The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  “And how will I get patients?” “Don’t worry about that. The rest of us will send you our overflow.”

  I am still waiting for their overflow—their overflow of paying patients, that is. They sent me their patients on Medicaid, they sent me addicts and indigents, but not one patient who could pay. Realizing that this was a way of forcing me to leave because they would have the excuse that I was not generating revenue for the hospital, I took stock and hied myself off to a two-day seminar in how to succeed in a medical practice.

  “You can have an office full of patients,” the seminar director lectured us. “You can put in fifteen hours a day and you can end up making five dollars for the day because the patients are not paying you. That is not the way to succeed.”

  “But you’re helping people,” someone objected.

  “Wake up and smell the coffee. You’re in a business. What you really need is a bank president to look after the money end, but you’re not going to be that lucky so you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  I didn’t get a bank president; I got Mrs. Kiman. At sixty-two, she’d been laid off from her job in a bank. “You know how to deliver babies,” she said. “I know about accounts receivable. Give me a chance. Let me show you what I can do.”

  I hired her as my office manager, and fifteen minutes after she went to work, she had the Blue Cross participating number that I had been trying to get for four weeks. A month later she announced, “We’re here all day and we’re making thirty dollars. From now on when a patient calls for an appointment, I’m going to say the fee is fifty dollars, cash or check, no insurance. If they want reimbursement, they’ll have to see to it themselves. If they say they can’t afford fifty dollars, I’ll tell them to come to the clinic, that you’re the director of the clinic and they can see you there.”

  In the next couple of months, only one patient came. But that one person said, “You’re so nice; you really take time with your patients” (not knowing that all I had was time), and she told her friends and they told their friends, until by the end of the second year my practice was generating half a million dollars a year. At the same time I was running the clinic, delivering babies, consulting on problematic cases, and squeezing in some research time at The Rockefeller University.

  Experiences like this have convinced me that being black is like being the frog in a muscle-wasting experiment. A researcher interested in determining how rapidly immobilized muscles atrophy tied down one of the frog’s back legs and left the other free. The frog pushed so hard and struggled so long against the fetters that the tied-down leg got stronger and stronger and soon was far more muscular than the free leg. Just so, the more you struggle against the fetters of being black, the stronger you become.

  But before I even got to New York Hospital and Shearwood to Harlem Hospital where he had signed on as Acting Chief of Orthopedic Surgery, we had to find a place to live in the metropolitan area. We were leaving the Navy on July 8 and were taking our vacations the month of June to give us time to get settled in our new home, which we planned to find by driving to New Jersey every weekend in May to go house-hunting.

  The first real estate agent we contacted arranged to show us a house in Franklin Lakes that was within our price range. The owners looked at us rather oddly as we were being introduced, but I was paying attention to the house, not the owners, and deciding that it wasn’t really to our taste. At the next house we went to, the owner asked the agent to step into the kitchen while we stayed in the living room. Her voice was dearly audible. “Get the niggers out of my house,” we heard her say.

  Shearwood looked at me. I looked at Shearwood. This was New Jersey in 1982?

  Outside the agent apologized, saying how sorry she was. “It’s their house,” I said, but I was hurt and I was angry because we had the children with us and this was something we did not want them to hear, not when they were still so young. Now I knew how Daddy felt when he said, “It don’t matter what you do to me, but don’t hurt my kids.”

  The real estate agent didn’t seem to have any more houses to show us after that, so I called an old classmate from medical school. “Oh, forget it,” she said. “Franklin Lakes is too far from the city anyway. I have a good real estate agent. Her name is Mary LaBelle, and she’ll take care of you.”

  Mary LaBelle proved to be a lovely lady with an Irish accent. I explained that I was an obstetrician and had to have a house close to a major highway so I could get to New York Hospital quickly. “No problem,” she said. “We’ll find just the right place for you.”

  Just the right place proved to be a handsome house in Paramus, New Jersey, but by the time we found it, we had used up so many weekends in looking that there wasn’t enough time left before we had to move to arrange for a mortgage and all the other necessities like a title search and survey. Mary LaBelle suggested that we rent with an option to buy, which seemed an excellent solution. The owners, whom we hadn’t met, agreed to this plan in a long-distance phone call. We put down a deposit with Mary, returned to Maryland, and I ordered a refrigerator and washer and dryer from Sears to be delivered to the house.

  Shearwood had decided that he needed more training in hip- replacement surgery since, for the most part, naval personnel were not of an age to need such surgery and he had little experience in it. Consequently, he had applied for a fellowship to Ohio State and was leaving in July to be away until January. With the house question settled, I felt I could mange without him for that length of time.

  On June 3, Mary LaBelle telephoned. “Dr. Thornton, I’m afraid you can’t have the house because the people don’t want you in there. The wife said to tell you that she’s decided to give the house to her son, but I don’t want to lie to you. What she really said was that they would burn the house down before they’d let niggers move into it.”

  I cried and cried and cried. Shearwood, trying to soothe me, said, “We’ll find another house.”

  “When? Where? You’re going to Ohio! The kids and I have to have some place to live!”

  “Yvonne, don’t get so upset.”

