I think, when Daddy gave me away that day in Riverside Church, he experienced it as quite literally giving me away to another man. No matter that he liked Shearwood, that he knew Shearwood would be a good husband for me and a good provider; on some unconscious level where ego and testosterone and territorialism mingle, he felt I had chosen Shearwood over him and in doing so had defected like a spy going over to the enemy. He had had his daughters so long in his life—we had been little pieces of clay that were his to mold—that he could not willingly release us, and when we left him to be with another man, it did not seem to him like a natural part of growing up but like a treasonable act. With his sons-in-law—Donna’s Willis, Betty’s Hubert, Linda’s Roger, and my Shearwood, he was correct and polite but not warm, nor friendly with them for their own sakes; not one of them ever called him anything but Mr. Thornton.
When I spoke of his lack of interest in Woody, Daddy shrugged. “He’s yours and Shearwood’s.”
“But, Daddy he’s also your grandson.”
“Yeah, but that’s not important. You’re the ones who’ll raise him up. I didn’t want my parents interferin’ in the raisin’ of my kids and I ain’t gonna interfere in the raisin’ of yours.”
Some men build businesses from the ground up. Some fashion paintings where before there was blank canvas, write books where before there was blank paper, make movies where before there was blank film, erect buildings where before there were empty lots. Daddy raised children. They were his blank paper, canvas, film, landscape, and like any creative person, the material had to be his own, to be shaped single-mindedly to his vision.
It was about this time that Daddy suffered a second blow, one that did not compare with losing Mommy but, like that incalculable loss, left him floundering and aimless. For thirty years he had worked at Fort Monmouth in menial capacities: as a laborer, as a janitor, in the motor pool. When offered promotions to more skilled work, he had refused the offers because the greater effort and energy involved might interfere with his holding down a second eight-hour job, while the increase in hourly pay would in no way match the money he could make on a second job.
One day he was called in and told that his current janitorial job was being abolished and that he would be transferred to be a laborer in the supply depot. He had once, briefly, put in some time in the depot and he knew the low-life civilians who staffed it to be bigots. He told the personnel officer, “Where you’re sending me ain’t gonna do nothin’ but get me upset. If I was a young guy, I would try to put up with it. But I’m not young and I’ve put up with enough.” He requested janitorial work elsewhere on the base or transfer to another kind of work, like running a copier or cataloging, saying he didn’t care if it meant a downgrade and less money. “If you send me to the warehouse, I’m the one they’ll have picking up the boxes, opening them, putting the stuff on the shelves, walking miles every day, and before I let myself get pushed around like that, I’ll retire. I don’t want to retire, but if I’ve got to go down there, I can’t accept it, I can’t put up with it, I’ll bow out.”
Bow out he did and was now doubly miserable: no Tass, no job to go to. When people tried to console him by saying he was in the enviable position of being able to do anything he wanted to, he answered flatly: “I’ve already done what I wanted to do. I looked after my kids and my wife. They depended on me and it was a challenge. I love a challenge, and now I ain’t got a challenge no more.”
To a suggestion that he might want to travel, he replied, “I took a vacation once for five days, and the thing that really hurt me and ruined the vacation was that I couldn’t get it out of my mind that here I was, doin’ nothin’ when I could have accomplished so much in those five days, I could have got a step ahead.”
Rita urged him to visit Linda in Europe. He vetoed that idea. “You go to Europe,” he said. “You sit in a French house, you listen to French music, you eat some French pastry, you go back home. Once you realize that no matter where you go, you got to come back home, you know what you should do—stay home and eat French pastry.”
What he did instead of vacationing or lazing around was to look for other work. He linked up with a man who had bought some dilapidated houses in Asbury Park that he wanted made over into apartments, and Daddy contracted to do the job single-handedly. He went to work gutting one house at a time, taking up floors and knocking out walls. He installed all new windows, walls, and floors; made kitchens, bathrooms, and closets; and grew happier.
“It’s a funny thing,” he commented, “but after working so hard for so many years, I can’t stop. If I wake up in the morning and don’t know where I’m going, I feel like I’m going crazy. And I do believe I would go crazy if I didn’t have something to do.”
For a feature story for Father’s Day, a newspaper reporter interviewed Daddy about his dream of raising his five daughters to be doctors. Daddy spoke about working two and three jobs for twenty-five years and driving, sometimes hundreds of miles, on the weekends to make a band date, but then he reflected: “I think the biggest of all my hardships, of all the things I been through, is having my children not need me anymore. Some people can say about their kids, ‘Oh, the hell with them,’ but my kids, they’re my children as long as I live. My life has been my children. They’re still babies to me.”
“But, Mr. Thornton …” the interviewer said.
“‘Yeah, I know," Daddy interrupted. “Kids grow up. I accept that but I don’t have to like it. How can children that parents love so much drift away from them?”
“It’s the way of the world.”
He shook his head sadly. “The worst thing about marrying young is that you have a longer time to be lonely when your children are gone.”
