Take My Hand(22)

Miss Pope whispered, “Now, you know how some white folks feel about Black bodies. They think we can tolerate pain better than them. According to some of these documents I’m about to show you, some of them even thought syphilis couldn’t kill us. It was as much an experiment about the effects of the disease as it was a crazy white man’s idea of a laboratory game with Black bodies.”

I wasn’t sure what Alicia and Ty were thinking, but I was thinking about the families. The wives. The children. We had only just heard about this experiment the summer before, and though it had been the conversation at many Black folks’ dinner tables in Montgomery, most of my community had not personally known any of the victims. I had already graduated and left Tuskegee when the story broke over the summer of 1972. So I had not had a chance to digest what it meant to our little community on campus.

Now I could not bear to think my next thought: The federal government could not possibly be doing the same thing with Depo and Black women.

“You worked here,” I said. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Miss Pope, but how could you not know?”

Miss Pope opened the top folder on her stack. “Baby, I keep asking myself the same question. How could it be happening right up under my feet? But once I learned about the study, I started collecting everything I could find about it. Y’all should start with this. It’s an underground newsletter that was circulating around Washington, DC, a few years back. A Black statistician by the name of Bill Jenkins found out about the study and tried to ring the alarm. You know why nobody listened?”

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because even though regular folks didn’t know, the medical folks knew. In some respects, the government did this in plain sight. They were publishing articles in medical journals about it and everything. Either they didn’t see what was wrong with it, or nobody cared about poor colored folks down in Alabama.”

“Or they thought they were doing good,” I said.

Alicia put a knuckle to her eye. Ty was still, his silhouette so dark I could not make out his face.

Miss Pope pushed the stack of materials toward us. “Stay as long as you like. I already had my dinner.”





TWELVE




Jackson

2016


Of all the movement stories that haunt me to this day, Medgar Evers’s murder is right up there. I have never driven through Jackson without picturing his bloody body lying in the driveway, his wife and children crouched in terror on the bathroom floor. I remember seeing him on television and thinking him courageous and charismatic. I was thirteen years old when he died, and the news marked a line into adulthood for me. If you lived in the Deep South in the 1960s, you had very few illusions about the dangers of movement work. Folks either walked right into it or stayed clear. Some just watched from the sidelines for fear of losing their jobs or worse. Even with all that we went through in Alabama, Mississippi was still its own kind of place. Nina Simone had said a mouthful when she sang “Mississippi Goddam.” In that Mississippi delta with its flat swaths of farmland, Evers had marched right up to the doors of the lonely cabins sprinkled in the middle of those farms and registered voters.

I always believed the movement leaders had to be a little wild-haired. Like that fearless Fred Shuttlesworth. I swear, that man was from another world. This might surprise you, but I thought we had turned a corner by the seventies. I knew racism still existed, but I was hopeful that Black Power and education would sustain us and keep it at bay. We’d been to hell and back, so the seventies had to get better.

When I arrive in Jackson I’m not just thinking of Evers, I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy. I didn’t even learn about that phrase until I got to medical school and was under the mentorship of a Black female. As soon as I heard it, I felt a sharp pain in my body. Hamer had been sterilized without her permission in 1961, and the procedure was so common, women had labeled it. I wish I’d known about that term when I was your age, Anne. I wish they’d taught us that in nursing classes at Tuskegee. Maybe it might have changed some things.

I’ve been on the road since 6:30 a.m. and I need caffeine, but I’m so eager to see Alicia that I don’t stop for coffee. I find her community not far from the shopping plaza, a redbrick entry sign bearing the words Riverwood Plantation. I wonder if the plantation fantasy bothers Alicia or if she thinks about it at all.

The houses in Riverwood Plantation are newer construction brick homes. Alicia’s house is the fourth on the right. Three cars and a van are parked in the semicircular driveway. Alicia’s husband owns a body repair shop. They have three grown children—all boys, all married, all college graduates. Two from Mississippi State. One from Tougaloo. Six grandchildren. Husband is on the deacon board, Alicia a missionary. The Southern American dream.

When Alicia ended her nursing career after having children, I was not surprised. A lot of Black women in the South had that dream of becoming a housewife back then. We called it “sitting down.” Alicia had always been traditional, and she’d dreamed about having her own family. My upbringing was different. Mama had never worked, so I had been raised knowing that I wanted a career.

I ring the doorbell, but Alicia opens so quickly she must have been watching through the window. I’m punctual, if not a couple of minutes early. The first thing I notice is that her eyebrows are still penciled—dark and perfect. Before I can get a really good look at her, she envelops me in a red flowered housedress and citrusy scent. “Lord, it’s really you,” she says breathlessly. “Ooh, girl, you lost all that weight. You feel like a feather.”