The girl selling braids along the beach was absolutely beautiful. High rounded cheek-bones, curving eyelids, full lips turned up at the corners around a smile that was dazzling against her jet black skin. A long floaty black cotton dress with splashes of ultramarine, and a jaunty baseball cap.

She was advertising hair braids shown in faded photos on a battered sheet of paper laminated with plastic. She immediately changed tack when she saw that both my wife and I have hair which is pretty much cropped. She thrust forward a foot – around the ankle was a braid of bright colours and beads. 'Muy bonito!' she said, giving us the dazzling smile again.

My wife was intrigued, so the girl undid her faded rucksack and pulled out a vivid mass of balls of wool and twine. They began to try combinations of glittery gold and red-orange and black, and I seized the chance to get out the sketchbook and do a rapid pencil sketch. As I started laying it out, I heard snatches of conversation, hampered by the girl's fragmentary Spanish – she lived in Salou, another resort down the coast … yes Sitges very nice … from Senegal … Dakar very hot better here ... been here three months no three years … When my wife asked how she had arrived here - perhaps by the dangerous boat-crossings? - the girl's Spanish ran out … 'No good Spanish,' she said firmly, obviously not wanting to get into anything to do with legality or illegality. The conversation died away, and I concentrated on the drawing.

There wasn't time to achieve the wonderful lustrous tonalities of the shadows of her skin, but the sketch came out pretty well – the curve of her cheek, the crescents of her eyelids, and above all the deep dimples at the corners of her mouth, permanently hinting at that smile …

Suddenly, my wife was nudging me. 'Have you got seven euros?' she said, and I realised that the weaving of the anklet was finished, and there it was, brilliant around my wife's brown ankle. As I was digging the money out of the beach-bag, my wife noticed the sketchbook. 'You've been drawing her?' she asked, 'Let's see … Oh yes, it's good – why don't you show it to her.'

The girl was surprised and pleased, so my wife suggested that I gave it to her. I tore the sheet out of the sketchbook and passed it over. She collected her things together, tucked the drawing away, beamed at us again, and set off down the hot beach, scuffing through the sand.

When I turned back to my wife, her eyes were glittering with tears.

'Do you know what she said to me? I said, you're very beautiful, and she said, no, not beautiful, I black – you beautiful, you white. How could she say something like that? How can she think she's not beautiful?'

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Handout:  Braid Girl   ... this blog is available as a student handout