Blood appeared in the palm of her left hand. A friend noticed that she was bleeding and informed Cloretta, whose first thought was, “I had cut myself.”4 Mr. Bremmond saw the blood too, and wiped it away, but it continued flowing; the source was not evident and he sent Cloretta to see Susan Carson, the school nurse. She examined the little girl’s hand and later told a newspaper reporter:
“Her palms were bleeding when she first came in,” Mrs. Carlson said. “There isn’t any evidence of a wound. It was fresh blood. I wiped it off and after a while . . . it would appear again . . . there were no puncture wounds. I looked with a magnifying glass.”5
When the history of elementary school nursing is written, look for Mrs. Carson as the first of her profession to see a case of stigmata.
Holy Marks
Stigmata is the plural form of stigma, the Latin word for branding, burning permanent marks into the skin with a hot iron, and it is used to describe wounds, blisters, or bleeding that spontaneously appear at the same places they were suffered by Jesus. The stigmata take different forms, but they often occur on the extremities where nails were hammered into Jesus’s hands and feet, and the torso where a Roman soldier delivered the coup de grâce with a spear. There can be stripes from flagellation, punctures on the forehead caused by thorns, knees abraded from the three falls on the road to Calvary, even a shoulder bruised from carrying the cross. Other forms of stigmata are not directly related to the Passion, such as shedding tears of blood, a cross-shaped wound on the forehead, even a “ring” that appears on the finger of female stigmatics who have “contracted betrothals or a marriage with our Lord.”6 There are also “spiritual stigmata.” These are invisible and allowed saints like Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) to experience the pain of the phenomenon without external signs.
It began more than a century before St. Catherine’s time, in 1224, with St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). He was engaged in “peaceful ecstasies of contemplation” on La Verna, a hill near Assisi, Italy, when a six-winged seraph appeared, bearing a cross with the crucified Christ.7 Many artists have depicted the scene, using golden beams of light to connect Jesus’s wounds to the places on Francis’s body where he developed a singular form of stigmata described by St. Bonaventure in the Life of Saint Francis (1261):
For his hands and feet seemed to be pierced through the midst with nails, the heads of the nails shewing in the palms of the hands, and upper side of the feet, and their points shewing on the other side; the heads of the nails were round and black in the hands and feet, while the points were long, bent, and as it were turned back, being formed of the flesh itself, and protruding therefrom. The right side, moreover was—as if it had been pierced by a lance—seamed with a ruddy scar, wherefrom ofttimes welled the sacred blood, staining his habit and breeches.8
There have been around 330 pious Roman Catholic stigmatics since then, of which more than 60 are beatified or canonized.9 By itself, the phenomenon does not indicate unusual holiness, and seemingly authentic cases have occurred in hysterics, the conventionally religious, and, in rare cases, non-Catholics. Moreover, the church is reluctant to proclaim anything miraculous. Even a popular figure like the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio (later St. Pio of Pietrelcina), was suspected of being a “mad . . . self-mutilating psychopath possessed of the devil who exploited people’s credulity.”10 It took a half century of investigation for Pio’s case to be recognized as supernatural.
Pope Benedict XIV (1675–1758) established guidelines for assessing the stigmata, distinguishing between wounds that are “natural, supernatural and preternatural (or else human, divine or diabolical),” and noting the characteristics of heavenly stigmata. They are:
(i) sudden in appearance, (ii) [involve] major tissue modifications, (iii) persistence and inalterability despite all therapy, (iv) hemorrhage, (v) absence of infection or suppuration [some wounds even give off a perfumed smell], (vi) sudden and perfect disappearance . . .11
None of this was of immediate importance to Cloretta Robertson. When a little girl is black, Baptist, and bleeding from her palms like Jesus, the first priority is seeing a doctor. An appointment was made to see a hematologist on March 20.
