The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  In medical school, there was a fellow named Larry Johnson I’d met when we played at Brown University. I told Mommy, “He’s six-one and he’s really sharp.” She raised her eyebrows. Then I said, “There’s this other boy at medical school. He’s so quiet, he’s like country, and he’s not pleasing to look at because he’s so huge, so I can’t get hot over him. But he’s very nice.”

  I was talking about Shearwood McClelland, whose name was pronounced Sherwood and who had finally gotten over thinking I was psychic and asked me to go to the movies with him, which I couldn’t do because I was either buried in my books or off on weekends with the band. But we did study together sometimes, and we talked. We talked about life and philosophy and psychology. Shearwood wanted to be a psychiatrist, which was a mistake, to my mind.

  “You’re too tall and your hands are too big. Besides, no white person’ll come to you because you’re black, and no black person’ll come to you because black people are not going to say they’re crazy, so you’re going to be poor, you’re going to starve to death. If you ask me, you should be in orthopedics because you’ve got big hands. People are always going to break their bones, so you could be sure of having work.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, and went on talking about the philosophy he read in his books. I quoted Daddy to him, which was everything I knew about life and living, and it convinced Shearwood that I was a deep thinker with a knack of putting things simply.

  Shearwood kept coming on, not like gangbusters, but quiet and steady and always so nice. Meanwhile I was running after Larry Johnson. Finally it occurred to me that I was being stupid. I told myself: Larry Johnson obviously has other things to do, so why don’t I just turn around and reciprocate a little here with Wood, at least by going to the movies? I decided that about April of our first year in medical school. In May, Shearwood’s mother died, and that’s when we became really close.

  Like my father, Shearwood’s father worked at two jobs. In Gary, Indiana, where the family lived, he was a laborer in a steel mill, and when not needed there, he drove a dump truck. It was Shearwood’s mother who had been the great influence in his life. She was a school-crossing guard. She was preaching the same doctrine in Indiana that my parents were in New Jersey: study, study, study. My mother used to talk about “barrelhouse niggers”, people who were always dancing and drinking. “In twenty years,” she said, “they’ll be just the same as they are today, or they’ll be dead.” Shearwood’s mother said, “My son is going to be a doctor. He’s going to be a doctor. He’s no ‘barrelhouse nigger’.” Shearwood and I used to laugh and say, “Did your mother know my mother?”

  When Shearwood was accepted at Princeton, it was such a foreign idea that his friends in Gary thought he was going to Princeton, Indiana. His father wanted him to go to Purdue and become an engineer, but his mother spoke of his becoming a doctor as though it were the natural order of things, and perhaps for the same reason as Daddy did: because being a physician gives an individual a place and a stature in the world that can never afterward be denied him.

  When Shearwood’s mother died that spring of our first year, the life went out of Shearwood. He stopped eating and lost a startling amount of weight. He gave up studying because, however long he stared at a book, the words refused to swim into focus and make sense. Nothing I said could pull him out of the dark depths where he wandered lost, but my presence was a bit of comfort and I spent what time with him I could until he decided to leave medical school without taking final exams and start over again as a first-year student in the fall.

  It was another year after that before he began to get back to being his old self. Saying he wanted to meet my parents, Shearwood came down to Long Branch with me one weekend, and afterward Daddy, who had no use for any man who came around one of his daughters, grunted his approval of Shearwood. Daddy loved honesty. When he encountered anyone, he was always thinking: Yes, but what do you really want? And later he’d say, “I know what that joker really wanted.” The honesty with which Shearwood approached Daddy was what won him over.

  Shearwood said, “Look, Mr. Thornton, I know how much you love your daughter. If I had a daughter, I’d love her that much, too. Now, what I want to say is this. Yvonne and I, we’re in New York, we could sneak around, but I think it’s better to come and ask you if I can take her out, and if you say no, I’ll understand.”