  “This is blatant racial discrimination! It’s not right! It’s not fair!”

  “Yvonne, calm down.”

  I couldn’t calm down. I grabbed the phone. I called Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. I called the Bergen Record, the county newspaper. I called CBS News. I said, “Here we are, doctors, naval officers. We’ve been putting our lives on the line for these people—my husband went to Okinawa; I was about to be sent to the Persian Gulf—and they are denying us a place to live!” Everyone I talked to was outraged on our behalf but could think of no action to take. I called the NAACP, both the New York City and Bergen County chapters, and was told they could do nothing unless twenty or thirty black persons were involved, in which event they would bring a class action suit. I told myself so often that I wanted justice that I finally looked in the Washington, D.C., Yellow Pages under Justice and came upon a listing for the Department of Justice. I called there and repeated my story.

  “Let me give you Mr. Hadley,” the person listening to me said. “He deals with the New Jersey area.”

  I repeated my story to Mr. Hadley, who said, “Dr. Thornton, this is really bad. I’ve never heard of this happening before.”

  “You’ve never heard of this happening?” I was stunned. “I’m not lying to you. We have two children. We have to move out of our Maryland house in a couple of weeks. We have to tell the military where to send our furniture, and it’s not right. It’s not right!”

  “I agree with you,” he said. “I suggest that the person you need to talk to is Lee Porter. She’s the director of the Fair Housing Council in Bergen County.”

  I called Ms. Porter and told my story again—and finally I was being listened to by someone who had an answer. “We’ll get on this immediately, Dr. Thornton. We’ll have our lawyer get an injunction against these people, which will prevent them from selling or renting to anyone else.” I could hear the red tape being cut
over the phone.

  “Good,” said Shearwood when I told him. “That means we can go ahead and move.”

  “Shearwood, I can’t move into that house. I’d be terrified you off in Ohio and me alone with the kids at night and them alone with a sitter during the day. I’d be frightened to death that someone might harm them.”

  Mary LaBelle understood and found us a three-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in Hackensack, New Jersey. I hated being on the tenth floor and felt we might just as well be living in the city, but at least we had a place to put our furniture and a roof over our heads. And I discovered that a dear friend from Roosevelt Hospital, a nurse named Ruth Horton, lived on the next block. Ruth was a godsend. She was company for me when Shearwood went to Ohio and an emergency baby-sitter when I was summoned to the hospital in the middle of the night.

  Kimmie was two; Woody was four and went to nursery school during the day. Both children went to bed at six o’clock in the evening, and during the day they weren’t running around because I didn’t want them on the terrace for fear of their somehow falling off. One day I came home to find a note slipped under the door: “If you don’t keep your kids quiet, I will.” From that moment on, I didn’t feel safe in the apartment. Each time I went down to the laundry room in the basement, each time I took Woody and Kimmie to the park, I searched the faces of the people in the elevator. Did you write that note? Do you intend harm to my children? Now I could imagine what it was like to live in the South, never knowing when the Ku Klux Klan was going to strike because of some offense, real or imagined.

  I called Shearwood in Ohio to tell him, ‘‘I’m going to find a house. I’m not waiting until January when you get back.” I asked Mary LaBelle to start looking for me. “We’re not in a rush this time,” I said, “so let me tell you what I want. I want a house with a circular driveway.…”

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t say why. For years I had fantasized about a house just as I had once fantasized about my senior prom and my wedding, and in my mind’s eye the house had a circular drive, was built of brick because Daddy claimed brick was as lasting as rocks in the earth, was set back far enough so the children wouldn’t run into the street and be killed, and had a big backyard for them to play in. And practically speaking, the house had to have four bedrooms and a room on the first floor that could be made into a library.

  Within a week Mary LaBelle called. “Dr. Thornton, I have your house. It’s big but it’s not too big. It’s on a busy street but the street is not too busy. It’s next to a major highway but the house is very quiet.”

  “What kind of a house is this?”

  “You have to see it because I can’t describe it. It was going for $279,000 but it’s been on the market for four years and you can get it for $145,000.”

  Mary was busy on Sunday so we agreed that she would take me on Monday to see the house. I went to bed Saturday night thinking about the house and woke up Sunday morning thinking about it, thinking about it with such a sense of excitement that I called the office and asked if there wasn’t somebody else who could show it to me right away. A gentleman obliged, and as we approached the house, he pointed to it. The house had a circular drive! It was built of brick! It was my house; I was sure of that before I even got out of the car.

  Well-landscaped, it looked from the front like a one-story, handsome but unpretentious, rather snug house, but inside, across the wide living room was a wall of windows, and beyond them the skyline of New York City. The land sloped down, so that under the first story was a second story, and the whole opened up into a four-thousand-square-foot mother-daughter house, with a huge backyard and a swimming pool and off to the right a patch of woods shielding the house from Route 80, the superhighway that would get me to the George Washington Bridge in under ten minutes. The bedrooms were on the opposite side of the house and the house was 1960s vintage and solidly built, so the hum from the highway was not a problem. The house had been rented to a U.N. delegation from a third-world island nation. The chandeliers had been ripped out and the swimming pool was cracked and peeling, which was why the house had been on the market for such a long time and the price had been almost halved.