Children’s Hospital
Four days after it began, Cloretta’s right palm was bleeding. Two days after that it was her left foot, and on the seventh day her right foot and right side of the thorax; when she got the crown-of-thorns stigmata on the fourteenth day, she bled from the middle of her forehead. The bleeding occurred one to five times daily, mostly from the hands, and the different places did not bleed at the same time. When asked about it, she replied shyly, “‘It happens. It just sort of comes on, I don’t know before. It doesn’t hurt. I just look down and it’s there. I don’t know what it is.’”12 She also thought, “‘It’s weird.’”13
At the Children’s Hospital Medical Center the staff hematologist watched Cloretta for two hours through a one-way glass but saw nothing unusual. It was only when she returned from the ladies’ room that he saw “dried blood on her lower right chest.” There was also “a relatively excoriated area on the front of her tongue—reactive and red—which could be sign of bleeding there.”14 Medical tests found no physical disorders, or anything in her family history that might be relevant to stigmata, such as blood diseases, cases of prolonged bleeding, easy bruising, or mental illness. Her background was also fairly normal.
Born June 2, 1961, Cloretta was the last of six children born to her mother, Alice. Alice Calhoun was thirty-six years old at the time and not married to Cloretta’s father, who lived in Oakland but had almost no contact with his daughter. In 1966, Alice wedded her third husband, fifty-five-year-old Andrew Robertson, and between his job as a longshoreman and Alice’s as a dental technician, Cloretta led a “lower middle-class” life with “her parents, three brothers, a sister, three nieces and a nephew in a big house” on 54th Street at Oakland.15
The hematologist was evidently skeptical, but no one in the Robertson family seemed to doubt the reality of what was happening. When Cloretta’s forehead became speckled with blood (crown-of-thorns stigmata), they photographed it and gave the pictures to reporters. Meanwhile, Alice Robertson worried about Cloretta’s health and her long-term prospects, saying tearfully, “I just don’t know how this will affect the rest of her life.”16 Getting treatment for stigmata also proved difficult. “It’s been a real trial for me,” she said, “going from doctor to doctor and taking her to hospitals in the middle of the night and having people there look at me like I’m crazy.”17 She eventually had to walk Cloretta to school to fend off the curious; in fact, the person who seemed most excited about the phenomenon was their pastor.
At Church
On March 23, the Rev. Leonard L. Hester described what was happening to the congregation and delivered a sermon about Cloretta; the story was attracting so much attention that it appeared in the religion section of Jet.
The article, Child’s Easter Bleeding Puzzles Parents, Doctors, is as straightforward as the title and illustrated with photographs of the Robertsons at home. We see a serene Cloretta seated on the sofa next to her mother, flanked by Rev. and Mrs. Hester. There is Cloretta standing before an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, reading a letter from a girl in San Francisco (the Sacred Heart is an unusual image for a Baptist household; perhaps Jet’s photographer brought it as a prop for the pictures). We also see Cloretta taking part in ordinary activities, like getting ready to dye Easter eggs with her nieces, Frances, Sonya, and Tonya. This was important; Andrew Robertson made a point of saying that, stigmata aside, “his daughter is an otherwise normal girl who likes to watch television and play with her friends.”18 Her stepfather might have also encouraged Cloretta’s seemingly detached response to the phenomenon.
She was very calm and said of the bleeding, “It happens. I don’t feel happy or sad, just in-between.”19 Mr. Robertson said, “I’ve been worrying about my baby and trying to keep her fr
om getting excited.”20 He added that Cloretta “doesn’t get upset (by the bleeding). It’s almost as if she doesn’t mind. Sometimes we’ll be playing, she’ll just look down and say, ‘Pop, there it is,’ and there’s the blood.”21
The doctors “tentatively diagnosed her as suffering from ‘Easter bleeding syndrome’” and the Robertsons hoped it would end with the holiday.22 “If the bleeding does not stop after Easter,” Andrew Robertson said, “we may have to do something further.”23
In addition to the hematologist, doctors Loretta F. Early of the Department of Pediatrics, West Oakland Health Center, and Joseph E. Lifschutz from the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Berkeley, saw Cloretta; there were several visits and the pair later coauthored “A Case of Stigmata” for the Archives of General Psychiatry.24
Second Opinions
The journal article discusses stigmata and psychogenic purpura, a rare disorder, in which bruises are created by the patient’s emotions. It also considers Cloretta’s background, physical and mental health, and the reality of spontaneous bleeding.
