The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  At Roosevelt Hospital, I was interviewed by the chairman of the OB/GYN department. Dr. Thomas F. Dillon. He seemed impressed that I had published a scientific paper based on the independent research I had done with Drs. Anthony Cerami and Joseph Graziano in the hematology laboratory at The Rockefeller University during my fourth-year elective and that I had two more papers in the works.

  “You’re a P & S student and your recommendations are excellent,” Dr. Dillon said. “Our program will be ranking you very high for a first-year residency position.”

  I was then given a tour of the hospital and, liking what I saw, I in turn put Roosevelt first on my matching list. Three days later it was settled: my postgraduate training would be at Roosevelt Hospital. My Jamaican classmate, who had listed Harlem Hospital last, went to Harlem Hospital.

  One of my P & S professors, a distinguished surgeon who had trained at Bellevue Hospital and who was black himself, stopped me in the hall one day. “I hear you’re going to Roosevelt.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Congratulations.” He added thoughtfully, “You know, there’s not too many black people at Roosevelt.”

  “I didn’t know, but that’s okay. I’ve been trained well here so it shouldn’t be a problem.” He was suggesting that blacks tend to feel uncomfortable when they’re the odd man out, but I’d been the only black in so many situations that it didn’t bother me in the least. “Actually,” I told him smilingly, “I don’t think of myself as black. I think of my skin as being just one large freckle.”

  He laughed. “Is that why you didn’t list Harlem Hospital?”

  “I imagine I didn’t list it for the same reason you probably didn’t list it when you graduated,” I answered.

  He said nothing more. He knew how the system worked.

  A year later, when Shearwood was graduating, he did as I had done: avoided playing it safe and was accepted for his surgical training at St. Luke’s, a private hospital. Interestingly enough, now, two decades later, he is Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at Harlem Hospital, but that is by choice, not because he was shunted off there because of his color.

  At Shearwood’s graduation, I was his family because his father had also died by then and his brother, who was living in Indiana. was unable to be there. As Shearwood took the Hippocratic oath with his class, I lifted my eyes to heaven in the hope that his mother was looking down, and in my heart I murmured, Your boy made it, too. Be proud Be proud of him and be proud of yourself that you gave him the vision.

  Shearwood was Dr. McClelland now. I was Dr. Thornton. We could talk about getting married.

  In my early days at P & S, I had mentioned to a black nurse that I was a Baptist and was looking for a church, a quiet one, a dignified one, not one where the sermons started late and went on for hours and people rolled on the floor shouting, “I got the spirit, Lord!”

  The nurse said, “You’d like Riverside.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Come over to the window and I’ll show you.”

  “That’s a Baptist church? It can’t be.” From what I could see of the spire, the building was as lofty and majestic as a cathedral. But the nurse assured me that it was indeed a Baptist church. The next Sunday I took the bus there and walked in—diffidently because I was awed by the soaring space and the echoing silence—and sat in the last pew. The singing of the choir was so fine, it made me feel as though I were at the Metropolitan Opera, and when it came time for the sermon, the senior minister, Dr. Ernest T. Campbell, spoke simply and eloquently about the presence of God in everyday life. The congregation listened quietly; no one interrupted with shouts about the Holy Spirit. At the end of the service, another minister said, “Those of you who wish to become members of The Riverside Church…” and I knew he was speaking to me, that I had found the religious home I was seeking.

  When Shearwood first asked me to marry him in 1971, I had wondered whether we could be married in The Riverside Church. I inquired of the pastor, who said that since I was a member, of course I could be, and did I want the wedding to take place in the Christ chapel or the nave?

  “The nave?” That spiraling, soaring, gorgeously generous space? Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I was starring in a rerun of The Sound of Music—Maria in her wedding dress and floating veil walking down the long, long center aisle, that was me. “I want the nave, yes. For June 8, 1974.”

  “But that’s three years away.”

  “I want to get in early here.”