  I rummaged in my purse for my checkbook. “I want the house,” I told the real estate agent. “I’ll give you a binder.”

  ‘‘Are you sure you don’t want to wait until your husband sees it? I’ve had this with other wives. They give me a binder and then the husband finds something wrong with the house and I have to return the binder.”

  “I like the house. My husband will like the house,” I said firmly. But then I thought maybe he was right and I’d better check with Shearwood. I reached him in Ohio. “Shearwood, I’ve found our house and I want to put a binder on it. What do you think?”

  “Honey, houses and homes are for women. I could live in a tent. Whatever house you want, that’s fine with me.”

  Our bonuses for joining the military made up the $10,000 down payment, and we obtained a VA mortgage for $135,000. The house needed patching and painting, which meant taking out a bank loan. We needed more furniture. Another bank loan. The utility bill for the first month was $1,200 because the heating system was electric. Obviously we couldn’t afford a bill like that every month, so we paid $8,000 to have the house converted to gas. Another bank loan. But none of that mattered. We had a lovely house, and by luck rather than good management, we had fetched up in a town, Teaneck, which welcomes ethnic diversity and has a school system second to none.

  Daddy came to see the house and pronounced his verdict. “You done good, Cookie.”

  The path to getting settled in civilian life had been a rocky one, but then nothing in my life had come easy. “Hey,” as Daddy said, “it builds character.”

  Incidentally, we won the racial discrimination suit against the Paramus people and the settlement paid for wall-to-wall carpeting throughout my dream house.

  16

  The Gospel According to Donald

  THE WEATHER PREDICTION for Friday, February 11, 1983, was for snow; a storm was coming up from the South. But the day was still clear when I left home for the twenty-five-minute drive into the city and to the hospital. Friday was one of the assigned days in the faculty practice group for seeing private patients, and I was counting on getting through my schedule in time to be safe at home for the weekend before the storm hit.

  One of the last patients in my office that morning was a woman with a history of having missed two periods who was experiencing crampy lower abdominal pain and some vaginal spotting. Her urine pregnancy test in the office was negative. I did a pelvic exam and discovered an area of extreme tenderness and fullness on the right side. Since the patient had no fever, which would have suggested an infection, my presumptive diagnosis was a possible ectopic pregnancy, that is, a fertilized egg lodged in a fallopian tube rather than in the uterus where it would normally begin to develop. The next step was to determine whether the fallopian tube had ruptured and the patient was bleeding internally. I warned the patient that what I was about to do was going to hurt but that I didn’t feel comfortable sending her home on a Friday into a possible snowstorm without having established exactly what was going on.

  I inserted a needle into the area of fullness and the syringe promptly filled with dark red blood. The patient was indeed bleeding internally. An immediate operation was imperative. I had the patient admitted to the hospital, and met her in the operating room a brief time later. Her fallopian tube proved to be too damaged to be saved and I had to remove it. When the patient had regained consciousness, I checked on her again and listened to her whispered apology for keeping me at the hospital for so long. We both could see the snow coming down outside the windows, but I told her not to worry, that it was worth having to drive home in the snow to know that she was out of danger. I was not looking forward to the drive, however. I was tired after a full complement of office patients and then the emergency surgery. The distance between hospital and home was only eleven miles
, but I would be glad when I had negotiated it.

  I called Shearwood, who was at home with the day off from Harlem Hospital in observance of Lincoln’s Birthday, and he offered to come get me, but I said no, that there was no sense in two of us being out in the storm. He suggested that perhaps I should stay put at the hospital, and again I said no, that I didn’t want to get stuck for the weekend away from him and the kids.

  When I pulled out of the underground garage at the hospital, it was two o’clock in the afternoon and I had three-quarters of a tank of gas. I turned up First Avenue, heading for the East River Drive. After thirty minutes I had gone half a block, so snarled was the traffic by stalled cars. It took me two more hours to negotiate the six blocks to the entrance to the Drive. The wind was blowing at what seemed like hurricane force, piling the swirling snow into entrapping drifts and plastering huge flakes against the windshield. The wipers were laboring to clear the icy slush, the heater was going full blast because it was deadly cold, and I had the headlights on, trying to gain some slight visibility, which had closed to a few feet in front of the creeping car. Everywhere, there were abandoned cars, but I in my large Chevrolet and a few other determined souls in heavy cars kept pressing on.

  I did not have a car phone at the time so Shearwood had no way of reaching me, but every once in a while he beeped me to reinforce my courage. He had no way of knowing whether I was buried in a drift, immobilized in a tangle mass of cars like a bumper car in an amusement park, or was still inching along. All he could do was beep to convey his concern.

  By eight o’clock that evening I had less than half a tank of gas left and I had struggled only as far as the foot of the ramp leading to the George Washington Bridge, where I was blocked behind several other cars and had several cars stopped behind me. Every time a driver pulled out to try to make it up the ramp, his car slipped and slid and fishtailed and spun its wheels, only to end up back where it had started. One driver after another made a run at the ramp. No car made it.