by Ron Powers
Holmes’s words were not muttered over brandy and cigars at the Harvard Club. They were part of the 8-to-1 majority opinion that he wrote for the United States Supreme Court upholding the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, a statute that authorized sterilization of “the unfit” regardless of consent.* The case was the despicably tainted Buck v. Bell, a paradigm of fabrication and tortured argument that legitimized State intrusion into the reproduction rights of individuals—in the name of a “pure” (and “sane”) national gene pool.
Carrie Buck was seventeen years old and poor when her adoptive parents, a couple named Dobbs, bundled her off to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Her natural mother, Emma, herself a “feebleminded” inmate at Virginia State, had given the child over to the Dobbses upon entering the institution years earlier. Now the Dobbses claimed that the girl herself was incorrigible, stupid, and, most unforgivably of all, the unwed mother of a child.
The State Colony’s superintendent, Albert Priddy, generously awarded the new inmate a mental age (nine) higher than he’d estimated for her mother (eight), but soon averred that being shut up in an asylum was not protection enough against the likes of Carrie Buck. After all, she had already polluted America’s precious supply of gametes and zygotes. Her fallopian rampage must be stopped once and for all. She would have to be sterilized.
Priddy in fact wanted to use Buck as a legal prophylactic, in a manner of speaking. He was a tireless sexual moralist and a sterilization buff (he tended to conflate promiscuous women with “morons”), and he had already been sued by previous victims of his remedy, which he had no intention of abandoning. He wanted to make sure the new statute would withstand review by the highest court in the land, so that he could legally sterilize naughty morons to his heart’s content. To represent Carrie Buck, Priddy hired a lawyer, one Irving Whitehead, a former director of the Colony and a friend of Priddy. Another friend was Aubrey Strode, a lawyer who actually wrote the new Virginia statute and whom Priddy chose to represent the Colony. Thus all the “adversaries” were on the same side, the Colony’s. (Whitehead was no Clarence Darrow and had no interest in trying to be one here.) There was little question of whose interests would prevail.
Dr. John Hendren Bell, who became superintendent of Virginia State when Priddy suddenly died, steered the case to the Supreme Court by securing writs of certiorari—consent of a higher court to review the findings of a lower one. The “findings” in Buck v. Bell were spectacularly bogus. Whitehead called no witnesses who were of any help to the girl or who could refute the crude “science” that diagnosed her intelligence and character. Most witnesses against her had never met her; their testimony had been coached and shaped by Priddy. Carrie Buck’s school records, never produced by Whitehead but revealed later, showed her to be a competent and promising student.
As for her degenerate promiscuity, the real centerpiece of the case: Irving Whitehead did not subpoena the Dobbs couple. Had he done so, they would have been obliged to testify that Carrie Buck had borne a daughter out of wedlock because she’d been raped—by a nephew of the Dobbses while the Dobbses were out of town.
Carrie Buck eventually was allowed to leave the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. She lived in poverty or near poverty until 1983, but she proved to be neither epileptic nor feebleminded. She was said to be a wide reader. Her daughter, Vivian, who represented the third generation of “imbeciles” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s phrasing, did well in school, making the honor roll once, before she died of measles in 1932.
Buck v. Bell remains on the books, and the science of eugenics remains in the annals.
6
“A More Normal World”
Our family traveled a lot in those last carefree years before the disasters commenced: To Washington. To the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, as mentioned, where I boosted Kevin up so that he could touch Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. (Kev had long since mastered the electrifying opening riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) We spent a week horseback riding and watersliding near Kalispell, Montana, where we ran into a Middlebury family whose sons were close friends of the boys. We spent a week on the island of St. John in the Caribbean, where we encountered what seemed the entire town of Middlebury. We divided a week between London and Austria, where I had been invited to speak at the Salzburg Global Seminar. The theme for the gathering was “America in Our Time.” My appearance was a patronage gig all the way: Olin Robison, the president of Middlebury College and of the seminar then, invited me. I recall grinding through my remarks in a conference room inside the august and historic Schloss Leopoldskron. I had constructed my talk around the hopeful metaphor of green grass sprouting through the cracks in urban sidewalks, a metaphor that had seemed resoundingly brilliant when I’d hit upon it back in Middlebury. In the event, I mostly recall the eminent historian Alan Brinkley glowering at me from the front row, trying to suppress the steam coming from his ears. I recall how perfectly the subtle plaids of his shirt matched his sweater.
I recall wanting to go home.
But Honoree and the kids had fun.
And we visited Ireland with Honoree’s mother, Honora, in tow, her final visit to the realm of her girlhood. Honora tracked down the gravesite of her mother. The tombstone is visible on a steep hillside above a bay—just visible above spears of grass that have not been mowed for decades. We watched as Honora, who was then in her eighties, climbed the hill on her hands and knees to the gravesite.
