The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  But neither did he consider being black, being black black, an excuse for nonachievement, only a reason to work harder, so that people who might pass you over for the way you look have to turn to you for what you know. “Work hard and you’ll make it,” he said. “It’s a natural law, like gravity. This country gives blacks a lot of grief. But it gives them a lot of opportunities too. Work hard and people will help you, doors will open.”

  “If the door doesn’t open,” he always added, “go around and climb through a window. If the window is closed, try to get in through the cellar. If that’s locked, go up on the roof and see if you can get in through the chimney. There is always a way to get in if you keep trying.

  “Look for your opportunities in the castaway areas of life,” he had told us, and it had worked for me recently in my work. Believing a new esoteric procedure in diagnostic fetal testing was almost certain to prove worthless, the department chairman had tossed the opportunity of learning it to me. Not only had the technique turned out to be valuable, but now I was in demand to teach it to doctors in other hospitals. As Daddy said: “Take what they give you and make something of it so they’ll say, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good,” where before there wasn’t nothin’ there.”

  One by one the others came in with their remembrances of how Daddy had phrased similar ideas:

  “How you get ahead in the world is by being the best at what you do.”

  “Do it with enthusiasm instead of whining, ‘Oh, God, I got another thing to do.’ Nothin’s gonna come from whinin’”.

  “Never dread anything. Just go ahead and do it.”

  “He and Mommy both used to say, ‘You waste more time dreading. Whatever happens, happens. Just go ahead and do it.’”

  Linda said, “I remembered that every time I had an exam.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me too.”

  “Get the job done,” I quoted.

  “Get the job done,” Rita said, and Linda said it too. We were remembering the days when the three of us had carried on with the band.

  “Everybody says it can’t be done until somebody goes ahead and does it.”

  We smiled at the echoes of Mommy and Daddy bouncing around the room. We smiled because people had said the Thornton sisters could not do it and we had done it.

  “Daddy was the bow, we were the arrows,” someone said, “and he aimed high. He didn’t say midwives, he said doctors. He didn’t say dental assistants, he said dentists.”

  A bit ruefully, a bit defiantly, Donna said, “It didn’t work with me.”

  “Ah, but if you and Jeanette hadn’t rebelled,” I told her, “we probably would have. It was you two bucking him and our seeing the trouble and unhappiness it caused that made the rest of us shut up and get on with it.”

  Rita asked something I had sometimes thought about. “Do you think he sat down and said to himself that the way out for blacks is athletics or music and girls are not going to do much with athletics so it had better be music?”

  “I doubt it,” Jeanette said. “I think he was like a guy in a traffic jam who takes any opening he sees, just trying to get a little bit ahead.”

  “Right. He always said if it hadn’t been music and the band, he’d have found another way.”

  “He was a determined man.”

  “If he hadn’t been determined, we wouldn’t have been the Thornton Sisters.”

  “If he hadn’t gone right on being determined, we’d still be the Thornton Sisters and blowing our brains our in some honky-tonk bar.”

  “Instead we’re professional women, respected, strong.…” “You’d better believe we’re strong! We carried Daddy’s butt up that hill….”

  “In the snow…”

  “Without dropping him…”

  We started to laugh then and kid around. And soon we were gathering our things together and getting ready to go our separate ways. We had each taken the mementos we wanted. Betty and her husband would move into the house. Whatever money there was had been spent on the funeral. Mommy was gone. Daddy was gone. It was over.

  Except that it will never be over. This past spring, ten years after Daddy’s death, sixteen after Mommy’s, I was asked to be one of the speakers at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Orlando, Florida. As the speakers filed onto the dais, I looked around. Here I was, a black woman—the only woman, the only black—surrounded by distinguished, white-haired men.

  I had been asked to speak on “The Whole Patient.” When it came my turn, I began by saying that, as specialists, we had been trained to evaluate, examine, and treat parts and that we were sometimes in danger of forgetting that what we were dealing with was not just a uterus but someone’s mother, sister, wife, or daughter. I reminded my colleagues that all of us had taken a sacred oath upon becoming physicians—the Hippocratic oath—that we had vowed to practice medicine in the best interests of our patients, not in the best interests of attorneys, HMOs, or hospital administrators.

  I argued, with all the persuasive powers I could muster, that we as physicians had to be stewards of the high standards of our profession. “We are at a crossroads,” I said, “where our patients are being reduced to codes, invoices, and hospital utilization units, and it is up to us to keep the humanity in medicine. We must insist on quality health care for our patients, because if we don’t fight for our patients’ health, who will? If we don’t fight for our patients’ dignity and right to be treated as a whole person, who will?”

  When I had finished speaking, the audience applauded. I began to turn away from the podium but the applause swelled and went on. I smiled and nodded to acknowledge my thanks. Again, I began to turn away, but one person stood up, then another, and another. Suddenly the whole audience of doctors was on its feet and I was being given a standing ovation—me a black, me a woman. I raised my eyes heavenward and silently said, as I have said over and over and over in my life, Thank you, Mommy. Thank you, Daddy.

