Tone describes the way the author seems to feel regarding the subject of the text. In this poem, Randall presents the mother as incredibly sympathetic—her primary concern is the safety of her daughter, and this is a terribly relatable desire to any parent. She "smiled to know her child / Was in the sacred place" and that the little girl would be safe from violence and discord there. Then, she hears the explosion at the church and her eyes grow "wild" while she "clawed through" rubble, only to find her little girl's shoe and no other sign of the child. It is truly a horrifying thought, and one that feels so visceral and common to any parent—that our children might be subject to some kind of violence, that we could lose them so tragically. In presenting the mother in this way, Randall's tone is quite sympathetic; he obviously feels for the grieving mother. He also seems to be calling out the injustice of the situation via irony; the little girl ought to be safe in church, far away from the dogs and clubs and hoses and guns. This irony adds a good deal of anger to the tone as well.
The speaker in Dudley Randall's 1968 poem, written five years after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in which four little girls were killed, uses a poignant tone. The first four stanzas are a conversation between a mother and daughter; the mother won't allow her child to join a protest march for fear that she'll be hurt or killed but is pleased to send her off to church in her Sunday best, believing that she'll be safe in that sacred place.
The mother's sense of loss is communicated in her final question, "But, baby, where are you?” as she finds her daughter's shoe buried in the debris of the collapsed church. The juxtaposition of "clubs and hoses, guns and jails" with "white gloves" and "white shoes" deepens the poignance of the innocent life lost to organized violence despite the mother's loving care.
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