  “How do you know that you and your fiancé will be feeling the same way in 1974? You do understand that once I put you down for that date, I have to turn away anyone else who might want it?”

  “This is real love, sir. We’re not ‘in love.’ We love each other. That’s not going to go away.”

  In my first year of residency, I stopped in at Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue and bought a book called It’s Your Wedding, which, to all intents and purposes, I proceeded to commit to memory: the proper this, the correct that—when the announcement goes in the newspaper, the wording of the invitations and their mailing date, the bridesmaids, the ushers, the ring bearer, the reception…everything. I intended to have an impeccable, dazzling wedding, and I was going to pay for it myself so nobody could order me to put the brakes on. My salary as a first-year resident was twelve thousand dollars for the year, and I saved it all, which wasn’t difficult since I was working far too hard to socialize. I was on-call every other night and every other weekend, and on the off weekends I traveled with the band.

  We still needed the money the band made because Linda and Rita were both studying dentistry at New York University—Rita had decided to follow Linda into dentistry rather than me into medicine. Daddy lined up gigs that we could fit around our schedules, but they were necessarily fewer and tuition costs were high. Linda, who was in her second year, had to apply to NYU for a loan. She was told that it would not be granted without two co-signers and she called Daddy in despair. He could sign, of course, but where in the world would they find a second person to sign?

  “Sugar, calm down. We’ll work it out. I’ll come up and talk to them.” Daddy counted on his customary approach: good suit, white shirt, no challenge, no argument. It worked, as it always had. “I told the man that I took care of my kids all my life. I asked nothin’ from nobody, and if I could go this far without askin’ anyone to co-sign, I could surely carry the weight the rest of the way. I told him, ‘I’ll sign, and I will pay,’ and he says, ‘Talkin’ like that. Mr. Thornton, your signature is all we need.’”

  Linda, still quiet and shy and painfully conscious of how overweight she was at five-foot-three and 298 pounds, did not have an easy time of it at NYU. Several times a week she called Daddy, often in tears because of problems with the work. “I just can’t get it, Daddy. The other kids get it, but I just can’t.”

  “Sure, you can, honey,” he’d tell her. “You got this far. You can make it.”

  “‘I’m dumb. I’m stupid.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s just that you get upset. Look, honey, stop cryin’. Take it easy, you’re gettin’ me all upset too. I’ll tell you what you do. If there is something you’re not gettin’ you go to the library and go back to the elementary part of what you’re studyin’, then gradually move up again. If you’re not understandin’ everything the professor is talkin’ about, you go back and you learn back up to where he is.”

  A day or two later, another phone call would come. “Thanks, Daddy. I did what you said, and it worked.” As he himself said, “I can’t do none of this myself, but I can give my kids good advice.”

  To Rita, who had the youngest child’s psychology of competing for attention and was infinitely feistier than Linda, he offered quite different advice. “Rita, don’t be brilliant. Keep how smart you are to yourself until you’re off by yourself somewheres. When you’re around teachers, play dumb. You learn more when you play dumb, and that way you don’t challenge them so they got to prove themselves.�
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  We were together one weekend, traveling to a gig, when Rita admitted to Daddy that he was right. “The other day,” she said, “I was practicing cleaning teeth and I wanted the teacher to check my work, but he passed me up. The next time I blocked the aisle so he couldn’t get by and I said, ‘Would you mind seeing if I did this right?’ He was kind of irritated but he took a look. ‘You didn’t scrape that surface,’ he said. ‘We weren’t told to scrape there,’ I answered him back.

  “The minute I said it,” Rita went on, “I knew it was the wrong thing. Like you’re always telling me, I had hollered him a challenge and right away he got determined to be the winner, like ‘Who are you to be telling me?’ He was like a dog with his ruff going up, and I knew I was in trouble if I didn’t do something quick.

  “I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m mistaken. You’re right, you’re absolutely right, I did do it wrong.’ And the minute I said that, he changed completely. He’d been going to part my hair for me, cut me off at the knees, but I hollered ‘no challenge, no contest’ and the fight went right out of him. He said, ‘That’s okay. Maybe your class was taught to do it some other way.’”

