Her hair’s brushed back from her rather high forehead into soft waves, more curls at the back of her neck, artfully bunched, not touching her shoulders; has she seen Garbo in Camille? No, Gone With the Wind. She and her mother read the book twice, and cried both times. Then they waited in a line that stretched around a city block in Knoxville to see the movie, and cried again. My mother must have felt that dirt in Scarlett O’Hara’s fist when she shook it at the Technicolor sunset and swore she’d never be hungry again. And the identification wasn’t only personal; book and film elegized a world lost when Atlanta burned, a dream, and my mother and my granny loved it. Though their family was never invited to crinolined gatherings at Tara or Twelve Oaks; immigrants, sharecroppers, they cherished the myth anyway, a Southern golden age. “People don’t understand,” my mother said, “that the Southerners were good to their slaves.”

In the photo she’s wearing a jacket with slightly padded shoulders, a complicated coral paisley accented with auburn and blue, a matching blouse beneath it. Her face is what the fashion magazines describe as egg-shaped, its ovoid punctuated by her blue gaze: how careful here, the tinter’s brush, limning the iris, the tiny corners of the whites of her eyes. The face is anchored and sparked by her smile: beautiful, unchecked, no hesitation in it, framed by her thin, perfectly painted lips, the upper lip especially narrow, like mine. Here is the source of the particular intensity with which she commands the frame: her smile and her eyes don’t quite align, the dazzle of one just so subtly opposing the depth of the other: delight and—what? Something withheld, not yet available to us? Something, unlike that smile, which is unwilling, unready to be known.

They are so like my sister’s eyes!

Strange how the picture changes if you look only at their eyes: suddenly he seems a little wary, she a little wily, a bit more knowing than that bright, uncompromised smile would lead one to think. Perhaps it’s only the tilt of his head, or the arch shapes of her plucked eyebrows, or maybe it’s nothing at all. Taken at face value, their whole bright faces, they are astonishingly and forthrightly happy, lit up by pleasure in a way in which I will never see them, not quite, and a little wave of shock attends the recognition that she is all of seventeen, and he merely twenty-three; I feel protective toward them, want to keep them right here, in this bright moment in Chattanooga sixty years ago, the flash of the photographer’s lamp finding its match in their unmistakable joy.