Through these years, Kevin played his guitars with abandon, with passion, and, when the music called for it, with palpable buoyancy and delight. Yet he never mocked the music, or kidded it (or his audience), or tried to subsume it with theatrics. He was never a fist-pumper or a jumper or a strutter onstage. His blazing rock and blues and jazz riffs could make his instrument seem almost alive, and Kevin let that instrument speak for itself. From his solemn expression as the notes leaped and danced, you might have thought he was playing a game of chess. And perhaps he was.
Certainly he lived deep inside the world of music, and he was a grand master at producing a tune to match a situation. On our return from County Mayo to Shannon Airport, our jam-packed little red car bumping along through the second or third hour of the narrow two-lane, goose-crowded route, the silence inside the car was broken by musical notes. I thought at first that someone had switched on the radio, though I could not recall seeing a rear speaker. The tune was “Wild Mountain Thyme.” It was being played by the small golden-haired musician in the backseat—played the way it was meant to be played: slowly, meditatively, one perfect heartbreaking note at a time.
Played on a small ukulele that Kevin had packed at the last minute. And played now, with the blooming heather all around us.
I taught writing at the college, or tried to, pacing back and forth in front of my impeccably disheveled students as I had seen movie professors do, scrawling words and sentences from their essays on the chalkboard, then whirling around dramatically to demand: “What’s wrong with this sentence?! Why is it up here?!”
On balance, I don’t think I did my students too much damage. I persuaded most of them that no law of literature stipulated that every essay had to begin with, “I woke up from my sleep. My eyeballs told me it was morning and my stomach told me I was hungry for breakfast.” I persuaded many that a sentence such as “While I was walking to the movies with my friend…” could use an extra touch of character description, given that “my friend” might be a soccer buddy, a hot babe, or an eight-foot rabbit visible to no one except the narrator.
Honoree did much better. She managed the transition from “bench” research scientist to teaching biochemistry to ambitious and bright students at a high-ranking institution. She took advantage of the college’s science laboratories to continue the endometrial cell research she had begun years earlier at Mount Sinai in New York (which Dean, in his grade school essays, always spelled “Mt. Cyanide”).
Honoree’s students loved her; loved
her passion for science and the pains she took to relate its principles to their own lives; loved her keen understanding of them as individuals—she invariably had memorized the names of her students each semester—sometimes numbering as many as seventy—and the extra time she took with them on concepts they found difficult. Her favorite class was “Chemistry for Citizens,” a course designed to integrate the principles of chemistry into everyday life. (One moss-backed colleague dismissed the course as “Chemistry for Turnips.”) She cherished her young women students especially, recalling the skepticism she’d herself faced as a female science major decades earlier. Her best students came alive to her; they joyously wore T-shirts begging “Speak Slowly—I’m a Blonde.” She would be up for tenure in just a few years, and we would live out our lives in our own moss-backed contentment.
Kevin brought home good grades, risked his guitar-picking fingers as a catcher in summer baseball—luckily, most pitches got by him—and formed a kids’ rock band. Dean maintained an honor’s student grade level through his middle school years. His auburn hair, darker than his mother’s, grew thick. He was a slim boy, but we’d added a trampoline and a swing set to our small backyard, and these marked the beginning of Dean’s physical transformation. He started using the top bar of the swing set for chin-ups. The results were quick and striking. Dean remained slim, but his back and shoulders took on muscle. He made the backstroke his specialty on the summer swim team, and his relay team set several records in district competition and then won the Vermont championship.
In the fall of that transitional year, 1992, we got him involved in the town’s community theater. He played the young Michael in Auntie Mame. He got to wear a turban and carry a scimitar, and, best of all, he (once again) got to break the family taboo on “swears,” without getting lectured, by belting out the scripted line: “Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death!” Just to be sure her son wouldn’t feel out of place among strangers (though she needn’t have worried), Honoree auditioned and won a small part as Mrs. Upson.
Kevin joined Dean and the community troupe the following year for the kids’ musical Really Rosie. He played Alligator, wearing his green cloth alligator-snout cap backward, the way he wore all his caps. And the two played Town Hill Boys in A Child’s Christmas in Wales the following season, singing their Welsh carols in mufflers and oversized newsboy caps. By that time, I’d yielded to the town’s overwhelming supplications and taken on some small parts as well.
This was how life was going to be. A road to heaven, paved with good student evaluations.
Yet fissures were starting to form in our family; hairline fissures, shifts in Dean’s behavior that were nearly invisible at first. Honoree and I told each other they were “phases,” the inevitable symptoms of a child’s transition into adolescence. Walking from our car to the venue of a folk concert one summer night, we noticed that Kevin was with us, but not Dean. We spotted him sauntering along on the other side of the street, aloof, apart. The apartness became a motif: He found another part of the woods on hikes. He took a seat off to himself at school games. He showed gruffness in moments where no gruffness seemed necessary. Car trips became volatile: the family, confined in close quarters, produced in our eldest son an edginess that could explode into angry argument, the exact cause of which we could never recall afterward.