This was a very small part of the interview. Mostly Daddy talked about the music lessons and traveling to New York to make records so we could hear ourselves getting better, playing at the Apollo and the Brooklyn Fox, and then at colleges and debutante balls, and our studying in the car while he drove. Only at the end, when the interviewer was expressing admiration for what Daddy and his daughters had been able to accomplish, did he speak of his yearning to have it all to do over again. Another man might have hidden his loneliness but Daddy had the courage to be himself and transparent.
While he was working in Asbury the next summer, a young boy began hanging around, offering to fetch a tool Daddy needed or help hold sheetrock in place until Daddy could anchor it with nails. Daddy began to look forward to seeing him each morning. He would be waiting for Daddy in front of one of the houses to help him carry his tools in, and when Daddy had to go to the lumberyard or hardware store for supplies, the boy went along and offered his advice, saying, “Mr. Thornton, let’s get this. I think we’re going to need it.” While they worked, Daddy talked to him about life and the world like he’d talked to us, telling him stories about people and incidents and drawing morals from them.
Daddy regretted that he didn’t have the lad with him all the time because, he said, “He’s all right with me, but as soon as he goes home, his mind is twisted into a different kind of atmosphere, and when I see him again the next morning, he’s lost some of the things he grasped the day before.” And when the boy went back to school in the fall, Daddy lost him altogether, which set him to thinking. “Maybe I’ll adopt another three kids,” he ruminated, sounding out the idea with one or another of us when we called. “Maybe three brothers.”
But when he did start over, it was with just one boy and the story did not have a happy ending.
14
Navy Blue and Black
By 1979, SHEARWOOD HAD FINISHED HIS INTERNSHIP and residency in orthopedic surgery and I had completed my fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine. I had an offer to become an assistant professor and join the staff at a teaching hospital on Long Island, and I asked Shearwood what he had in mind to do.
“I want to get more experience working with trauma,” he said. “I want to see more bones.”
“Shearwood, you
’ve been looking at bones for years. We have a new baby. You should be thinking about starting a private practice or getting on staff at a hospital.”
He gave me a sidelong look, not sure how I would take what he was about to say. “I’ll tell you what I think we both should do, Yvonne. What I think we should do is go into the military.”
“What!”
“They’re looking for black people. Besides which, the country has given us an opportunity to succeed and we should pay back what we’ve been given.”
I wasn’t sure that what we had been given was anything more than the same opportunities anybody who works hard is entitled to. But that was beside the point. “First of all,” I said, “the military is with guns and killing people. I’m an obstetrician. I deliver babies. What am I going to do in the military?”
“You can come in as my dependent.”
“I’m not going anywhere as anybody’s dependent!”
“Don’t get excited, Yvonne. Why don’t we just look into it?”
I didn’t like the idea. I didn’t like it at all. Linda was in the military and they had shipped her to Europe and Korea. What if they separated Shearwood and me? I told him, “Shearwood, okay, we’ll look into it, but if it doesn’t sound good, I’m taking the position on Long Island. Agreed?”
He agreed, and we went to a Navy recruiting office—Navy because, Shearwood reasoned, the Army was like the dregs, the Marines were heavy into killing people, and Air Force bases were on vast wastelands, while naval bases were on the water at attractive places like Newport and San Diego. We presented ourselves to the recruiter: two Ivy League-trained physicians volunteering to enter the service. The recruiter could not have been more surprised—or pleased, because all the physicians who opted out of the Vietnam war in order to complete their residency training under the Berry plan were now finishing up the years of service they owed the government and were returning to civilian life, leaving the military with a shortage of physicians. Also, he said, we had specialties that were in demand.
“Obstetrics?” I said, not sure I’d heard right.
“There are sixty thousand babies born in the military each year. Men come home from a six-month tour of duty abroad and …”
“Nine months later..
“Boom.”
“A baby boom.”
“Right.”
I could tell he wanted me to join up even more than Shearwood, so I figured we were in the driver’s seat. “We’ll think about it,” I offered, “if we can go somewhere nice and posh, like Bethesda, somewhere affiliated with a medical school or a large teaching hospital.”
“We can’t give you any guarantees.”
“In that case, we’re not coming in,” I announced.
It turned out that we could get a guarantee after all. Word came that we would be stationed at Bethesda. But we still didn’t sign any papers because we decided to drive down and take a look at the place first. Bethesda is in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., and it is the location of the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine, as well as the National Naval Medical Center. It looked wonderful to us. And Shearwood looked wonderful to the chairman of the orthopedic department, who pumped his hand and enthused when he heard Shearwood might sign up: “Oh, my goodness, this is great. Let me take you around, son.”
I laughed when I heard about his reception. “Boy, they must really be hard up if they’re hugging you, Shearwood,” I said, and indeed it proved to be that the Navy had only forty orthopedic surgeons for the entire fleet, and what with broken legs and slipped disks, that wasn’t very many.
So, Shearwood was all set, but I reminded him that we had made a bargain: if the chief of obstetrics didn’t want me, then we weren’t going in. “Right,” he agreed, “but they’ll be as anxious to have you as they are me.”
