Introduction

By many measures -- including her own -- Nancybelle Valentine, 71, lives an ordinary life. Retired for just over a decade after a forty-year career in the fashion industry that culminated with her role as a founding employee and key staff member of Liz Claiborne, she spends her days tending the quiet suburban home that she shares with the love of her life, and serving as an Elder and trustee at her church. She travels on occasion, socializes with friends, reads avidly about events past and present, and has mastered the rudiments of e-mail and computer games.

However, anyone who views Elder Nancybelle's life through the prism of history would readily concede that hers is an unusual story. For the woman who became Elder Nancybelle was once a little black girl, born at a time when human possibility was rigidly constrained by rules of race, class, gender, religion and sexuality, who has lived her life mostly on her own terms, with neither defiance nor capitulation.

I first met Nancybelle Valentine in 2002, when I began attending Unity Fellowship Church-New Brunswick. It was only in the spring of 2005 that I began to appreciate the simple, audacious beauty of her life's journey. I am young enough to be Elder's daughter, and I came of age with opportunities for education, career advancement and self-definition for which my foremothers worked, dreamed and sometimes died. Despite those opportunities, I rarely see women (or men, for that matter) of my generation and younger who move through life with the freedom and self-confidence that I witness in every encounter with Elder.

I wanted to better understand the source of that self-assurance, and I found at least part of the answer in a treasure trove of studio photographs of her and members of her family dating from 1917 on. As scholars suchas Nell Painter, Claudia Tate and others have noted, the formal portraits African Americans commissioned of themselves and their families sometimes helped black people avoid internalizing the debilitating racial stereotypes of the time. This certainly seems to have been the case in the life of Nancybelle Valentine.

I was fortunate to have the interest and assistance of two of my students, as well as members of our respective families, in collecting the materials from which this story is assembled. I hope that it reflects the beauty, boldness and simplicity of the woman on whom it is based.

Kim Pearson