The doctors’ initial impression of their patient was of a
pleasant, neatly and attractively groomed prepubescent black girl, cheerful, friendly, and somewhat reserved in her conversations with adult white men. With one of us (L.F.E. [Dr. Early]), however, she was much more spontaneous and conversed freely and openly. Her physical examination results were entirely normal; she was and remained alert, well-oriented, and a pleasant patient.
She considered herself “shy, desirous of getting along with people, happy, and feeling that she had little to offer others,” while
[h]er family describes her as gregarious, likeable, active, creative, happy, and very helpful in household chores. Her teacher described her as talkative, gregarious, and somewhat manipulative. We believe that the family was very close, warm, positive, and apparently emotionally and physically healthy. We wondered, however, about the effect on the children of considerable overcrowding in the home. We lacked considerable information about pertinent family such as whether she was ever exposed to scenes of violence or to excessive sexual stimulation [experiences associated with cases of psychogenic bruising]. It is notable that both the patient and her mother had strong positive feelings about the sense of intimacy with the many family members in the home.
There “was no apparent conflict over her natural father,” and as for her religious life, New Light Baptist Church was “mildly fundamentalist, with minimal emphasis on hellfire and brimstone, accentuating positive aspects of Christianity and good works.”25 Her life was not a hothouse for psychopathologies, and Cloretta did not
appear to have a hysterical personality. She was not self-centered, overly dramatic, flirtatious, impetuous, excitable, or manifesting any obvious neurotic symptoms. The only hint of neurotic symptoms was her casual attitude toward the bleeding, a bit of “la belle indifference.”26
This apparent unconcern might have proved useful, however, for a child trying to chart a course between her mother’s fears and her pastor’s excitement. The most worrisome aspect of the case were incidents of auditory hallucinations, which began a few days before the bleeding started and occurred when Cloretta was praying at bedtime.
Her prayer consisted of a blessing to each individually named family member. The hallucination consisted of a simple, positive, brief instruction such as, “Your prayers will be answered.”
In addition, there were voices talking to her (once on Good Friday and again on Easter Sunday), telling her to go and pray with certain people. She did so, believing that her prayers would have healing power, and in each case they did. After Easter Sunday, though, the voices stopped and there were no visual hallucinations.
As for the stigmata itself, the inevitable question is whether or not it was really happening, and could “self-induced wounding [be] ruled out as the cause of these strange phenomena?”27
Physical Evidence
There have been a number of fraudulent stigmatics. The sixteenth-century nun Maria de la Visitacion was caught painting stigmata onto her skin (“Her physicians defended her, but the Inquisition’s examiners scrubbed away her wounds to reveal unblemished skin”), as well as more complicated cases in which subjects were not consciously aware of wounding themselves.28
One of the most prominent modern stigmatics, Therese Neumann (1898–1962) of Konnersreuth, Germany, experienced a wide variety of phenomena including spectacularly gruesome displays of bleeding. They went on for decades, but apparently no one ever actually saw the bleeding begin; moreover, in the years before the stigmata appeared, she suffered from convulsions during which “‘[t]he fingers trembled, and she dug them into her palms.’”29 Skepticism is inevitable in cases where the stigmatic must be alone, unobserved, or concealed in bedclothes for blood to start flowing, and had Cloretta’s episodes always been preceded by a visit to the ladies’ room, as happened at the Children’s Hospital, it would have raised suspicions. Witnesses, however, saw the bleeding begin while she sat in class, or carefully inspected her hand as more blood appeared, without finding an opening in the skin.