  My father sort of said, “Oh.” Then, “Sure.” And later to me, “That’s a nice boy, Cookie. That’s a really nice boy.”

  He didn’t fail, however, to start talking about “Samsonite weddings,” as he called them. “She says: ‘I want to live with him to find out how we are with each other. We don’t want to get married; we just want to live together.’ It’s shack up; if you don’t like it, pack up. Except the next thing you know she’s pregnant and her life is over. That’s what happens. Women are to have kids. Men are to run around. It’s the natural order of things.”

  He had always drilled into us that women can do anything, that they are brighter than men, but when he was talking about sex, he changed his tune. “You stupid women! Emotionally you’re stupid. You can’t help yourselves because God made you that way.” Then he’d repeat his dictum about the three seconds in an hour that a woman is weak, and then the six seconds in the second hour, and how in the third hour the six seconds become nine, and, “He can zoom right in and get you. It’s just hormones. Even if he doesn’t kiss you in the ear, you’ll decide you want to kiss him in the ear. You get weak. You’re stupid.”

  At P & S, Shearwood and I would sit talking by the hour about C. S. Lewis, Nietzsche, Rollo May, and an art-of-living book Shearwood called his bible, Advice from a Failure. It was during these long intellectual discussions that I’d think: Shearwood would never do anything. Two hours would go by, then three, and I’d find myself looking at him and thinking: He’s so sweet. He’s got a lovely smile.… And all of a sudden I’d catch myself. If Daddy hadn’t warned me about the three-second rule so often, maybe it would have been shack up and pack up and all my plans would have gone out the window, a lifetime’s goal sabotaged in three seconds. Instead, I’d remember Daddy’s voice saying, “But…but I’m here to tell you that you can select the time you’re gonna be stupid,” and I knew this wasn’t the time.

  One day Mom and I were talking and, to my surprise, she remarked, “If you’re going to get married, the best thing is to marry somebody who loves you. It’s not necessary that you love him.”

  I said, “Can we go around on that again, Mom?”

  “What I’m saying is that if you have a choice, it’s better to marry a guy who cares more for you than you care for him. In a relationship, one person always loves more than the other; it’s never equal; and a woman’s a lot better off if she’s the one who’s loved rather than the one doing most of the loving.”

  I asked Daddy what he thought about this, and he said: “Your mother’s right. She’s absolutely right. You know how I love your mother. I’d go through fire for her. And that’s the good way for it to be. Women have the capacity to love anybody, but men are dogs. It’s in their nature to run around. But if a man latches on to somebody he truly loves, if the sun rises and sets in that one woman, if she is all he ever wants, then he’ll stick by her. On the other hand, if he doesn’t feel that strong, then things are tilted in his favor; he has the power, and he abuses the woman. I see that a lot of times,” Daddy said. “The guy gets into the relationship, he likes her, but that fades after a while, and then she’s in a pickle.”

  I was in the third year of medical school when Shearwood asked me to marry him. “Unh, unh,” I told him. “‘I’m not marrying anybody until I finish medical school and that M.D. is behind my name and I have at least a year of obstetrical training. And if I marry anybody then, I won’t change my name. I’m always going to be Dr. Thornton, in honor of my father.”

  Shearwood said calmly, “I know that. If I have to wait five years, I will. I’ll wait however long I have to because you
are the only woman I will ever love.”

  “Shearwood,” I said, “you’re too serious about this. Lighten up.”

  “Now we can lighten up,” he answered. “I just wanted to let you know my intentions.”

  Before this, in one of our times of long talks, I had mentioned that I didn’t ever expect to get married but that if I did, my dream was of a three-carat, marquis-cut diamond for an engagement ring. One of my college professors had worn a two-carat, emerald-cut diamond that glistened in the sun and was so beautiful that it got me interested in diamonds, and I’d looked them up in a book and decided that what I liked was the marquis cut.