He continued to show curiosity and imagination in his schoolwork. His prickliness did not seem to damage his relations with Kevin; the two remained close, and he developed a casual charm that seemed authentic. He was unusually at ease with adults, looking them in the eye and asking them questions about themselves. As he moved into mid-adolescence, his good looks and his easy manner—outside the family—made him attractive to females, including females a few years older than he. Within minutes of our arrival at our campsite on the island of St. John in the Caribbean when Dean was fifteen, we spotted him chatting up a fellow tourist in her mid-twenties who seemed pleased by his attention.
Back at home, the bad times were closing in. Honoree and I kept the reversals of fortune as far from the boys’ sense of anxiety as we reasonably could, but we did not deny that they had happened.
I lost a book that had consumed three years of my working life when people associated with the project rebelled against its content and persuaded the publisher to cancel the contract. Honoree’s setback arrived in a letter that she picked up at the president’s office on Mother’s Day in 1994. She had been denied tenure. This came as a shock. She had passed two previous reviews without a problem, her department recommended her for tenure, she’d obtained grants, and had involved her students in her published research. A professor in another department, risking bad feeling among the faculty, soon wrote a denunciation of the turndown in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Honoree appealed the decision. Her appeal was rejected. I immediately resigned my adjunct appointment as a gesture of contempt for the college’s blindness toward promising women professors. My furious gesture was expensive. Our household was now without an income.
Despite the risk and Honoree’s misgivings, I never regretted that decision to stand with my wife. Not then, not now. Not ever.
It was in this family climate of financial uncertainty, and the resulting tension that we could not conceal from our sons, that Dean, at age fourteen, composed one of the most beautiful and psychologically freighted essays he ever wrote—though two years later he was to write an even more powerful one. Bearing almost uncanny echoes of James Agee’s numinous description of the Gudger family’s bedroom in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Dean’s “My Room” invites the reader into a sacred chamber. As with Agee, Dean confers holiness upon the room’s objects by the simple scrupulous act of naming them. And he allows the reader to associate these objects with the tapestry of his mind.
My Room
You turn the corner, and see the door to my room. Brilliant colors meshed together formed from years of sticker collections. Marker lines stray and then cross again. Glues colored red, green and blue, are splatter painted across the once white door frame.
As your hand clasps the door knob you feel the masking tape which is wrapped around 3 or 4 times. The tape is slightly stained from the oils from hands past. As the doorknob turns you feel two clicks from inside the metal mechanism, the door is a bit sticky at first, and a little hard to open, but it finally gives way.
As it opens perhaps the first thing you notice are the ski pictures, which have been plastered to my also once white walls, giving the room a sort of bluish tint. To your left as you step on the wooden floor, covered 2/3 of the way with a free standing carpet kind of in the middle of the room, you see a 2x3’ tack board. On it is a calendar held by 3 different tacks a red, a blue and a silver. A photo above the month of September shows tall slim trees rising to the sky… Adjacent to the tack board, a long narrow mirror hangs from a nail in the wall…
Along the wall the mirror hangs on, there is a box like cubical cut in to the wall. Inside this space is my bed. My bed consists of a mattress on top of the wooden bottom of the cubical. On top of the mattress is a sheet covered by a blanket and then by a white feather down comforter. The pillow is also feather down, covered by a blue pillow case… In the far corner there is a large lamp, which is controlled by a switch at the door and a switch in the bed’s cubical. Along the left side of the bed there is an alarm clock/radio, a couple of books and a small reading lamp. A map of the USA is on the ceiling above the bed.
To the right of the wall the bed is in, is my desk. It is a wooden desk with no drawers… An IBM computer in good shape sits in the middle. To the left is a fan placed carefully on the end of the table facing my bed. Behind the desk are several Jimi Hendrix posters and a Duke Ellington poster. On the desk beside the computer are magazines old papers, a hammer, a tie, computer games, cards, tapes, disks and some books. Scattered about is loose change; and lying underneath the desk is a fuse box…
If you turn 90 degrees to the righ
t, you see a wooden shelf nailed to the wall with three wooden planks. On the middle plank is a black stereo CD player, nothing big just something to play music on when I’m doing homework, reading or hanging out…
Turning to the last wall you see a dresser on top of which is a souvenir shelf. Placed in one of the three white wicker racks there are… concert tickets a couple of small flags, miniature statues, plane tickets, brochures, a Powder magazine and other odds and ends from places I’ve traveled to…
Opening the door one last time you’ll see what I’m using as a temporary lock, a hole in the wall on the left of the door right next to the entrance, reinforced by nails which I put a screwdriver in flush with the door. You move past the doorway stepping out and away from the familiar sight and smell of my room into a more normal world.
A more normal world.
We recovered our financial footing, but slowly. Honoree found a teaching position at Trinity College in Burlington, a small institution for women administered by the Sisters of Mercy order, and commuted the seventy miles there and back for a few years until the college was forced to close for lack of funding. I eventually found a book project that restored us to solvency.