Free The Wedding by Dorothy West Page B

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 ofus 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 ageconsigned 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