  When I described it to Mommy, she said I was too materialistic and I said it didn’t make any difference if I was because I’d never find a black guy with that much money, but one thing was sure: I wasn’t going to settle for what she’d settled for—going to Woolworth’s and paying $1.50 and I love you dearly and love is better than anything else and you don’t need a ring.

  Shearwood asked me, if we were to become engaged, what I wanted for an engagement ring, and I said, ‘“You know what I want.” “Yvonne, my father is a steelworker, not the chairman of the board.”

  “I didn’t say that’s what I had to have. I said that’s what I wanted.”

  “Then that’s what you’re going to get.”

  Medical students could earn extra money by following surgeons around and assisting on appendectomies and such.

  Shearwood went to work in the Emergency Room at Harlem Hospital during the summer and on nights and weekends and holidays to save up for my ring. He was cracking chests and sewing up people, and more and more he began to say, “Hey, I like doing this stuff!” Eventually he changed his mind about becoming a psychiatrist in favor of being an orthopedic surgeon.

  My mother said, “If he can do this for you, work so hard to show you that he loves you, that’s a good man. There are times when you really need a man—when you’re pregnant, when you’re incapacitated—and you know Shearwood’ll be there for you. He’ll take care of you because he loves you.”

  Daddy commented: “The Bible says the man is supposed to work by the sweat of his brow and the woman’s supposed to go forth and be fertile, go forth and procreate. What’s happening now is that women are having babies and working by the sweat of their own brow and doing everything else, too. Why? Because the guy doesn’t love her enough to get two jobs and she doesn’t want to lose him, so she’s doing all this stuff. But Shearwood gets the job to get you the ring, so you know he’s gonna look after you, you know he’s gonna be there when you need him.”

  I saw what they meant, but it was all somewhat theoretical until the day I did poorly on an exam in biochemistry, the first time I had ever done badly on a test, and I went to pieces. Shearwood was there for me, holding me, comforting me, talking to me with the voice of reason; not once saying, Aw, don’t worry about it, like another man might have. Other men I knew, when it was a crisis situation, they fell apart, they had no depth to their being, but “steady as she goes,” that was Shearwood.

  Now I was beginning to understand why Mommy and Daddy claimed there was no such thing as easy love. “The word is used so often,” they, said. “It’s such an overused word. People say love, but what they usually mean is lust.”

  Mommy explained, “There is such a thing as responsibility. companionability, working together. You have to develop love. You don’t even know what the man is when you’ve only known him a couple of months or a couple of years. He’s gotta show his love. He can’t just say it.”

  “Look at your mom and me,” Daddy said. “We were young kids. Yeah, we liked each other, but it’s working together, it’s sacrificing together, it’s doing the same things, caring for each other when one’s sick, doin’ something you maybe don’t want to do—when you’ve done all that, then you can start talkin’ about love.”

  I felt lucky that Mommy and Daddy had talked like that to us when we were kids because when I was twenty-one and got in the situation of having to make choices, their words came back to me. I listened to other women saying, “Oh, look at that hunk. Look at those buns.” I watched them fall head over heels for somebody who was cute and flashy, which is what the culture says you’re supposed to want. And then I’d look at Shearwood. He was no Rudolph Valentino. What he was, was my best friend. Our love affair, if such it was, wasn’t exciting, wasn’t romantic. But when I looked five years, ten years down the road, as Daddy had always taught us to do—”Size up the situation first. Try to see to the end of it. If it looks okay to the end of it, take that path. But if there’s any problem with it, don’t even bother wasting your time”—I looked, and as far as I looked, there was Shearwood: intelligent, gentle, generous, caring. Yes, he was the man for me.

  Even if he didn’t have cute buns. As Daddy said, “For such a big guy, he doesn’t have enough butt to last him until tomorrow morning. But,” Daddy added, “don’t even think of getting him on a diet. He’ll be a big man all his life. He’ll be heavy. Don’t try to slim him down. Nobody can buck what he’s made to be.”

