“It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” Mom said. “Getting a glimpse into history like that. I feel sorry for poor Clarissa and she’s been dead for more than a hundred years most likely. How terrible to lose her father so suddenly.”
I nodded, a lump rising in my throat. I’d felt an immediate bond of fatherlessness with Clarissa. My own father had died of pancreatic cancer when I was under five, and I had few memories of him. At least Clarissa had her papa until adulthood. “I meant to read more letters last night,” I said, “but I fell asleep.”
“I’ll bet that Matilda she mentions was my great-great-something-granny,” Althea put in, coming over for a look at the letter.
“Your great-grandmother was a slave at Rothmere?” I asked. “How come I didn’t know that?”
Althea shrugged. “I didn’t know it myself until Kwasi and I did some genealogical research a couple months back.” Wooden bangles clacked on her wrist as she pulled the letter gently from the envelope, read it, and handed it back.
Kwasi Yarrow was a professor of multicultural studies at Georgia Coastal College and Althea’s boyfriend. She’d experimented with finding her African heritage at his urging, and although she ended up explaining to him that her roots were in south Georgia and she returned to First Baptist after attending his African Methodist Episcopal church for a month, she retained some of her traditional African fashions and accessories, saying they “suited her.”
“You’re not surprised that I come from slave stock, are you?” she said, jutting her chin out.
“Of course I’m surprised,” Mom said, running a dust cloth over the wooden blinds. “Any slave that gave her master the kind of lip you give everyone from clients to friends would probably have been sold to some unsuspecting owner out of state.”
“Hah!” Althea laughed. She tapped on the lid of the Mr. Coffee to encourage it to brew quicker. “You’re probably right about that. We Jenkinses are known for speaking our minds. Kwasi and I couldn’t find out a lot about Matilda, but it seems she got her freedom and lived to be a hundred and two.”
“Good for her,” I said, putting the letter in my purse and accepting a mug of coffee from Althea.
“If you come across any more references to Matilda, I’d be interested in seeing them, Grace,” Althea said.
“I’ll let you know,” I promised.
The day passed quickly in a blur of cutting and coloring and highlighting. Once again, conversation revolved around Horatio, which was still on course to hit the Georgia coast by Wednesday night. People who weren’t fussing about the hurricane were talking about their Halloween costumes for trick-or-treating Sunday night. Mom and Walter left for Jacksonville, Althea cleared out an hour early to meet Kwasi, and after I closed up the salon, I walked the six blocks from my apartment to the high school to catch the bus as dusk was falling. A bat flapped past just overhead and I wished her luck with catching a mosquito dinner. The sky was still relatively clear, but it felt like the pressure had dropped a bit and a headache niggled at the back of my skull. It grew more forceful as I took in the students milling about the yellow bus in the parking lot, several of the boys tossing a football around and other students chatting in clumps of three or four. Rachel broke away from one of the groups when she caught sight of me.
She grabbed my forearm. “Grace! We’ve just had the most, like, splendiferous idea. The student council”—she nodded toward the group she’d been talking to—“has been trying to come up with a fund-raiser idea for the Winter Ball. Ari suggested we do one of those head-shaving things; you know, where people contribute money to get certain teachers or popular kids to shave their heads. And then I said we could, like, contribute the hair to Locks of Love, and everyone was, like, ‘Yeah!’ ” She looked at me expectantly.
“Sounds like a good cause,” I said, looking around for the science teacher who was supposed to be in charge of tonight’s outing.
“Great! Then you’ll do it?”
I looked at her eager face. “Do what?”
“Come to the school and shave the heads of the kids who ‘win’ and cut girls’ hair for Locks of Love. Ari looked it up on her iPhone and you have to have at least ten inches of hair, so I s’pose it’ll mostly be girls doing the Locks of Love thing.”
It was a good cause—Locks of Love makes wigs for children who lose their hair to cancer treatments or other causes—and I didn’t mind helping out. “Sure,” I said. “I could leave the salon a little early and come to the school. And I can mail the hair to Locks of Love; I’ve cut hair for them before.”