The Lady in the Red Shoes
By Carolyn S. Smith

It was a long trek on the school bus – three hours each day split between morning and afternoon. I didn’t mind. During this gentle tour through some of the most beautiful country on earth, I was free. I could dream. I could contemplate life.

I contemplated life from a comfortable vantage point. Daddy had built us a nice house on the farm. Mother made me beautiful clothes, and our table groaned with good food. Our lives revolved around church and family. It was assumed I would go to college.

As the bus stopped at the homes of some of my schoolmates, I felt great sympathy. Some of these houses were shacks one board thick with only shutters to close on the empty holes that should have contained windows. A friend’s bedroom walls didn’t even have batten, so she could look straight through the cracks to the outside. Many of these kids came to school in dirty, worn clothing, and some had no hope that they would ever have anything better.

So I devised a plan. It was beautiful in its simplicity, and I spent many hours pleasantly contemplating how much better life would be when it was implemented. “Plain and simple,” as some would say: just take these kids from their poor, hopeless environment and give them to parents like mine. Then they would have all the advantages I had. Poverty would be eliminated. Everybody would go to college.

My reverie came to an abrupt halt the day we were visited by “The Lady in the Red Shoes.” Those red shoes showed that she was from town. Country women and girls wore brown or black that went with everything. Red meant she had money for frivolous things.

The lady had come to see mother. As they talked in the living room, mother began to cry. Mother was not a cry-baby, so this was serious. The lady said that I was not being adequately provided for. She said I was being deprived of what I needed to succeed in life. She said my parents would be neglectful if they did not find a way to provide what I needed.

She also exposed my plain and simple plan for the farce that it was. From the perspective of my innocent youth, I had failed to consider basic questions: Who gets to decide which children go and which children stay? Whose standard of living will be used to make these decisions?

I contemplated the anguish of being torn from my home, my parents, to be placed somewhere else with strangers because some other stranger thought I would be better off there. I contemplated the anguish my parents would suffer if they lost me. I looked at those shacks with new understanding. They weren’t just shacks anymore. They were homes. Families lived in them. Those kids weren’t kittens to be parceled out to “better” homes.

I have now practiced for about 15 years in Oklahoma’s juvenile deprived system. My childhood innocence has been replaced with a sad understanding that some of those shacks sheltered abuse. Some of those fine homes in town sheltered abuse, too. I understand that some children must be removed from their homes temporarily or permanently.

But I still approach this job with the understanding of my youth; these children are not kittens to be given away. Houses that appear as shacks to me may be real homes to the families who live there. My standard of living is higher than some, lower than some. So is theirs. So what. Anyone who claims to have a plain and simple answer to this dilemma — who claims to know who should make these decisions or what standards should be used — is as deluded as I was as a child. The best we can do will be an imperfect system.

A few years ago, mother told me that of all my accomplishments, the one that made her proudest was that I was valedictorian. That seemed odd to me. I asked her why. She said it was because I had proved to The Lady in the Red Shoes that I could succeed even without the World Book Encyclopedia the lady had been trying to sell that day. The lady’s son, with all the advantages these books had given him, came in second.

Ms. Smith practices in Ponca City.