Take My Hand(67)

Eugenics? Why hadn’t I thought of that word? I’d learned about it in an ethics class once.

“Eugenics,” repeated Ty. “Like gene selection.”

“In 1919,” Lou continued, “thirty-three states enacted sterilization statutes. But in Alabama, state legislators never were taken by the idea. Here, we didn’t go as far as some of the other states.”

“Why is that?” Ty asked.

Lou shrugged. “I don’t know. I hesitate to say it was for moral reasons, but it could have been. Eugenicists never gathered enough support here to make anything of it.”

“So the idea was what . . . to stop us from having children because we were inferior?” I whispered.

“Well, the ideas were often aimed at specific populations that included Black people, yes. But also the poor, the mentally retarded, the disabled, the insane.”

“So that’s why Mrs. Seager went after India.” I was all cried out, but this dawning realization opened my wound fresh again. Why had I not thought of that before? Mrs. Seager probably put the girls in three of these misguided categories: poor, Black, and mentally unfit. Had I done the same? I had initially deemed the girls unfit to be mothers, too. Because they were poor and Black. Because they were young. Because they were illiterate. My head spun with shame.

“Did they target poor white folks, too?” Ty asked.

Lou nodded. “Back in 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that compulsory sterilization of people deemed unfit was constitutional. People in asylums all over this country were sterilized.”

“I never knew that,” Ty said.

“Neither did I, before I started researching.”

“So what did Judge Johnson rule exactly?” Ty asked.

“He rejected the Wyatt v. Alderholt statute. In Alabama, state legislators had passed a bill that mandated sterilization for every person in an insane asylum.”

Lou rearranged a stack of papers. It appeared he was still working through everything in his mind, fitting the pieces together himself in the same way that we were trying to.

“Lou, listen,” I whispered. “We’ve got to help you.”

“A local law firm across town has agreed to give me some staff support. There’s no need.”

“You could have asked my mother,” Ty said.

“Your mother has helped. She’s the one I call when I get stuck on something, and she helps talk me through it. And that won’t change.”

“Everybody keeps thinking you’re getting rich off this case,” I said. “Little do they know.”

Ty and Lou laughed, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“I can type,” I lied.

“I’m sure you can.”

“Let us help.”

“Civil.”

I had a hand in breaking all of this. I had to have a hand in fixing it.

“So will the Williams girls get anything in their damages case?” Ty asked. “Everybody keep asking me.”

“First, we need to win this one. That’ll give them vindication and justice. It will also generate positive attention. When it’s over, they can focus on compensation. Yes, I’m hoping those girls will never have to worry about money again in life.”

Lou was talented and mature, so it was easy to forget sometimes that he was, in certain ways, just as naive as the rest of us.





THIRTY-FIVE





They’d finally put some equipment on the Dixie Court play yard. Mace and I sat on the edge of the spinning wheel. Whoever had installed it had forgotten to oil the main crank in the center, and it was creaky when it spun. Mace braced his feet on the ground. Every now and then, he used his toe to move it back and forth so that it whined faintly. The two of us sat watching the sun sink in the sky.

“What I’m supposed to say to them newspaper people? Half the time I can’t even understand what they be saying.”

“Say good morning and keep walking,” I told him. “Say no comment.”

“?‘No comment’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That means you have nothing to say to them.”

He breathed out slowly. Although they had installed brand-new equipment, the single lamp in the park didn’t work, so the kids usually cleared out at dusk. We were alone, lit faintly by the light in apartment windows, though Mace’s face was completely in shadow.

“Do you ever wish we’d never filed the lawsuit?” I asked him.

“What you mean?”

“Do you wish I’d left it alone and never stirred up all this trouble?”

I had come over to see the girls, but they were eating dinner, and Mace asked me to go for a walk with him. The wheel was as far as we got. We had not talked much since we’d come back from DC, and I hadn’t even had much of a chance to ask him what he’d thought about testifying before Congress.

“The onliest thing I wish,” he said, “is that they had never butchered my girls. I ask God all the time why that happened. What I done wrong. Maybe I should have took another wife. Maybe if they had a mama it might not have happened.”

I flinched when he said that. I had tried to be a mother to them. I had tried to do what his wife would have done.

“I’m sorry,” he said.