by Dorothy West
It was true that in the nighttime of love Corinne desired and was possessed by the very darkness that repelled her in the day. Her repulsion was grounded in a suspicion that, given her forebears, only chance had given her the proper, fair color. Chance had smiled again and given her two daughters in her likeness, but Hannibal’s half of her makeup still had to be heard from, and the chance of that pattern continuing unbroken was too slight for her to risk a third try at bearing Clark a son. Her fear that she might reject her child as Josephine had rejected her was too deeply rooted in her psyche for her to drag it up to the surface and damn the consequences.
Suddenly her face went slack around her open mouth and she collapsed, the floor rising up crazily to slam her in the face. The local doctor came and she was put to bed under mild sedation. She slept fitfully, softly whimpering.
Gram, already past eighty at this point, took up the watch. She sat quietly on the enclosed porch, erect in a hard-backed chair. A pane of glass shut her out from any strength-draining conversations with the neighbors who silently stood vigil on the lawn, quieting the children when their voices shrilled, allowing Gram the dignity of her isolation.
In a summer settlement some distance from the Oval but very like it in its quiet location and little park, the mothers gossiping back and forth about the lost child and the waning hope of finding her alive felt great sympathy for the Negro mother. They wished that there were some way they could help, for they knew that it could have been one of their own children as well as not, and they thanked God for sparing them. From time to time they made a careful check of these children, screeching a little one’s name whenever a panicky eye overlooked the object of its search. It was some time before anyone noticed that the protective circle of neighborhood children included one more child than it should, and one more dog. For a while the child was left to itself, each mother thinking rather smugly that her small child was where she could see it. This was no day to let children run free.
Shelby had been drawn to this sanctuary because it resembled home, with its little park and its children playing and its mothers watching them. She found a tree to stand under and leaned against it, thoroughly tired after the long walk through the heart of town. For the first time that day it occurred to her to be worried about her situation. The puppy was nervous too, as if he sensed her anxiety. He darted from beneath her feet and into the street and back again, over and over, several times narrowly avoiding a grisly fate beneath onrushing wheels. The summer cars honked at the puppy impatiently, until finally a policeman, terribly conscious that his summer job existed because of them, told Shelby a little too tartly that her dog was tying up traffic. “Go home and tell your mother that all dogs must be restrained on a leash downtown. Or their owners will be fined.”
Shelby could only stare back. She was too overcome at being the sudden center of attention, a dozen honking cars screeching to a standstill, and a tall policeman, as tall as the sky, crying sharp words that she couldn’t unscramble. On top of it all, the puppy—not knowing a friend from an enemy—insisted on digging his paws into the policeman’s impeccably creased pants as he begged for water, using the only sign language he knew.
Shelby, older and shyer than the dog, kept her own extreme exigency to herself, though it was rapidly reaching an excruciating state. Bracing herself against the tree, she clamped her legs together and began to shiver uncontrollably. She tried desperately to find a dark face among the crowd of mothers. She simply knew that a dark face was almost always an approachable face, while a white face was always a passerby’s face, one of so many that it was impossible to pick out the right one. Her straits were too intimate to reveal to a stranger.
Suddenly it happened, before all these strangers, as the puppy sniffed at her and looked surprised, and a boy stopped dead in his play and stared before running off to tell. The hot sticky stream ran steadily down her leg, making little splashes around her feet. The children stampeded to witness her disgrace, their eyes crowding in, and then giggles rising around her like waves, like waves drowning her.
She cried and cried and cried. She turned her back and pressed her scarlet face against the tree.
Then there was a voice, a mother’s voice, scolding but not scolding her, shooing the other children away, reminding them that they were not immune to accidents. The arms gently pulled her away from the tree and held her racing heart against a quiet hill, and a clean, soft handkerchief with a scent she could never know but never forget dried her downcast face. The voice, as gentle as snow falling, slowed her shuddering and her sobs.
“What’s your name, darling?” the mother’s face asked.
“Shelby.”
There was something about that name that sounded familiar. “Shelby what, dear?” the woman asked.
“Shelby Coles.”
That sounded even more familiar. The mother called to the watching women. “She says her name is Coles. Does that ring a bell?”
It did for somebody. “That sounds like the name of that colored child they’re looking for. Seems to me it was Coles or something like that.”
“So what?” someone else cried out. “It takes more than a name to change black to white.”
“I’m not blind,” the mother said indignantly. She turned back to Shelby. “Run home, dear, and tell your mother to change your clothes and keep you home so you don’t get lost.”
“I am lost,” said Shelby softly, admitting it to herself for the first time, and unable now to go another step unless it was in the direction of home.
“This one’s lost too,” the mother groaned. “Are you sure you don’t know the way home from here?”
Shelby nodded mutely.
“But at least this one’s been found. I just hope her family isn’t too frantic.”
“The quickest thing to do is to call the police in case they’ve had a call from her mother. Tell me your name again, dear, slowly.”
“Shelby.”
“Tell me your whole name.”
“Shelby Coles.”
