As Semelee straightened she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the churned-up water and took another peek. She didn’t hold much with mirror gazin’, but every once in a while she took a look at herself and wondered how different things mighta been for her if she’d had a head of normal hair—black or brown or red or blond, didn’t matter, just so long as it wasn’t what she’d been born with.

The surface of the water showed someone in her mid-twenties with a face that wasn’t no head turner but not ugly neither. If heads did turn, it was cause of her hair, a tangled silver-white mane that trailed after her like a cloud—a very tangled, twisted stormy cloud that no amount of combin’ or brushin’ could straighten. No amount at all. She should know. She’d spent enough hours as a kid workin’ on it.

That hair had been a curse for as long as she could recall. She didn’t remember bein’ born here, right here on the lagoon, and didn’t remember her momma leavin’ the lagoon and takin’ her to Tallahassee. But she did remember grammar school in Tallahassee. Did she ever.

Her earliest memories there was of kids pointin’ to her hair and callin’ her “Old Lady.” Nobody wanted Old Lady Semelee on their team no matter what they was playin’, so she used to spend recesses and after school mostly alone. Mostly. Being left out would have been bad enough, but the other girls couldn’t let it go at that. No, they had to crowd around her and pull off the hat she wore to hide her hair, then they’d yank on that hair and make fun of it. The days she came home from school cryin’ to her momma were beyond countin’. Home was her safe place, the only safe place, and her momma was her only friend.

Semelee remembered how she’d cursed her hair. If not for that hair she wouldn’t be teased, she’d be allowed into the other kids’ games, she’d have friends—more than anything else in the world little Semelee wanted a friend, just one lousy friend. Was that too much to ask? If not for that hair she’d belong . And little Semelee so wanted to belong.

Since hats wasn’t helpin’, she decided one day at age seven to cut it all off. She took out her momma’s sewin’ scissors and started choppin’. Semelee smiled now at the memory of the mess she’d made of it, but it hadn’t been funny then. Her momma’d screamed when she seen it. She was fit to be tied and that scared Semelee, scared her bad. Her only friend was mad.

Momma took the scissors and tried to make somethin’ outta the chopped-up thatch but she couldn’t do much.