Take My Hand(19)

Mr. Ralsey’s cigarette smoke filled the dining room and someone had turned on the radio. WRMA played gospel on Sundays, and somebody with a voice was singing “Just Another Day.” I knew the song well, but at that moment, I could barely hear the words. I was trying to digest what Ty had just told me.

“What are you two over there whispering about?” Ty placed the pudding on the table.

“You,” Alicia said, and Mrs. Ralsey laughed.

I sank into a chair.

Mrs. Ralsey spooned pudding into her mouth. “Civil, did Ty tell you he was the graduation speaker for his class?”

“No, ma’am.”

“In the course of the speech, he tried to be respectful to the college president, Dr. Barnes. But he kept calling the man Dr. Bailey. At first, we didn’t know who he was talking about. We figured he was talking about some professor. But then . . .” She chuckled. “Ty calls the man up to the podium. He turns around in this serious voice and say, Dr. Bailey, I want to present this gift to you in appreciation of everything you’ve done for our class this year and by this time you can hear the whispering in the crowd. Everybody was about to bust out laughing, but Dr. Barnes didn’t seem to mind that the name was wrong. You best believe he came right up to that podium and took that gold pen Ty handed him.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Mrs. Ralsey, this banana pudding sure is good,” Alicia said. “Tastes like my grandma pudding.”

“Thank you, Alicia.”

The pudding tasted bland on my tongue. I looked over at Alicia. She and I hadn’t discussed the Williams girls since I first confided in her at the diner, and now she had been running around with Ty behind my back doing some kind of investigation.

“Mrs. Ralsey?” I turned to Ty’s mama. “Do you know anything about the drug Depo-Provera?”

“Depo what, baby?”

“Depo-Provera. It’s the birth control drug we give to some of the patients at the clinic. An injection that suppresses ovulation for three months.”

“No, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it. Why?”

“I was just telling Civil that I read up on it,” Ty interjected. “And I discussed it with one of my old professors. His brother works in Washington, DC, for the federal government. They’re still doing trials on that drug. I don’t think it’s safe, but they’re using it over at the clinic.”

“If it weren’t safe, Ty, they wouldn’t be injecting people with it.” Mrs. Ralsey placed two elbows on the table.

“Unless you’re poor and Black. You know how they did those men at Tuskegee.”

Mrs. Ralsey’s face turned serious. All of us had been stunned by the revelations about the experiments on men at Tuskegee. Even though the study went on for forty years, none of us knew anything about it before the summer of 1972. It was unthinkable to us that they left hundreds of men untreated, letting them die long after penicillin was available.

“Ty, what are you saying?” Mrs. Ralsey asked.

Mr. Ralsey appeared in the archway that separated the living and dining rooms, a stub of a cigarette dangling from his fingers. “What’s this?”

“Ty is saying that the birth control drug they’re using over at the family planning clinic is dangerous,” his wife answered.

“The clinical studies suggest it causes cancer,” Ty said.

“In humans?” his father asked.

“Mice. Monkeys. The studies began five years ago. And the FDA rejected its approval.”

“Well it’s not unheard of for unapproved drugs to be prescribed for certain uses. Civil, are your patients aware of the risks of the drug?” Mrs. Ralsey looked at me.

“I think so. I mean, I guess.”

“Are they given something to read and sign about the risks and side effects?”

I tried to think of the women who had been given their first shots since I started. Yes, we had given them documents to sign, but Mrs. Seager had coached us to summarize the document. Just standard language. Nothing alarming. The women I’d seen had not actually read the document. They had only listened to me speak, trusted that I had correctly translated the block of letters on the page. Even the literate ones didn’t read the forms before signing.

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Alicia said slowly, “even if the drug does cause cancer, it doesn’t overtake our concerns right now. It would take a long time for cancer to show up. That’s far off in the future. But a baby could happen any day now.”

That was probably why Alicia hadn’t mentioned it to me. She thought pregnancy was a more pressing concern and was convinced we were still doing important work.

“Alicia, that argument doesn’t make sense.” Ty shook his head. “You can’t have a baby if you dead.”

Mr. Ralsey, who had been listening quietly, spoke. “Ty’s right. If it’s true that these drugs carry serious risk, then you are essentially experimenting on those women the same way they experimented on those men in Macon County.”

Not just women. Girls. I swallowed. I had tried to forget that I’d given India Williams a shot, hoped that it would just pass quietly through her system until it wore off. Then I’d tried to get them into an apartment to make up for my mistake. But cancer? Ty had to be wrong. Maybe they had altered the medication into a better formula since that study. The clinical studies were on animals, not humans.