This had to be more than a coincidence. Reason rejected the possibility that two children were lost with the same name and the same outfit. And yet it was just as improbable for a white child to be colored, but what else was there to think? She called to the women. “One of you come here for a moment. Just one. Too many might frighten her.”
A woman quickly outran the others, sniffing something special and wanting to be part of it. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but this has to be the child they’ve been looking for.”
“You’re crazy, all right. You really think so?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“How?”
“Ask her.”
“Ask her?” The mother was horrified. “I couldn’t do anything so awful. Suppose she isn’t? It might leave a scar.”
“Well, we’re wasting time this way.”
The mother looked at Shelby carefully, studying her blond, sun-bleached tresses and her beautiful blue eyes. “It’s a fool question, but I’ll ask it.” She took Shelby’s hand. “Tell me, little girl, and don’t be afraid. Are you colored?” Without knowing it, both women stopped breathing.
Shelby stared at the mother, trying to find some clue in her still face, but all she saw was discomfort. “I don’t know,” she said after thinking it over, because she didn’t. She had heard talk at home of “white” and “colored” people, but no one had ever defined the terms for her.
The mother could take command now. The following question was easy. “Are you white?”
Shelby looked at her hand. It was dirty, but when it was clean, it was white. At any rate, the mother’s encouraging tone seemed to want her to say so.
“Yes.”
“Well,” a redheaded woman with small eyes and sun-blasted skin said dryly, “white or not, she’s lost, so you’d better get the telephone.”
“I feel like a fool,” the mother si
ghed, “telling them I have another lost child with the same name. But it’s not the same child—it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Look,” the sunburned woman snapped. “Watch,” she said briskly to Shelby, “I’m not going to hurt you.” She took a strand of Shelby’s hair and rubbed it forcefully, then she lifted the strand and gave it a little tug. “You see, it’s real gold, it didn’t rub off. It’s real hair—it stayed on her scalp. God may have given some coloreds light skin, but He never gave them blond hair. And those eyes! Does it make any sense now? That she couldn’t be colored?” Shelby watched in awe as every jerk of the woman’s arm tugged up her crisp navy-blue cotton shirt and revealed a sharp barrier of crimson between dry rust and creamy white.
“I suppose so,” said the mother uncertainly. But she was still not completely convinced, perhaps because deep in her heart she knew that too many people had blended too many colors not to strike a combination that looked as real as the real thing.
The sunburned woman brushed her hands briskly. “That takes care of that. The other name probably wasn’t Coles at all. Forget it and call the police. See you later—I’ve got things to do.” She looked down at Shelby and clucked.
“Come on, dear,” the mother said to Shelby. “We’ll go to my house, and pretty soon someone will come to take you home.”
“Will Mummy come?”
“No, a nice policeman will come and take you home to Mummy.”
But Shelby knew the policeman would only get mad again because she and the puppy were still hanging around. And maybe he would ask her if she were colored and pull her hair harder and harder, pull it right out of her scalp, until she had no hair left at all. She began to cry bitterly at the thought.
The mother swept Shelby into her arms. The puppy clawed at the mother’s skirt and whimpered, impatient to be carried too. And so they walked, and with the mother’s scolding and the puppy’s misbehaving and the mother’s strong arms that felt like vises, Shelby was so frightened of what the mother might do to her and the puppy and what the policeman might do that she went limp and white, and mute.
She did not speak again for some time. A policeman came, not the one who was mad at her but a Santa Claus policeman—fat, ruddy, and kind-talking. He did not pull her hair or ask her if she was colored. But she would not talk to him or raise her eyes to him, not even when he petted the puppy and said that a dog was a fine friend who never let you get lost alone.
When they drove into the Oval, her name began to sing, soaring to a crescendo burst out of screen doors and running after the car on legs stout and thin, repeating itself over and over. There was no uncertainty. She had her identity back; she was Shelby, one and indivisible, a girl with real hair.
She sat up straight and looked out the car window, feeling her name caressing her face—“Shelby, Shelby, Shelby”— and seeing the waving hands like so many colored banners. For the first time in her short life she knew the joy of returning home after a journey among strangers.
The car stopped, and the police chief lifted Shelby out. The puppy prepared to follow, but Shelby gently pushed him back inside. She said softly, “This isn’t really my doggie. He lost himself, and I found him. I think he’s a white doggy, but I don’t know. But please don’t pull his tail to see.”
The sayings of children were not easy to interpret, and he who took the time had time to waste. The police chief was too busy to ponder Shelby’s words. “So this is the little fellow! Somebody called us about him this afternoon. I’ll tell his folks you took good care of him. They’ll be glad he had you for company. Now let’s go show Momma you’re safe.” He took her hand and led her up the walk.