I was interviewed by a Dr. Knab, chairman of the OB/GYN department and captain in the Naval Medical Corps. I sensed immediately that the man did not like me. He looked through my curriculum vitae and commented that it was most impressive. Then he settled back in his armchair, tented his fingers, and said, “But, unfortunately, Dr. Thornton, we don’t need you.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “I’ve just finished my fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine and there are fewer than one hundred such specialists in the whole country. There can’t be too many here.”
“Be that as it may, I can only thank you for coming to see me and repeat that the Navy has no need of you.”
Thank you, Knab, old boy, I said to myself as I left his office. I didn’t want to be in the military anyway. Just let me get out of here.
“Pack up the car, Shearwood,” I said when I got back to the hotel. “You’re going to have to find a job in New York.”
“Why? Dr. Slemmons loved me.”
“Yeah, but Dr. Knab didn’t love me. He says there’s no room for me here.”
Shearwood was disappointed, but he dutifully called Dr. Slemmons. “There’s a Dr. Knab in the OB/GYN department who says there’s no room for my wife, and my wife and I agreed that if we couldn’t come in together, we wouldn’t come at all.”
“Hold on,” Dr. Slemmons told him. “Let me look into it.”
In almost no time at all, Dr. Knab was on the phone, saying smoothly that he had discovered one of the maternal-fetal specialists was about to be transferred to Portsmouth and so there was an opening for me after all.
“Oh, really? Are you sure?” “Certainly. Any time you’d like to come, the position is here for you.”
Someone else might have hesitated to go to work for a man who didn’t like her and hadn’t wanted her there, but I knew how eager Shearwood was to be at Bethesda and, besides, having to prove myself to men like Dr. Knab was nothing new to me. Like the others, he would be waiting for me to fail, which meant that I had to make very sure not to. I could never do less than my best. I had to have my wits about me always and take infinite pains with every procedure and every operation. Rather than making me tense, though, the pressure led me to be very good at what I did and, like Daddy, I enjoyed the challenge.
Dr. Knab, despite my credentials, obviously didn’t believe that I was good. I had read in his eyes what he was thinking: “Oh, I had one like you taking care of me when I was a baby.” Such men hate it because they can’t treat you like a servant; they have to treat you as an equal on the surface but underneath they are seething. As a black woman all you can do is never give them any cause to say you’re belligerent or that you’re not professional; you just basically do your work and accept the fact that you are not welcome, merely tolerated.
It was July 1979 when we went into the military, and in September I discovered I was pregnant again. I informed Dr. Knab, who did not trouble to hide his annoyance. I was the only female on the attending staff in the department, and my pregnancy simply served to affirm his opinion that women in medicine were a nuisance because they had babies and disrupted the status quo. I assured Dr. Knab that being pregnant wouldn’t interfere with my carrying out my duties, that the baby was due June 7 when I would be taking my month’s vacation in any event.
Also at the end of that month, on June 30, I would be taking my subspecialty board examination in maternal-fetal medicine. In all, there were four examinations: written and oral exams in my basic specialty, obstetrics and gynecology, and written and oral exams in my subspecialty of maternal-fetal medicine; plus a postdoctoral thesis to be written, published, and defended as part of the oral examination.
By the time we went into the service in July, I had already passed my written exam in OB/GYN and my thesis was in its final stages of preparation. The oral exam was being given in November, which meant that all that fall, while getting accustomed to being in the service, I was studying furiously and at the same time suffering from such morning sickness that my dearest wish was that someone would take me out in the backyard and shoot me. The morning sickness hadn’t in the least abated by November when I flew to Chicago
for the exam, and a more wretched—and retching—person had never stood before the board of examiners, all of whom were male and were rumored never to pass female candidates if they could possibly find an excuse not to. I took as many antinausea pills as I dared, but even so …
When they said, “Dr. Thornton, give us a differential diagnosis on the basis of these slides,” I had to say, “Excuse me, I have a touch of flu,” and scurry to the bathroom.
I staggered back. “Are you all right?” the chief examiner asked, staring at the large drops of perspiration I had to keep wiping away. “Do you want to make this an incomplete and come back next year?”
“No, sir, I can do it. Just give me some time. I have this flu..”
I excused myself again, staggered back again, glad of my black skin so they couldn’t see how green I was. After that I was able to stay in the room, albeit feeling like a cat who has swallowed a poisoned mouse. I didn’t care if I passed or failed; I just prayed for the ordeal to be over.
Days later, back in Bethesda. Dr. Knab nodded at me in the hall. “You passed,” he said, in a peevish tone that implied he wished I hadn’t so he would have that failure to hold over my head. The occasion called for fireworks shooting off, or at least for a cheer or two, because even though you have completed all your training, if you’re not board-certified, you haven’t managed to catch the brass ring. But it was just, “You passed,” from Dr. Knab, “Thanks,” from me, and we continued on our ways. I wrote a little note in red ink to Shearwood, who was in the midst of a surgical procedure, and sent it into the operating theater: “Don’t forget the milk and eggs on your way home, and by the way I PASSED MY BOARDS!” To this day, Shearwood carries the note in his wallet.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 24