* * *
Ellen wanted to have a vaginal birth, but God was telling us that the babies were not supposed to come out that way. She had a fibroid, which is not uncommon among women, especially black women. Fibroids are benign tumors that can grow in the uterus; they can be as big as a cantaloupe or as small as a pea. Ellen’s was the size of a peach. During the C-section, the physicians not only realized the umbilical cord was wrapped around Stokely’s little ankles, but he was also trapped by the fibroid. And Sadie was confined by the tumor too, so she had to be pulled out by her feet.
Here’s the beautiful thing about all of what happened during my children’s birth. There wasn’t a male in the room except for me. The twins were brought into this world by women. Three black, female physicians performed the operation and delivered the babies. There were three nurses, nurse techs, and anesthesiologists for each child.
The birth wasn’t easy for Ellen, but afterwards everything seemed fine. We were overjoyed to have two healthy babies. Stokely, who was a pound heavier than his tiny sister, looked eerily like my family. I could see my father, me, my nephew, and my brother stamped on his tiny face. Sadie didn’t have that froggy look that babies sometimes have. She came out pursing her lips, with big beautiful eyes. Down South, if a newborn comes out a little homely, someone will say, “Oh bless her [or his] heart. She’ll grow into her looks.” But Sadie was undeniably gorgeous.
Shortly before 11 p.m., we sent everybody home. It was just me, Ellen, the twins, and the lactation nurse, who sat on one side of the bed, while I sat on the other. We were working on tandem breast feeding. While feeding the babies, Ellen started complaining of feeling hot and sleepy, so the nurse and I grabbed the babies, who were at each of her breasts. Ellen was growing faint and eventually passed out after violently throwing up. She woke up to me patting her head.
“Baby, you passed out and vomited. Are you okay?” I asked.
She was going in and out of consciousness. We put the babies in the bassinets and pressed the emergency button. I ran out into the hallway and shouted as loud and fiercely as I could, “Can we get some help for my wife?!”
Another nurse arrived, but I was steaming because I felt they were moving too slowly. I think many people in my shoes would have wanted them to move faster, no matter how fast they were moving.
I immediately FaceTimed Dr. Cannon, Ellen’s primary OB/GYN, and also texted her. She was putting rollers in her hair but stopped everything to get back to the hospital.
Ellen would wake up to a room of activity. A white obstetrician, who happened to be our neighbor, was standing over her. “Your physicians are on the way. I heard the code over the intercom. I saw it was your room . . . Ellen, do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ellen mumbled.
Within minutes, the whole critical care team was in the room, including the doctors who had conducted the C-section: Dr. Paige rushed in with an ultrasound machine; Dr. Cannon checked Ellen’s bleeding and vitals; and Dr. Freeman examined her cervix.
The physicians decided they needed to go back into her uterus. “Are you sure?” Ellen asked. They were sure.
Ellen was wheeled out of the room in her bed, and Sadie, Stokely, and I stayed in the room. I pulled over the doctor’s rolling chair and sat between their bassinets while I talked to them and fed them when I thought it was time.
A nurse brought me some formula and plastic nipples. I had to learn quick how to feed them and change their diapers. I called Nosizwe so that she could interpret what I might not understand. She had already made it home after being at the hospital for the births, but she was willing to turn around, despite living a ninety-minute drive away. She said she’d never heard that much fear in my voice before. I called my brother, too, who also came to the hospital. Nosizwe called Ellen’s dad to let her family know what was happening. Two of Ellen’s siblings also rushed to the hospital. For three or four hours, family members were downstairs and I was by myself with the babies upstairs—none of us knowing what was going on with Ellen.
My brother Lumumba sent me a text. “How are you holding up?”
“Scared.”
“I’m going to step away and call you,” he wrote.
My brother is the religious one, the minister in the family. “Make sure you are breathing,” he said. “Everybody is depending on you at this moment. So be strong. You are the father, the husband, and you are running the show. You have to be strong.”
That gave me the courage I needed to talk to Kai on the phone throughout the night. She was terrified. “Is mom okay?” she kept asking.
I really didn’t know what to tell her. But I said, “She’s going to be okay.”
“Please don’t let anything happen to Mommy; Mommy means everything to me,” she repeated.
That’s when I broke down and cried. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. So Kai tried to comfort me. “It’s going to be okay,” she told me. It was a real role reversal for a thirteen-year-old.
As I waited to hear about my wife, I tended to our children. Every three hours I woke up to feed the babies, trying to put them to sleep, changing them, trying to figure out how to do everything. By the time Nosizwe arrived to be with us, I had somehow come up with a routine. She said I was just following instinct.
“Sadie is taking five milliliters of formula every three hours, but Stokely is taking seven and a half. I’m trying to get them to ten to twelve milliliters,” I told her. “Sadie hasn’t pooped yet, but Stokely has. He’s already pooped three times.”