  “That’s what I’m always tellin’ you,” Daddy said. “You challenge a person, he’ll fight you. He’s got to prove he’s right. You’re not makin’ his paycheck no bigger by tryin’ to get him to admit he’s wrong. You’re just makin’ him give you a hard time. If you know you’re right, after you leave, you can go on down the steps and holler ‘the big dummy!’ if that makes you feel better.”

  Daddy may have been uneducated in a formal sense but he understood personalities and human interactions and communicated this understanding to us so clearly that he was our prophetic educator in the ways of the world. It was because of him and exchanges like this that I knew better than to make the mistake an intern at Roosevelt Hospital made the very next week. The chief resident made a statement, and the intern, fresh from medical school and immersion in textbooks, volunteered, “Actually, you’re wrong about that.” Indeed, the chief was wrong, but that only increased his anger at being shown up, and from then on, throughout the rest of the year, the intern was picked on unmercifully.

  I wondered if I was about to be singled out for an unusually hard time when I first presented myself in the doctors’ scrub room at Roosevelt. “I’m here to scrub with Dr. Bartsich,” I said to the man sitting there reading a newspaper.

  “I’m Dr. Bartsich,” he said in a thick German accent. “Who are you?”

  “Yvonne Thornton, your first-year resident.”

  He rustled the newspaper ominously. “We’ll be going in ten minutes,” he barked and jerked the newspaper up in front of his face. I knew what he was thinking: She’s one of those affirmative action people. I said to myself, Oh, boy. I’m in for it now. But he was a fair man and gave me a chance to prove myself. When I showed him I was eager to learn and willing to put in any amount of time, that I never failed to be there when he needed me and never went off duty if there was anything more to be done, he lost his doubts and poured his knowledge into me. He had the most skillful hands I’ve ever seen in a surgeon, and because I was determined to emulate him, I too became a more than competent surgeon.

  Occasionally, when I entered a patient’s room, even though I was wearing white garb and had a stethoscope around my neck, the patient would glance up and say, “The wastebasket’s over there.”

  “I’m not here to empty the wastebasket, Mrs. Jones. I’m here to do your preoperative evaluation. I’ll be assisting Dr. Bartsich in the operating room.”

  The little furrow in the middle of Mrs. Jones’s forehead would tell me the woman was thinking: Are you skilled enough to touch my body? Are you trained enough to be here in the first place? Often the patient would ask, “Did you go to Meharry?”

  “No, I didn’t. How many children do you have, Mrs. Jones?”

  “Did you go to Howard?”

  “No. Are you allergic to any medication?” I never offered the information of where I had gone to school because Daddy always said, “Keep your credentials in your back pocket. That way you don’t sound like you’re braggin’, and it’ll really take people by surprise when they do find out.”

  “You’re scrubbing for Dr. Bartsich?”

  “With. With Dr. Bartsich. He cannot operate alone. It takes a team.”

  A Mrs. Jones I remember well was silent while I listened to her lungs and heart, then suddenly said, “Are you a racist?”

  I laughed. “Mrs. Jones,” I said, “if I were, your chances of getting off the operating table wouldn’t be very good. But I’m not, so don’t worry.”

  I would tell Daddy stories like this when we were driving to a gig, and all he’d say was, “Builds character, Cookie. Builds character.”

  When I went to Roosevelt Hospital, I was the only black and the only American woman in the OB/GYN residency program. The chief resident, whether or not he was prejudiced against blacks, which he didn’t reveal, was openly and avowedly prejudiced against women because he believed we “hen-medics” were taking up spaces that should have gone to men. “You women,” he’d rant, “you’ll get pregnant and have babies and all this training I’m giving you, it’s going to be totally lost.” Grumpily, as though in retaliation for what he foresaw happening, he piled work on the women and looked for opportunities to show us up. I recollect one instance vividly.