  Daddy believed that a person’s attributes are God-given. “If God didn’t want you to be the way you are,” he said, “you wouldn’t be that way.” In his opinion, if you’re happy-go-lucky, that’s the way you are. If you’re calm and deliberate, you’re that type of person. You can’t change no matter how much you try. Nor can you be changed. He admitted that he’d tried to make Jeanette helpful and loving and generous. He’d tried to make Donna outgoing and worldly like Jeanette. He’d tried to make Linda stand up for herself. But, as he said when we were grown “I’ve got five of you guys, and I couldn’t change one of you into something God didn’t make you to be. All could do finally was to try to steer you toward a path that was going to protect you when you got older.”

  For me as the middle child, it was finding someone to be, acquiring an identity of my own, which translated into becoming a physician. It still happens these days that people, when I came into a room, look at me with that little frown on their forehead, which means, What’s that black woman doing here? Then we’re introduced and it’s, “Oh, Dr. Thornton,” and I look up to heaven and silently say, Thank you, Mommy. Thank you, Daddy.

  For Linda it was to be dentistry, and for Rita, like me, it was to be medicine. Linda, having seen how hard I had to study to make it as a biology major, gave some thought to switching to a major in the Russian language. Daddy was skeptical.

  “What’re you gonna do with that?” he demanded.

  “Become an interpreter,” Linda told him. “Maybe at the United Nations.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” Daddy said, “a Russian fellow is going to have a lot easier time learnin’ English than you’re gonna have learnin’ Russian, so he’s gonna be the one that gets the job at the United Nations and you’re gonna be on a long line at the unemployment office.”

  Linda nevertheless persisted—for a while. Then one day she said, “Daddy, I’m dropping Russian. I’ve decided I’m going back to the original idea of being a dentist.”

  Ever hardheaded, Daddy did not applaud her decision but instead underlined her mistake. “Look how much time you lost. You took the Russian and then you dropped it. If you had started off with what you’re supposed to start off with, you would have been that much time ahead. You’re not going to catch it up. It’s lost. So, whenever you go out to do something, make sure you’re going right straight ahead because you can’t go ahead and then back up. That time is down the drain.”

  Linda was accepted at New York University College of Dentistry in 1971, Rita was about to take organic chemistry at Monmouth College, and I was entering the third year of medical school. Because Linda and I were in New York City, Daddy and Mommy and Rita would drive to the city on Friday afternoons and pick us up to head out to wherever the band was playing on the weekend.

  By now the music was changing. Rhythm and blues and the Motown sound had gone out, and psychedelic sound was in.
James Brown had been replaced by the flower child. Our band could play Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and we played some of the old music that was still good, but instead of dancing, the kids would just sit there and look and listen. They were into LSD and other drugs.

  “What happened to good old beer?” we said to Daddy. “What is that smell?”

  “Probably something out of the kitchen,” he kept saying, until we finally figured out it was marijuana, a smell that was becoming pervasive on campuses. The type of student had changed. They were no longer getting out on the dance floor and having a great time. As Daddy said, “They’re like sitting and…pondering.”

  Yale was the worst for that. The students would smoke a joint and listen and say, “Hm-m-m.” I really hated to play there because the most difficult thing for an entertainer is to be up onstage singing her heart out or blowing her lungs out and the only reaction she gets is, “That’s interesting, isn’t it, Martha? Quite pleasant, really.”

  But Linda and Rita and I were still saying to each other, “If you’ll hang in, I’ll hang in,” and that’s what we did, even though I was now on-call every other weekend and Daddy had to book our gigs around my schedule. The last two years of medical school are people. You’re on the wards, and you start learning to apply the things you’ve learned from books and in the lab to the pathology of patients. You’re called a clinical clerk, and you rotate through the different clinical disciplines: three months of medicine; three months of surgery and its surgical subspecialties, such as urology and orthopedics; six weeks each of obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics; three months of neurology and psychiatry.