My sister later said, “Bakari became a dad in two hours.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Ellen was still awake while taken into surgery. She told the doctors that she couldn’t die because she had to live for her two new babies, for her daughter Kai, who desperately needed her, and for her husband. Three years earlier, Ellen’s beloved brother had suddenly passed away. Even at the edge of death herself, she was thinking about her family, worried that her siblings and parents couldn’t handle another sudden loss. And there was still so much she wanted to do in life.
The three physicians listened, held Ellen’s hand, and prayed. Ellen told me that it was at that moment she knew why she had handpicked those doctors. She knew they not only cared and would listen to her, but they’d do whatever they could to save her life.
Ellen had earlier bonded over her love for getting her eyelashes extended with the female anesthesiologist, who walked into the room and said, “I hear you lost a few eyelashes.” That made my wife laugh. She assured Ellen that she was in good hands. Ellen could hear the anesthesiologist ordering blood and telling people what to do and how fast she needed it done. Ellen was grateful for how seriously the doctor took everything, but she could also hear in the doctor’s voice just how dire a situation it was. That’s when she drifted off to sleep.
When the surgeons opened my wife up, they discovered that Ellen was bleeding out pretty good. Her blood had also started to clot in her uterus. The physicians pulled out clot after clot after clot. Ellen received seven units of blood; most people have only nine to twelve units in their entire body.
If we had been in Denmark, South Carolina, which no longer has a hospital, she surely would have died. Or if we had been in Orangeburg and she had to be transported to Charleston or Columbia, or if we had been in any other small rural county in a place like Alabama and had to get her air-lifted, she would not be here today.
The physicians inserted a device called a Bakri balloon that is used to control postpartum hemorrhage. Ellen believes that my quick call to her doctor and my shouting for help in the hallway helped save her life, and so, in her mind, it’s not a coincidence that a balloon with a name similar to mine also saved her life. During her pregnancy, we took birth classes. The instructor always asked fathers what they were looking forward to, and I always said, “I’m just worried about my wife.”
Ellen also worried. She once sat me down for a talk. “There will be times that it will b
e just me and you, and you have to be my advocate,” she told me. “I will need you to be my advocate.”
She now believes God was preparing us for war. We were both on heightened alert and took every precaution possible without anyone telling us to be so careful. She reminds me that when she fainted in the hospital room, I shouted loud enough to make everyone stop and listen.
Ellen woke up from surgery fighting, wanting to rip the ventilator out of her throat. For the next thirty-six hours, she was on life support. I went back and forth to be with my wife and then to be with our babies. Ellen recalled my kissing her and telling her that she needed to calm down. Despite her hands being in restraints, she got a pen from her friend Tara, who had come to be with me and the babies, and wrote, “This is a shit show” and “Tell them to take this thing out of my throat.”
The medical team was surprised that she was so alert and able. “But I was determined,” she later said. She was resolved to get to her family as soon as possible. When the doctors said she needed to be in the ICU for several days, she balked. She allowed us to bring the babies in an incubator only once to see her, worried they might get sick from the germs there. She also thought that Kai seeing her in that condition, swollen and in pain, would be too scary for her, so she insisted Kai visit only the babies.
Feeling nauseated after a dose of oxycodone, Ellen told the nurses to give her just Tylenol. She wanted to be fully aware of everything she was feeling, even her severe pain. She worried that if she fell asleep, she wouldn’t wake up.
I continued to visit her in the ICU but tried not to be away from the babies for more than thirty minutes at a time. The hospital was very secure. Each parent needed to have a bracelet to move around, and a nurse or a parent had to be with the babies at all times.
Ellen was out of the ICU in only thirty-six hours. That was on Wednesday, January 9, 2019. We were able to leave for home two days later.
“I know that I was lucky,” Ellen said. “I know that if one small detail in the chain of events had happened differently, I very likely would not be here to share my story. God gave me two miracle gifts on January 7, 2019, in the images of our twins, Stokely and Sadie. God also gave me a test, so I can share my testimony. I thank God every day that he spared my life that night because I have so much more life to live and so much work to do.”
My wife and I are not upper class by any stretch. We live comfortably, but we are not wealthy. However, we can afford to find the physicians we want. And maybe that’s even more important than the type of hospital or how many practitioners are looking out for you. We found doctors who looked like my wife, clearly understood her challenges, and cared deeply about her health.
All the doctors who helped my wife are people we know; we attend the same parties and circles. They were able to see what she was going through and understood her pain, understood that this wasn’t normal and perceived the urgency to do what they needed to do. Because they knew us, they listened.
The idea of health equity is about meeting people where they are, providing them with quality care no matter their backgrounds. In our case, it was a matter of life or death. We were in the position to seek people out, to find people who not only looked like us but who listened to us. Most white people get this benefit because of privilege; most black people, regardless of socioeconomics, do not.
XI
Why 2016 Happened and the Power of Rhetoric
This is an excerpt from my father’s middle school book about South Carolina history:
There were more Negroes than whites in the state. The Negroes were uneducated, they had no knowledge of government, they did not know how to make a living without the supervision of the white man, they were so accustomed to being taken care of that they had no idea how to behave under freedom. They stole cattle and chickens and hogs, burned barns and stables. They were not willing to work. They were like children playing hooky the moment the teacher’s back was turned. There were so many more Negroes than whites that they would have been in control if they had been allowed to vote. They nearly ruined the state during the years they voted. The whites were determined this should not happen again. Regulations were made to prevent Negroes from voting. To this day, South Carolina is a white man’s government.
