This is a collection of photographs. 

        Here is the head of a grinning baby. The picture is torn near the upper right corner, and on its back are streaks of dried glue in a swirling pattern, to which bits of dark paper cling. 

        This passport-sized shot shows a black woman with handsome, unsmiling face, hair combed severely back, dark bands of some sort visible across the neck. The small part of her white dress that shows disappears in the white background, making her head appear to float, as if in milk. 

        One large close-up of a tottering baby is so far out of focus that only two grey spots and a faint line between them can be seen in the white oval of the face. Yet in another shot a black face and a pale one touch, with no loss of definition in either the black or the white.
        That is a picture to break hearts.
        A white ribbon arcs across the mother’s black hair. The white of her dress and veil is the white of the background, and the shadowed white of the child’s face. The pattern in the woven border of her veil is black on white; it arcs over her shoulder. The child’s black eyes speak to the mother’s modulated blackness.
        The black cheek and lips of the mother are pressed to the child’s white cheek in an achingly palpable kiss.
        The child is adult and pensive; the mother inward, electric.