Thrown-away Child

while, the cultural barriers between an old black southern lady and a cop from New York with a map of Ireland for a face seemed no thicker than a dragonfly’s wings.
    Ruby broke the quiet. “Mama, you told me always to remember the terrible way that white woman looked at us that time.”
    Mama finished with her hanky, tucked it back into her sleeve. “Time was that?”
    “The Christmas when you took Janny and me and Perry over to the city dump off Elysian Fields, and then we caught the bus back home ...”
     
    Arms full of discarded treasures, Violet Flagg and er three shivering ducklings stumped out from the Pi es of trash back up to Paris Avenue. They sheltered themselves from a sharp wind at the bus stop, and waitedfor the L. C. Simon coach that would carry home to the St. Bernard Project.
    Scattered around Violet’s feet was a Christmas bounty.  There were prayed-for mittens for Janny, which Violet would clean with a Woolite soak and repair with a few stitches around the raveled cuffs before wrapping them up with some paper and ribbons. For Perry, a little tin circus wagon attached to a miniature tricycle with flecked pictures of Happy Humphrey on it, from the Joe Palooka comic strip. Violet would fill in the paint flecks with ink and crayons. The present for Willis was nearly perfect: a wooden box lined in red satin, torn only some at one edge, containing a small leaded decanter and three out of four matching shot glasses. Violet felt badly about what she managed to find for Ruby, a banged-up white boy-doll with no clothes and not much hair. But Ruby seemed happy enough.
    Ten minutes went by as they waited for the bus, ten minutes that seemed like sixty. “I hate the cold, Mama, I just hate it so!” Ruby said. Janice agreed. “Me too. When I grow up I’m going to buy me a big old fur coat.” Perry stamped his feet. Violet drew the children around her, and rubbed their hands in hers, one after the other.
    A long black car pulled up alongside the bus stop. Thinking at first it was a funeral car, she pulled thechildren back. Violet made an X over her heart with a chilly finger, and said under her breath, “God kiss, the devil miss.” Up in the country, people said that whenever a hearse passed by.
    It was a Cadillac car, all right, but not the kind with the long sprays of waxy lilies sticking out the back over the casket. Same as a hearse, though, there was a colored man in a leather-brim chauffeur’s cap sitting up front. And did she recognize that man? Why, yes-—it was Matthew. Violet relaxed some.
    A back window whirred down. A lady in a delicate chapeau of purple felt pushed her head partly out the window. She held on to the chromed window edge with one hand, which was protected from the elements by a contrasting purple glove. Tufts of lacquered gold hair showed beneath her daintily cocked hat. Behind a scrim of millinery gauze was a vanilla pudding face, with wafer lips and dimpled cheeks liberally rouged.
    “Yoo-hoo!” called the pudding puss from the window of the purring limousine. “Why, Vi—is that you there?”
    Violet stepped in front of the children. “Oh let me see the shiny car,” Perry said, tugging at her skirt. “Who that is?” She pushed him off toward the girls. Ruby and Janny peeked around the sides of their mama’s coat to look at the lady in purple riding in the big black car. Hand held to her mouth, Violet whispered sternly to the children, “Shush!” Then she stepped toward the back of the big car and bent over a bit, in a sort of bow. She said, “Yeah you right, it’s me, Miz LaRue. What you be doing out Paris Avenue way today?”
    “Well, being that it’s Tuesday I’m on my way over to your very own church—the Land of Dreams Tabernacle, of course. Now you know that, Vi.”
    “You right, Miz LaRue.”
    “Can you believe it? Here it is, Christmas near upon us.” Mrs. Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux—or Miss Ava LaRue, as Hippo’s wife preferred to be called, this being what she referred to as her stage name—spoke with an excited rush. She stroked her forehead with the back of one of her soft gloves. “Oh, and my charity committee’s got ever so much to accomplish yet in working out details with the Negro ministry and all. Youknow, the poor families of the city must have their holiday baskets—and proper gifts for the little colored children ...”
    She stopped talking then, taking note of six big, inquisitive eyes belonging to three shivering