The small group of people on the lawn stared over her head at the chief, freezing their smiles, trying to chill him with cold silence. They let him pass without a handshake and then closed in behind him like sentinels on guard, as if to imply that they had to see the child safe inside before they would disperse. With Shelby safe, they could release the bitter gall they had swallowed for hours, not wanting to risk God’s displeasure by mixing prayer with venom. Now that Shelby was whole and unharmed and God had presumably turned His ear to other emergencies they could unburden themselves of their grievances without fear of offending. It was rare in this bucolic summer resort off the coast of New England to feel a ripple of unease about the color of one’s skin, and now it was as if a cold wet wind had blown through the community. On their way home to try to salvage what could be salvaged of the lost day, to try to unwind and restore summer’s lost tranquillity, the Ovalites took turns at the dead horse.
“Show me one white man who can look at a colored man without saying to himself, I see a colored man.”
“The only one I know of died on the cross, and the other one has not yet been born.”
“I see white people all day long, from the time the milkman comes in the morning, and all I see is the man with the milk. After all, I don’t want to marry him.”
“Keeping us colored is one of their chief occupations. If they don’t remember it every minute, they’re afraid they’ll forget we’re not children of God.”
“They must think they’re God, that nobody can look like them but them.”
“It’s a wonder they ever found Shelby at all.”
“They couldn’t find a lost colored child, so they had to settle for any child that was lost. They had the whole town keeping an eye out—everybody put on dark glasses. Those of us with light-skinned children should put a tag on them, ‘Please return to the colored race.’”
“They’re the ones who make it so easy for us to pass. We jump their fences and they never find us, and all the time they’re looking right at us.”
By the time Corinne woke up from her sedation, Shelby had been long asleep. Corinne had lost a child for a day, and the strain of not knowing where Shelby was, or if she were even living or dead, had been more than her frail flesh could bear. The neighbors’ account of Shelby’s return gave her something to think about, as everyone knew who knew how she felt about color. If her feelings rubbed off on her children, they stood a good chance of catching white fear, and God help her if they decided to pass and were lost to her, not just for a day, but forever.
Shaking their heads and sighing, the Ovalites scattered to their cottages, returning to the slow domestic hum of daily routine refreshed by the break from the ordinary. They were secretly enjoying their ruminations now, anticipating the impact of their story on the beach the next day. Screen doors opened and were allowed to bang, and radios began to liven up the summer atmosphere. Makeshift suppers were made in kitchens, and little children began to be scolded as their mothers began to see them again as something less than angels on loan.
Inside the glassed-in porch, the chief of police presented Gram with her granddaughter, restraining his surprise that this old lady was as blue-eyed as the child who called her Gram. According to all his previous conceptions, her age consigned her to those generations that were sometimes less black but were never more white than they should be.
Gram rose up slowly from her chair. She read his thoughts, of course—so plainly were they stamped upon his face—and she dismissed his brand of thinking with a wave. She was immune to his lower-class mentality. Inherent in her was the Southern aristocrat’s uncompromising contempt for poor whites, bred in the bone. She had never played with a poor white, supped with a poor white, or met a poor white on any level that was remotely social, the line of demarcation between their worlds sharper than the color line, which was openly crossed under cover of the night. Communication between white aristocrat and white trash was unknown, there being no magnet of color to attract one to the other.
“Well, here she is, safe and sound, and only a little the worse for wear,” the chief said reassuringly.
Gram rose, holding herself as erect as an old gnarled stick that had rooted itself in time. In no one’s memory had she ever not been old, not even in the memory of Corinne, who had been too young when Gram was not
old to think of Gram as other than the rod and the staff that comforted her when Miss Josephine and Hannibal locked her out of their lives. Gram bent forward a little, not enough to upset her delicate balance, and stretched out her arms. Shelby’s head burrowed into Gram’s brittle old body, with its soothing smell of lavender. Gram spoke softly to the policeman, reserving her strength for getting Shelby to bed and calming her so that she could fall asleep. “Thank you for searching so long for my great-granddaughter. I thought this little town could be covered in an hour or so, except for the woods. But please convey the family’s thanks to all you called in to help. The child’s father, Dr. Coles, will send a check to whatever island charity you wish to name.”
The Southern accent surprised him. Everyone else in the Oval spoke as well as he did. This old lady sounded like the colored maids who swarmed through town on their Thursdays off, looking for friendly colored faces and knowing better than to look for them in the Oval. This old lady did and yet somehow didn’t talk with a tongue that was coated with grits and gravy. In fact, if she hadn’t sounded so colored she would have sounded white, which was the nearest the chief could come to appraising the quality and inflection of a Southern gentlewoman’s stubbornly unaltered pattern of speech. “Ma’am,” he said, not sure that he meant to say “ma’am” with special deference, “we did our duty and were glad to. We don’t want special thanks, but the doctor might be interested in helping our little hospital, which never has enough towels and washcloths. I’m sorry we didn’t find your granddaughter sooner, but a little dog followed her all day, and nobody was looking for a little girl with a dog. I’m not making an excuse, ma’am, I’m just making an explanation.” That was the way he meant to tell it to the reporter for the Vineyard newspaper when he came around to ask particulars. People believed what they read in that highly regarded weekly, which reached more homes than any Oval accusation, and would salve the town’s conscience of any real or imagined guilt.