  I say it once more as I come to the end of their story. Thank you, Mommy and Daddy. We would have been nothing and done nothing without you. And it will not stop with us. Our children’s lives, too, and the lives of all the people we touch will be immeasurably different because we were the ditchdigger’s daughters.

  17

  Afterword

  It has been twenty-five years since my father’s death and more than a decade since the first printing of The Ditchdigger’s Daughters. Many readers have asked: “What happened to the daughters?” “What are they doing?” “Where are they now?” This new 2008 edition of The Ditchdigger’s Daughters has given me an opportunity to answer those questions.

  My parents’ dream was to have all of their daughters become physicians. Victor Hugo once said: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” Little did my parents know that their dream would blossom into a future for their daughters that continues to bear fruit. Over the past decade, the book has garnered many accolades, including a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and recognition by former President Bill Clinton. It also has become a national bestseller and an award-winning film.

  Now for the update: My oldest Sister, Donna (tenor sax), never celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She lost her battle with lupus in 1993 and died at age forty-eight. Although Donna chose not to graduate from college, she still recognized the value of education. Her daughter, Heather, is an alumna of the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. She is a social worker now living in San Francisco with her husband and young son.

  Betty and her husband still reside in “The House That Donald Built” in Long Branch, New Jersey. Betty will soon be retiring after almost forty years of being a geriatric nurse.

  Jeanette (electric guitar) continues to practice psychiatry in Albany, New York, in her subspecialty of Addiction Psychiatry. She has been married for over twenty-five years to her husband, Emile, a gastroenterologist. Although they have no children, Jeanette remains involved in many civic activiti
es.

  Over the past twenty-five years, Linda (drums and percussion) has since retired from the United States Army as Lieutenant Colonel. She is now one of the very few female board-certified prosthodontic oral surgeons in the country and holds a Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration. Currently, Linda is an associate professor on the faculty of Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she serves as the course director for removable prosthodontics.

  Rita, my kid sister (piano and keyboards), has had a more circuitous route to her present career. After leaving her position as a science teacher, she enrolled in Seton Hall University School of Law and received her law degree at the age of forty. Not being satisfied in the legal profession, Rita changed her path, entered the New Jersey Institute of Technology and, in 2006, at fifty-four years of age, became the first black woman at NJIT to receive a Ph.D. in Environmental Science.

  As for me, since 1983 (when the book ends), my life has been occupied with trying to balance my roles as a mother, wife, professor, obstetrician/gynecologist, and author. I am still married to my medical school sweetheart, Shearwood. It will soon be thirty-four years. Where does the time go?

  I have been affiliated with several teaching hospitals and universities since the book was published in 1995. The academic achievement of which I am most proud is my climb to the faculty position of Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cornell University Weill Medical College in New York, and my delivery of 5,542 babies. I am presently a consultant in High-Risk Obstetrics (Perinatology).

  My mother always told us: “No amount of success in your profession can ever make up for being a failure at home.” With that said, my greatest life accomplishment has been (with my husband) rearing two exceptional children. Our daughter. Kimberly, is a graduate of Stanford University and is now com¬pleting her graduate studies in socio-medical sciences in the Master of Public Health program at Columbia University. During her years at Stanford, Kimberly, distinguished herself by being asked to sing for then-President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton.

  Our son, Woody (Shearwood, III), is a Life Chess Master and has had a stellar career in the world of chess. He was the 1997 United States Junior Open Chess champion, became a member of the All-American Chess Team and won the United States Chess Federation Scholar-Chessplayer Award before entering Harvard University. Woody graduated cum laude from Harvard and began his medical studies at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (our alma mater). When he graduated from P & S, my husband and I ascended to the stage and presented him with the diploma of Doctor of Medicine. He is currently in his residency, training to be a neurosurgeon.

  I again want to thank Dafina Books and Kensington Publishing for continuing my parents’ legacy. By keeping their story alive, others may be inspired and motivated by their vision, their struggle, and their triumph. My parents are no longer with us physically, but their indomitable spirit will live on in the next generation and in generations thereafter.

  Although we may not have all become physicians, the four remaining daughters of Donald and Itasker are all doctors. We were born daughters of a ditchdigger, continued together in the music arena as “The Thornton Sisters,” but we are now living our parents’ dream as the Doctors Thornton.

  ******

  If you think that my parents were amazing, follow my own trials and tribulations in trying to balance married life, raising two children and practicing full-time medicine as a high-risk obstetrician at an academic medical center in my new memoir, to be released in December, 2010 entitled, “SOMETHING TO PROVE”—A Daughter’s Journey to Fulfill a Father’s Legacy; the sequel to “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters”.

  DR. YVONNE THORNTON is a double Board-certified specialist in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine. She lives in New Jersey.

  www.doctorthornton.com

  www.pagingdrthornton.com