One of the reasons author Rosel George Brown is so successful in making the reader shudder with her imaginitive tale, David's Daddy, is her effective use of the notion of sanctity, and in particular, with the violation of sanctity.
The story begins on a dusty schoolyard, a setting that the reader unconsciously associates with safety, especially under the watchful and knowledgeable eyes of the venerable Miss Fremen. What safer place (or at least we would hope) for young kids to frolic? And who better than the wise and somewhat paranoid Miss Fremen to watch them? The reader is further lulled into schoolyard reveries with the mundane discussion of potty breaks.
But the mention of a nagging problem begins to disturb the sanctity of the school, and the unflappable Miss Fremen is confused by the hints of special Talent within one of her students. The ripples of disturbance are amplified by Brown's use of forshadowing with the following: ""...going to be just like his daddy." She shook her head fatalistically. "Bad blood in the family."" Brown also builds tension with words like anxious, frown, vulgar curiousity, and jolts us the words "bomb scare".
Then the pace eases as the reader is again lulled by the comforting nonsense and mundanities of a teacher taking care of her children. But when a lurking man with "...a hack, now and then, like a comment on whatever dreary thoughts such a man must have," slouches into the classroom, the reader is chilled by the interruption. Even the degenerate intruder is disturbed by his violation of this sanctum, and "appeared very ill at ease, because sometimes even grown people feel overawed when they walk into a school. Especially the kind of grown people who used to get called to the principal's office all the time."
The hushed silence and tension of the children send shivers up the spine of the reader, and the quick thinking Lillian makes a decision to violate the sanctity of the intruder's mind by calling upon the Talented child, Jerome. Punctuating the waiting with the thunder of the clock hand was a great touch.
The frenzied search for "...a dark place...a little place...[where the intruder was] scared of God..." keeps the reader's pulse going until the end, where Brown sends a slightly sad message about the mixed nature of Jerome's "gift". Brown tells us that the sanctity of Jerome's childhood is violated by his own gift because Jerome "would know assurance was not mine [Lillian's] to give."
Rosel George Brown's use of images of violations of sanctity, in particular, the sanctity of the perceived safety in a school, the sanctity of the privacy of the mind, and the sanctity of the innocence of childhood, make the violations in her story jarring, effective, and compelling.

--by Michael Bailey