered this contest, I had no idea all this would happen. I found out about the contest in Seventeen, and I wrote away for the forms. I thought I wouldn’t win, because I didn’t have a local sponsor. I was a candidate at large. But this is not like a beauty contest. You don’t have to wear a bathing suit. It mostly has to do with scholarship and poise and grace. I have
a ninety-five-point-six average. I want to study medicine; and the