“That that child, that Christmas boy, is a nigger.”
“A what?” the matron said.
Backthrust in her chair, she glared at the younger woman. “A ne—I don’t believe it!” she cried. “I don’t believe it!”
“You don’t have to believe it,” the other said. “But he knows it.
He stole him away because of it.”
The matron was past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes.
“I don’t believe it!” she said.
But on the third day she sent for the dietitian.
She looked as if she had not slept in some time.
The dietitian, on the contrary, was quite fresh, quite serene.
She was still unshaken when the matron told her the news, that the man and the child had been found.
“At Little Rock,” the matron said.
“He tried to put the child into an orphanage there.
They thought he was crazy and held him until the police came.” She looked at the younger woman. “You told me ...
The other day you said ...
How did you know about this?”
The dietitian did not look away.
“I didn’t.
I had no idea at all.
Of course I knew it didn’t mean anything when the other children called him Nigger—”
“Nigger?” the matron said. “The other children?”
“They have been calling him Nigger for years.
Sometimes I think that children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age don’t see.
Children, and old people like him, like that old man.
That’s why he always sat in the door yonder while they were playing in the yard: watching that child.
Maybe he found it out from hearing the other children call him Nigger.
But he might have known beforehand.
If you remember, they came here about the same time.
He hadn’t been working here hardly a month before the night—that Christmas, don’t you remember—when Ch—they found the baby on the doorstep?” She spoke smoothly, watching the baffled, shrinking eyes of the older woman full upon her own as though she could not remove them.
The dietitian’s eyes were bland and innocent. “And so the other day we were talking and he was trying to tell me something about the child.
It was something he wanted to tell me, tell somebody, and finally he lost his nerve maybe and wouldn’t tell it, and so I left him.
I wasn’t thinking about it at all.
It had gone completely out of my mind when—” Her voice ceased.
She gazed at the matron while into her face there came an expression of enlightenment, sudden comprehension; none could have said if it were simulated or not. “Why, that’s why it ...
Why, I see it all, now.
What happened just the day before they were gone, missing.
I was in the corridor, going to my room; it was the same day I happened to be talking to him and he refused to tell me whatever it was he started to tell, when all of a sudden he came up and stopped me; I thought then it was funny because I had never before seen him inside the house.
And he said—he sounded crazy, he looked crazy.
I was scared, too scared to move, with him blocking the corridor—he said,
‘Have you told her yet?’ and I said,
‘Told who?
Told who what?’ and then I realised he meant you; if I had told you that he had tried to tell me something about the child.
But I didn’t know what he meant for me to tell you and I wanted to scream and then he said,
‘What will she do if she finds it out?’ and I didn’t know what to say or how to get away from him and then he said,
‘You don’t have to tell me.
I know what she will do.
She will send him to the one for niggers.’ ”
“For negroes?”
“I don’t see how we failed to see it as long as we did.
You can look at his face now, his eyes and hair.