stone’s throw, and not knowing that the distance she had come was the infinite distance between two worlds and two concepts of color.
“Well, you’d better go home, dear, before your family misses you. Stay on the road and don’t go back through the woods. It’s a wonder you didn’t get lost. And you mustn’t fret about the dog—he’ll follow you home and your family will know what to do with him. Run along now, straight home.”
“I will,” said Shelby, really glad to be given a command, which relieved her anxiety about the puppy and instructed her to go straight home, where, with her hunger and thirst nagging her now without letup, she wished she was this very minute.
Shelby and the puppy returned to the road and resumed their search for some familiar house or face. Many people saw them pass—most of them smiled, some even spoke a greeting, and all of them absorbed the beauty of the bright-haired child, even taking casual note of the yellow sunsuit and the red shoes. None of them suspected for a moment when they were later questioned that Shelby was the colored child who had now been missing for over four heartbreaking hours.
A sand pail had been found in the woods and identified as hers, and the unspoken fear was now growing, since no one anywhere had seen her, that she had gone through the woods to the waterfront, stopped to play in the water, waded out too far, and drowned. But the land search went on in the desperate hope that the child would be found alive and unharmed, with no one yet willing to abandon that hope and drag the sea for a small drowned body.
The sickness of the search was that so many people saw Shelby, but they were not looking for such a child. They were looking for a colored child, which meant they were looking for what they knew to be a colored child—dark skin, dark hair, and Negroid features.
A snowballing word of mouth, a genuinely sympathetic mouth, had needlessly falsified the child’s description by its thoughtless indulgence in that strange habit of whites ofprefacing any and all mention of colored people with the identifying label of race.
For, as the alarm had spread through the town that a child from the Oval area had been lost, those who knew where the Oval was had added the helpful information that an Oval child was a colored child. Shelby had made the subtle transformation to a little colored girl wearing yellow and red, which made the stereotype complete.
Even the police and the organized volunteers hampered their own painstaking search by coloring their inquiries. For even they did not believe they were searching for a blond-haired, blue-eyed child, just as the two old people on the porch had nothing in their experience to imagine such a phenomenon. Those who knew colored people only as servants and veered from thinking of them otherwise could not make any association between the poised and lovely child who had brightened their morning and the colored child who had gone and gotten herself lost.
Even the yellow dress and the red sandals did not strike them as anything more than an unremarkable coincidence. Every little girl had a pair of red shoes. Red was childhood’s favorite color. And yellow was becoming to blondes. In envisioning these unsuitable colors on a colored child, they evoked no image that could possibly compare with their recollection of Shelby. They said they had not seen her, and watched the searchers go off. In a way, they were better off not knowing how unhelpful they had been, and better off not knowing that they had glimpsed in Shelby the overlapping worlds and juxtaposed mores they would not live to see.
It struck the old gentleman that he should call after theretreating form of the police officer and tell him that a dog was missing, too, but he thought better of it. They had enough on their minds without this bit of frivolous information.
So they slowly rocked in their chairs, staring at the incoming tide and praying that it held no cruel
“Well, you’d better go home, dear, before your family misses you. Stay on the road and don’t go back through the woods. It’s a wonder you didn’t get lost. And you mustn’t fret about the dog—he’ll follow you home and your family will know what to do with him. Run along now, straight home.”
“I will,” said Shelby, really glad to be given a command, which relieved her anxiety about the puppy and instructed her to go straight home, where, with her hunger and thirst nagging her now without letup, she wished she was this very minute.
Shelby and the puppy returned to the road and resumed their search for some familiar house or face. Many people saw them pass—most of them smiled, some even spoke a greeting, and all of them absorbed the beauty of the bright-haired child, even taking casual note of the yellow sunsuit and the red shoes. None of them suspected for a moment when they were later questioned that Shelby was the colored child who had now been missing for over four heartbreaking hours.
A sand pail had been found in the woods and identified as hers, and the unspoken fear was now growing, since no one anywhere had seen her, that she had gone through the woods to the waterfront, stopped to play in the water, waded out too far, and drowned. But the land search went on in the desperate hope that the child would be found alive and unharmed, with no one yet willing to abandon that hope and drag the sea for a small drowned body.
The sickness of the search was that so many people saw Shelby, but they were not looking for such a child. They were looking for a colored child, which meant they were looking for what they knew to be a colored child—dark skin, dark hair, and Negroid features.
A snowballing word of mouth, a genuinely sympathetic mouth, had needlessly falsified the child’s description by its thoughtless indulgence in that strange habit of whites ofprefacing any and all mention of colored people with the identifying label of race.
For, as the alarm had spread through the town that a child from the Oval area had been lost, those who knew where the Oval was had added the helpful information that an Oval child was a colored child. Shelby had made the subtle transformation to a little colored girl wearing yellow and red, which made the stereotype complete.
Even the police and the organized volunteers hampered their own painstaking search by coloring their inquiries. For even they did not believe they were searching for a blond-haired, blue-eyed child, just as the two old people on the porch had nothing in their experience to imagine such a phenomenon. Those who knew colored people only as servants and veered from thinking of them otherwise could not make any association between the poised and lovely child who had brightened their morning and the colored child who had gone and gotten herself lost.
Even the yellow dress and the red sandals did not strike them as anything more than an unremarkable coincidence. Every little girl had a pair of red shoes. Red was childhood’s favorite color. And yellow was becoming to blondes. In envisioning these unsuitable colors on a colored child, they evoked no image that could possibly compare with their recollection of Shelby. They said they had not seen her, and watched the searchers go off. In a way, they were better off not knowing how unhelpful they had been, and better off not knowing that they had glimpsed in Shelby the overlapping worlds and juxtaposed mores they would not live to see.
It struck the old gentleman that he should call after theretreating form of the police officer and tell him that a dog was missing, too, but he thought better of it. They had enough on their minds without this bit of frivolous information.
So they slowly rocked in their chairs, staring at the incoming tide and praying that it held no cruel
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