The Underground Railroad(34)
“Sam?” Cora said.
“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and then added, “Whatever you do, man, keep out of Red’s Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the female patrons. His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.
“They think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.
“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage. The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a fantastic course! What if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men.
The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper today?
Sam shook his head and topped off the man’s drink.
Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this very topic. America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history. Controlled sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?
A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not the sort that goes to Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to know.”
“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam. We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”
Caesar was in agreement.
“Will they believe you over their white doctors?” Sam asked. “With what proof? There is no authority to turn to for redress—the town is paying for it all. And then there are all the other towns where colored pilgrims have been installed in the same system. This is not the only place with a new hospital.”
They worked it out over the kitchen table. Was it possible that not only the doctors but everyone who ministered to the colored population was involved in this incredible scheme? Steering the colored pilgrims down this or that path, buying them from estates and the block in order to conduct this experiment? All those white hands working in concert, committing their facts and figures down on blue paper. After Cora’s discussion with Dr. Stevens, Miss Lucy had stopped her one morning on her way to the museum. Had Cora given any thought to the hospital’s birth control program? Perhaps Cora could talk to some of the other girls about it, in words they could understand. It would be very appreciated, the white woman said. There were all sorts of new positions opening up in town, opportunities for people who had proven their worth.
Cora thought back to the night she and Caesar decided to stay, the screaming woman who wandered into the green when the social came to an end. “They’re taking away my babies.” The woman wasn’t lamenting an old plantation injustice but a crime perpetrated here in South Carolina. The doctors were stealing her babies from her, not her former masters.
“They wanted to know what part of Africa my parents hailed from,” Caesar said. “How was I to know? He said I had the nose of a Beninese.”
“Nothing like flattery before they geld a fellow,” Sam said.
“I have to tell Meg,” Caesar said. “Some of her friends spend evenings at Red’s. I know they have a few men they see there.”
“Who’s Meg?” Cora said.
“She’s a friend I’ve been spending time with.”
“I saw you walk down Main Street the other day,” Sam said. “She’s very striking.”
“It was a nice afternoon,” Caesar said. He took a sip of his beer, focusing on the black bottle and avoiding Cora’s eyes.
They made little progress on a course of action, struggling with the problem of whom to turn to and the possible reaction from the other colored residents. Perhaps they would prefer not to know, Caesar said. What were these rumors compared to what they had been freed from? What sort of calculation would their neighbors make, weighing all the promises of their new circumstances against the allegations and the truth of their own pasts? According to the law, most of them were still property, their names on pieces of paper in cabinets kept by the United States Government. For the moment, warning people was all they could do.