The dominant narrative around Black women has almost always been struggle, and I'm tired of that being the only story on offer. Try and find picture a Black woman at leisure, poolside, in the 1950s or '60s. If nothing comes pops up, that's the point. Pools were one of the most literal battlegrounds of segregation, closed, drained, met with violence rather than shared, so what should have been an ordinary afternoon became something that was rarely allowed to be photographed at all. The Lafayette Hotel carries that exact mid-century visual language on purpose. The pearls and the red lipstick are symbolic too, the specific kind of woman that era's imagery was built to signify, standing in for the version of leisure that got left out of it. This is my attempt at filling that gap.