Susan Saulny

I mean, wow, doesn't that just hit you?

He was unaware.

When he was growing up eating that gumbo, he thought his mother was a white woman from Chicago that...

Found a good recipe, I guess.

But he said he found the taste of her gumbo once on a camping trip along the Gulf of Mexico.

And he had no way of knowing at the time, but he was very close to where she was actually born.

And Edward and Laura, it seems that they were only able to be themselves fully in the kitchen.

And their children and grandchildren remember them spending long hours in the kitchen together.

And they would make things like red beans and rice and bread pudding and all these Southern specialties.

Yes, people described Charles to me as having moderately brown skin without being in the sun.

So as a result of that, he hardly ever wanted to be in the sun.

and would wear long sleeves and long pants and hats.

And among his own children, most had fair skin, but he had one daughter with especially curly hair.

And I guess he didn't like that.

So as a chemist by profession, he started mixing his own concoctions and different potions that he thought could straighten her hair.

And even as a little girl, he would put these things, these mixtures on her hair and try to make it straight and slick it back into a ponytail.

And the other members of her family told me they watched this and just shake their head in horror.

Like her hair was, first of all, beautiful as it was.

And they could see that there was something painful going on inside of him that was causing him to react this way.

And it was another one of those moments that led to a deep sense of suspicion that they didn't know the whole story.