It was written by Mary C. Simms Oliphant, the granddaughter of southern slaveholder and author William Gilmore Simms. In the textbook excerpt, which Oliphant based on one of her grandfather’s books from the 1860s, she’s discussing the period after slavery and Reconstruction. Her work, for children, even justifies the existence of the Ku Klux Klan and why African Americans should not have the right to vote. Luckily, my father’s African American teachers corrected the propaganda. Still, it’s important to understand that many white teachers taught it as gospel to their students for decades, as late as the 1960s or later. If this type of warped history was being spread as fact about black people for hundreds of years and not so long ago, is it so difficult to understand why some white Americans still feel contempt toward African Americans?
* * *
I never get caught up when people call me “nigger,” and I’m called that a lot. The reason I don’t let it bother me is something Stokely Carmichael said about racism and our reaction to it: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem, but if he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” So I don’t get caught up in the sensationalized rhetoric or insults that people hurl at me. Instead, I focus on the people who have the power to implement systems of oppression.
During the 2016 election, on September 8, US presidential candidate Donald Trump did not like that I was expressing my support of Hillary Clinton on CNN, so he trolled me, tweeting, “@realDonaldTrump Henry McMaster, Lt. Governor of South Carolina who endorsed me, beat failed @CNN announcer Bakari Sellers so badly. Funny.”
Then he blocked me, so there was no way for me to respond.
But I still slung a tweet back: “Temperament. If I can rattle you on @CNN, how can you handle Putin, @realDonaldTrump? 60 days out and worried about a kid from SC. Sad.”
I find a big difference between that type of silly verbiage and Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and actions of locking children in cages, trying to build a wall, straining and suffocating historically black colleges, and . . . of course, the list goes on. What really gets my attention are leaders who prevent their own citizens from having access to hospitals, decent schools, and clean water.
Despite Trump’s criticism of my supporting Hillary, I get paid as a political commentator at CNN for my truth and for telling it through the lens of my life—political or otherwise.
I strongly believed Hillary could win the presidency in 2016. Like many people in this country, we imagined that at least white women would band with nonwhite voters to elect a woman over Trump, who had shown no evidence of having women’s interests at heart.
During the election year, I was a surrogate for Hillary Clinton and became close to the former First Lady, US senator, and secretary of state. She traveled to speak at Denmark-Olar Elementary School. Supporters packed the gymnasium to hear her vision for a subject dear to my heart: how to help blighted communities, like our rural towns in Bamberg County. The three hundred supporters, most of them African Americans, wanted to know whether Hillary could fix the Social Security system and bring them clean water. I told the media gathered that her visit proved there was more than one Flint, Michigan.
Hillary also invited me to speak at the Democratic National Convention, which I gratefully accepted. I was able to participate in that historical moment from a perch at CNN.
For political commentators, election night coverage is our Super Bowl. Before the big night, you’re hoping to get the phone call from CNN execs that puts you up front with John King and the Magic Wall; with Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Anderson Cooper—there’s nothing like it. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be a part of that Election Night Super Bowl when we had thirty million viewers.
I was excite
d and honored to get that phone call from CNN vice president Rebecca Kutler and was part of an email chain that set forth our schedule for Election Day. To be frank, everybody on set believed that Donald Trump was going to get destroyed. I predicted that Hillary Clinton would get 330 electoral votes, similar to Barack Obama’s 2012 election, which was an electoral landslide.
The night before the election, I had spoken to Steve Schale, a political strategist and guru in Florida. He directed Obama’s campaign in the Sunshine State in 2008 and returned in 2012 as senior adviser for Obama’s Florida campaign. CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger had also spoken to him the night before. He told us both that he had run about thirteen simulations, and Hillary Clinton won in all but one. We were really confident going in.
Days before the election, I had received a call from one of Hillary’s communications strategists, Adrienne Elrod, who told me, “The Secretary wants you to be at the Javits Center for a four-hour Election Night party. She would love it if you could be there. And she’d like to congratulate you and thank you on this night of celebration for all the great work you’ve done.”
I knew I had to be on TV. I was on from 4 to 7 p.m., which means we’d be kicking off prime time. I wanted to be where history was being made, but I wanted to experience it through the media lens in Washington, DC, and on the set of CNN. Before I got back to the campaign to decline the invitation, I talked to Ellen and Kai. I wanted them to be with me on Election Day, but I also knew they were passionately excited about a woman leading the free world. There was a possibility they’d want to be in New York City with the president-elect; however, Ellen was fine with whatever I wanted to do, so I chose to stay with CNN.
There was hope during the night when Hillary won Virginia, and we knew she had the “blue wall” to depend on—states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—but when Trump chipped away at that blue wall, it became clear to me that things were not going well.
My Vanishing Country Page 16