I was only six when Ma shook me awake (gently, for once) and told me through a slow-motion half dream that Grandma was going to die. She didn’t say how, when, or why. In my still dream-sleep, I imagined each of her tears as beads in a necklace that would choke my grandma—stealing her away from me forever. After I washed my face and hands, we three ate cheese grits and bacon in silence. An hour later Grandma came out of the bathroom with weightless balls of her long, always-pressed hair in her hands. I remember the shower of golden dust falling from the purple velvet hatbox she pulled from top of Ma’s closet, a hatbox she filled with the brittle dried-out strands. She said she was going to sew a wig of her own hair after it all fell out, and she had started on it when she died.

Later on that night, Ma was snoring on the couch and Jewel had stomped downtown in thigh-high boots to “practice on how I’m gonna spend Hakim’s money.” I slipped into Ma’s bedroom, stood tiptoe on a step stool she kept in her closet, and eased the purple hatbox down by the dingy cream ribbon choking its brim. The black hair was still furled deep inside, a tight knot of coarse strands filling the bottom of the box like a lost baby animal fighting the cold.

Some people leave behind clothes. Some people leave jewelry too old-fashioned to wear. Others leave their loved ones money. A house was too much to expect in my neighborhood, although relatives would fight over a dead one’s money and argue it was a real house all their own—and not the money—that they were after.

Grandma, needing few clothes, having no jewels but a wedding band, earning no money and certainly no house, left us her hair when it still had shine. Each and every time I had no one to talk to, I pulled down that hatbox to talk to her; each time, I half expected to open it to a puff of gray—as if she were still alive and resting underneath it. That day, I pulled out a couple of strands and twisted them around the middle fingers of both my hands. I tested the elasticity of a dead woman’s hair, pulled it taut and dared it to break, and from the other side Grandma called my bluff.