I looked down at the book in my hands and gently lifted the leather cover. There, in slightly blurry, slanted blue handwriting, were the words:

My darling Anna, share your deepest thoughts here in this journal, my love, and know that I will always be with you, forever and ever. Mom

I could barely tear my eyes away from the words to look back at Saundra. “Oh my God, Saundra!” I said. “This could tell us so much.” I opened the book at random. The pages felt crinkly and brittle, and they were covered with a rounded vertical script—a miniature example of the distinctive vertical loops so evident in Anna’s signature on the mural. “This is so cool!” I looked up at Saundra again. “I spend half my day wondering what was going through Anna’s mind while she painted this thing.” I nodded toward the mural. “Maybe this will tell me.”

“Why on earth my mother would have it, I don’t know,” Saundra said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed. “Mama Nelle would have been a little girl when Anna painted the mural, right? Nineteen-forty?”

“Right.” Saundra nodded. “But however it came to be in her hands, I’m just happy you want it, and that Mama was able to let me know I should give it to you.”

“Me, too.” I hugged the journal to my chest. I felt ridiculously happy, holding something that had spent so much time in Anna’s hands.

“Would you like to see the sketches?” Saundra asked.

“Yes, sure,” I said, although I was answering more to be polite than anything else. What I really wanted was to dig into the diary. The journal.

Saundra pulled a sheaf of sketch paper from the box and began spreading the portraits out on the table. There were six of them and the subjects all looked like African Americans.

“I’m pretty sure this one was my mother when she was a little girl,” Saundra said, pointing to one of the drawings. “It looks like a photograph I have of her. And this one might be my aunt Dodie, Mama and Uncle Jesse’s older sister. I can make some educated guesses as to the others, but I really don’t know for sure.”

“These really don’t look like Jesse Williams’s work,” I said, frowning at the sketches. “I’ll have to show them to Oliver—the curator—and see what he thinks.”

Saundra pulled out her phone to check the time. “Well,” she said, slipping her purse over her shoulder, “do what you want with them. They have to be from when he was a kid, given the age of my mother in the drawing, so probably not as polished an artist as he was later. And I’ve got to run.” She nodded toward the journal I still held against my chest like a treasure. “You be sure to tell me what you learn, all right?”

Chapter 58. Anna