  Every week in a teaching hospital there are Grand Rounds at which residents present cases to the attending physicians, giving details of a patient’s presenting problems and how the case was managed. What was done, and why, is discussed, and the appro- priateness of the management is thrashed out so that everyone—attending physicians, residents, and interns alike—can learn from the experience.

  At P & S, I’d had the experience of presenting in front of an attending physician who railed at students who used index cards to jot down the facts of the case. “Do you know the patient or don’t you?” he’d hiss. “Why do you read from those damn cards? Either you know the patient or you don’t.”

  Being in show business, besides being blessed with a pho- tographic memory, when it was my turn to present a case, I would make notes but then memorize the cards and give the facts and answer any questions without referring to them. The first time I did this, the attending physician said, “Residents, did you see that presentation? That’s exactly the way I expect it to be done every time.” With that experience behind me, I was never nervous about my ability to present a case, and perhaps it was just this poise that riled the chief resident enough to look for a chance to show me up.

  He thought he had found it when a really bad case came in at ten o’clock one night: a botched abortion on a woman who was much too far along in pregnancy to have had an abortion at all. An instrument had been inserted into her uterus and had gone right through the thinned-out wall, rupturing veins and an artery and causing massive hemorrhaging. The woman’s uterus was all ripped and she had lost over half of her blood volume by the time she got to us. It was a terrible case. Several of us went without sleep all night to save her. At five in the morning, with grand rounds scheduled for 8:00 A.M., the chief resident said, “Yvonne, you’re presenting this case.”

  “Good heavens, Steve, why didn’t you tell me that last night so I could have made notes of her lab results and the progress reports from the intensive care unit?”

  “Tough,” he said, smirking because he knew full well I wasn’t going to be prepared. I had only three hours, I had another delivery to go to, and I was dead on my feet so I would certainly fall asleep if I had a free moment between now and then.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said to myself. “You’re not going to make a fool out of me.” I checked on the patient in labor and found I wasn’t needed quite yet, so I ran over to the ICU and quickly reviewed the patient’s chart and the many pages of lab results. I then went to a conference room and found pieces of blue, yellow, and pink chalk. In the amphitheater where the grand roun
ds were held was a free-standing, two-sided blackboard. With the colored chalk, I diagrammed the uterus with its veins and arteries and the exact path of the perforating instrument to make it clear to the audience the situation we had been confronted with. Then I turned the blackboard around so that when everyone gathered in the amphitheater at eight, it was seemingly blank. Then I ran back and delivered the baby.

  As people filed into the amphitheater, the chief resident walked past me and said slyly, “Are you ready?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I answered meekly. While two other presentations were being made, I memorized the facts I had gotten down on cards. Then it was my turn. I stood at the front of the room and described the emergency situation we’d been confronted with.

  “In order to make it easier to conceptualize the situation...” I said, and moved to the blackboard and swung it around. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the chief resident come bolt upright in his chair. “This shows the angle at which the instrument perforated the uterine myometrium….”

  Afterward the other residents grabbed me, “How did you find time to do that?”

  “My mother always said you don’t find time, you make time.” I didn’t add that my father had worked two eight-hour jobs for twenty-five years so I’d had plenty of evidence that it is possible to keep going when you have to.

  The chief resident’s only comment was: “Show-off.” But after that he left me alone, perhaps sensing that that kind of testing only made me stronger and more determined. That reaction had started way back when all of us were little kids and Daddy had said, “You’re already being written off because you’re black and female.” And had been reinforced with the band when he said, “They don’t think girls can make great music come out of these instruments.” Each time we were tested, we showed what we could do, and when we did, we were allowed to progress to the next step. This is why, if I may be forgiven a digression, I believe it is time for the black race to forget about rhetoric and instead show what we are capable of doing. The testing will surely go on for the next generation and the next, but each time we meet the test, we’ll climb another rung of the ladder until finally we arrive at parity, having earned our place rather than pleading or demanding that it be given to us.