The House of Eve (103)
* * *
When Eleanor arrived at Howard Hospital she took the elevator up to the top floor. As her kitten heels clicked across the white tiles, she said hello to a few of the nurses on duty before walking back to her husband’s office. As assistant chief of staff, William had a well-appointed corner suite. Eleanor could hear voices from the office floating down the hall.
“Darling.” William beamed when he saw her, and then stood from behind his desk. A woman in a white lab coat with a stethoscope hanging from her neck sat in the seat across from him.
“I’d like you to meet our newest doctor on staff, Dr. Pearsall. She’s an optometrist and has just arrived from Philadelphia.”
The woman stood and reached out her hand to Eleanor. Eleanor shook it. Her touch was soft and somehow familiar. For whatever reason, Eleanor had a hard time making herself pull away.
“How do you do, Dr. Pearsall?” Eleanor looked at the woman’s face. Although her mouth smiled warmly, the feeling had chilled just below her dark eyes.
“I’m just fine. Happy to be here. Please, call me Ruby.”
“Where’s Wilhelmina?” William broke into Eleanor’s thoughts.
“Pretending to be sick. I think she’s suffering from summer fever.” Eleanor chuckled. “She sends her regrets and asks that we bring her back some dessert.”
William grinned. “Dr. Pearsall, would you care to join us for lunch? We are heading over to a new bistro that just opened up on U.”
Dr. Pearsall appeared caught off guard and quickly shook her head. “Thank you for the invitation, but I need to go down and get settled.”
Then something on the wall above William’s head caught her eye. “That’s a beautiful painting.” She pointed.
“Oh, our daughter is quite the artist.” William lit up.
“She has an eye,” Dr. Pearsall said, still staring at it. “Well, I better get on my horse. It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Pride.”
“Likewise,” Eleanor said, smiling, and then watched the optometrist walk out the door.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My late grandmother became pregnant with my mother at age fourteen and gave birth to her at fifteen. It was 1955, and having a child out of wedlock was the ultimate sin. So they hid her pregnancy from everyone. Even to the child she gave birth to. My mother did not know her mother was her mother until she was in the third grade; she had been raised by her grandmother, and it had never been openly discussed. My grandmother told me that she was the black sheep of the family. Both she and my mother shared a feeling of deep-rooted disgrace, and as I was growing up, I could see it play out in their turbulent relationship.
My mother does not think there was love between her parents. She describes it as a onetime hookup. My grandfather did not make my grandmother an honest woman by marrying her. He couldn’t. His family was very light-skinned and from the “right” side of the tracks. She was mahogany brown and from the lower-class section of North Philadelphia. Like oil and water, they were not intended to mix. My grandfather married someone else, with whom he went on to have children, and my grandmother and mother were stuck with the burden of this lifelong embarrassment.
The idea for The House of Eve started with a what-if. What if my grandmother had had money and opportunity, and when she found herself pregnant and in trouble she was sent away to a home for unwed mothers? To erase the humiliation of bearing a child out of wedlock, and to be able to return to her life in North Philadelphia and start over. Like it never happened. Searching for the answer to this question, I read The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, who so graciously answered all my emails about this moment in history. I found articles about women who had been forced to surrender their babies and I found these two particularly helpful: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/19/maternity-homes-where-mind-control-was-used-teen-moms-give-up-their-babies/ and https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/273834/wayward-past/.
The astonishing fact is that between 1945 and 1973, 1.5 million women in the U.S. lost children to forced adoption in homes for unwed mothers. I say lost because they were forced to give their babies up. Until 1973, abortion was illegal and punishable by imprisonment for both the mother and the doctor. Unmarried women were also pressed to give up their babies because there were no IVF treatments, and the only way for married couples who suffered from infertility to have a child was through adoption.
But in trying to connect the dots between my grandmother’s story and the research, I didn’t find the story I wanted to tell, because of all the stories of women I uncovered, I couldn’t find a single story about a Black woman. When I asked around, I was told that Black women went down south to hide out, and then left the baby with a relative. Or they had the baby and dealt with the consequences because there was no other option. My mind couldn’t accept that this was it. Black women’s lives have never been a single narrative. There had to have been a small group of elite Black people who could not conceive but still wanted a family. How did the stories of wealthy Black families dealing with infertility play out in the 1940s and ’50s?
In order to find the story, I needed to understand the lives of these Black families. I read Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. This book was instrumental in laying out the life of people like the Prides—families that could trace their roots back to three generations of education and financial privilege.