During Cloretta’s first trip to the hospital, Dr. Early attended to her hand in a way that suggested blood was passing through Cloretta’s unbroken skin. The doctor told a reporter, “‘I have wrapped her hands thoroughly and the blood was there after 18 hours. There was no way she could have removed the bandages [and] then replaced them, or stuck an object beneath them to insert any blood.’”30 The formal account in “A Case of Stigmata” states that Cloretta’s left hand was
bound thoroughly with an elastoplast boxing glove dressing. . . . She was returned to school and within three hours, while in the classroom, bled spontaneously from her right palm. The bandage was removed by the school staff the following day so that she could play her clarinet and blood was reported in the dressing.”31
Drs. Early and Lifschutz never saw Cloretta start bleeding; she claimed not to know when it was going to happen, yet good luck and insight into how the phenomenon might be triggered, allowed Dr. Early to see the stigmata occurring and examine the skin afterward.
The single most important factor in precipitating the phenomenon seems to have been Cloretta’s “identification with the figure of Christ. She was also preoccupied with Christ’s suffering . . .”32 When interviewed, she “denied any knowledge of the stigmata phenomenon prior to bleeding,” yet also “recognizes that her bleeding is connected with the death of Christ, celebrated nine days from now on Good Friday.”33 “It was only after the first week of bleeding that she learned of St. Francis of Assisi and later clearly identified with him.”34 So, on Cloretta’s fifth visit to Dr. Early’s office,
the physician suggested that she sit in the examination room next to her office and draw pictures of St. Francis of Assisi from a book she had brought with her. The patient was alone, nursing staff was on lunch break, and while copying pictures she noticed bleeding from her left palm. She immediately returned to the physician’s office with two to three drops of blood in the palm of her left hand. The physician observed the blood to increase in volume four fold, welling up from the center of the palm and spreading over the palmar creases. After wiping the wet blood away no lesions were present with the exception of a pea-sized bluish discoloration remaining in the palm of her left hand for approximately three minutes.”35
In 1975, Dr. Early described the phenomenon as “red blood cells . . . passing through the walls of tiny capillaries and through the skin.”36 (The blood was also analyzed.37) As far as the reality of Cloretta’s stigmata was concerned, the doctors noted that “[s]elf-induced trauma is almost humanly impossible to rule out absolutely in such cases; but we believe the likelihood of it to be almost nil in this case.” They continued, “One can no longer dispute the power of mental and emotional forces to control such physical phenomena. By analogy we need not doubt that profound, intense religious and emotional
forces, conscious and unconscious, could cause stigmatic bleeding.”38
They were not a product of hysteria; Dr. Lifschutz described Cloretta as “a very well-adjusted, stable little girl.”39 Nor was it psychogenic purpura, which are very rare and seen in people that have “severe hysterical and masochistic traits . . . [whose] life stories were checkered with violence, sadism, and sexual trauma.”40 In short, “[t]he only significant background for the stigmata was her religiosity”41 and identification with Jesus’s suffering.
As often happens with stigmata, the phenomenon reached its climax on Good Friday. Cloretta was staying at a friend’s house that day and claimed that after waking up she bled from all six sites simultaneously for the first and only time (“there were [however] neither witnesses nor blood reported on the bed sheets”).42 After nineteen days, she felt “‘it was all over.’”43 But the doctors predicted that “the chances are better than even that she will again bleed at subsequent Easter seasons.”44
At church that day, members of the press almost outnumbered the small congregation. The Rev. Hester delivered a sermon about the crucifixion and talked about Cloretta, calling the phenomenon a “miracle” and saying that “We pray for Cloretta and her family that this bleeding will be with her throughout her life.” He told Jet that “[t]he Lord has prepared her for this,” and as the congregation filed out she “shyly offered her hand to those leaving,” for the Rev. Hester believed “‘that by touching her hand we’ll all be blessed.’”45
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 6