“Oh, heck no. If my girls can walk it, she can walk it too,” James would say.
Next thing you knew, little Anna was walking like a pendulum all the way up that rocky path to the crystal-clear springs. And when Josie’s little ones dawdled or complained, Rose Anna sped up. Not only was she going to show them she could do it, she was going to beat them all to the top.
And she nearly did.
Reaching the springs for the first time ever, Anna watched with a tinge of jealousy as Josie and James’s kids jumped into the cold, clear water. Josie put a life jacket on Anna and they watched from the shore. They sat there together in silence. Then Anna felt it: James’s strong arms lifting her up off the ground. And before she knew what was happening, he’d slung her into the air and out into the middle of that ice-cold water.
Splash! She was screaming bloody murder as her head went under. James didn’t panic. He just watched and waited. And when Anna’s head finally surfaced, she screamed again. But it wasn’t in terror. She was screaming like any little girl who’d just hit water that damned cold. It was a scream of liberation and unbridled joy. There she was, floating down that spring-fed river just like the rest.
Josie pointed it out first: “James, her lips are turnin’ real blue.”
James quickly waded in, pulled her out, and looked at her real close. “You’re right, Josie. Her lips are turnin’ real blue.”
Anna’s heart broke. She didn’t want this to end. James saw it in her eyes and added, “They’re real blue, Annie…just like everyone else’s lips.” And he chucked her right back into the water! She squealed with delight. He must have thrown her in forty times that day.
So when Cokie broke the big news that Josie, James, and every one of Anna’s other siblings were coming home for Christmas in 1961, Anna was beside herself. Cokie pulled out all the stops. There were countless new handmade decorations, and Santa even put an apple and an orange in Martha’s, Anna’s, Mary’s, and Nan’s stockings that Christmas morning.
When the time finally arrived for Christmas dinner’s main event, Cokie stepped to the fridge and emerged cradling her revered burgundy bowl. The fruit salad was piled high this year. She could smell the sweetness of it before she’d even taken off the plastic wrap.
But one step from the fridge, Cokie’s hands shook. Then, the heavy bowl, slick with the dew that had collected on its cold glass, slipped from her fingers. Time seemed to slow as the treasured bowl headed toward the hard, unfinished kitchen floor. When it finally hit, it hit hard and loud. Smash! It must have been a terrible sound. Impossibly loud. I can almost hear it echoing more than half a century after it shattered into a million tiny pieces.
The room, filled with so many, went silent.
Cokie’s burgundy bowl, which had slept in its safe spot high above the chaos and heartbreak of their daily lives, waiting patiently to share its uncommon excellence, had been the symbol of the family’s hope—hope that despite circumstance, something better surely lay ahead. It quietly spoke of crazy dreams and unbridled possibility, the source of whatever foolish optimism this family dared hold on to when whispering about brighter tomorrows in shared beds late at night. And there it lay, destroyed, its exotic treasure mixed in with shards of blood-red glass.
Not a word was uttered. Cokie sat down while Josie and James gathered the remains. Anna grew incredibly still, the crash continuing to ring in her ears. Where were her guardian angels now? How could they have let such hope be crushed? She watched as the blood-red shards vanished into a bucket, perhaps fearing what would soon prove to be true—that the cherished bowl’s passing was an omen, that hope was indeed receding, and that new tragedy would soon fill the void.
CHAPTER 3
Our Suffering
I
For nearly a decade, the March of Dimes had helped Anna avoid polio’s most brutal surgeries, and although her recovery was proving Cokie’s optimism too bold, with the vigilance of Warm Springs’ caretakers, she could now “walk” upright with crutches and braces. The March of Dimes had even made her into a Louisiana poster girl to help raise more funds for others. Anna’s grateful smile radiated off newspapers around the South—her angelic face framed by a leather strap under her chin, and supported by steel bars locked into an orthopedic corset that kept the weight of her torso from bearing down on her increasingly fragile spine.
All of this made the news from Anna’s local March of Dimes chapter seem impossibly cruel. A volunteer at the Baptist church that ran Anna’s chapter had been skimming off the top. By the time the crime was discovered, the chapter had gone broke. Anna’s spine refused to stop twisting from the polio-related scoliosis, and suddenly there was no more money to send her back to Warm Springs to receive the care it demanded.
Cokie’s heart broke all over again. She did all she could to find new support, but with few resources, connections, or know-how, she came up dry. Truth is, if you don’t have an education, and if no one has ever taught you how the system works or introduced you to people of influence, how can you be expected to navigate the system when it starts to fail? You most likely can’t. You likely fail with it. And so the powerless stay that way. The poor get poorer. The sick get sicker. And when the men at the local Lake Providence hospital said that Anna’s only option was to go to the nearest Shriners Hospital for their free treatment, Cokie believed them.
Anna would never see her adoring Warm Springs push-boys, tend her bedside flower garden, or hear her angels’ voices ever again. Her new hospital was way down in New Orleans, and its scalpels, drills, and surgical horrors would make Georgia’s hardships seem like an all-too-pleasant dream.
II
As on most nights in her new, unfamiliar New Orleans hospital, Anna was in bed and her eyes closed, but she couldn’t sleep. Unlike at Warm Springs, the children living alongside her here weren’t exclusively polio patients; they had suffered every kind of affliction or accident. Many were missing limbs. Her new roommate had no legs, and only one arm. She used that arm to push her body around on what amounted to a homemade skateboard. They made quick friends, but few children here dared get close. Too often, doctors and nurses would walk in unannounced and roll one of Anna’s new friends away—off to a surgery he or she didn’t know was coming, had never agreed to, and had no power to stop. Some simply never returned. At Shriners, the scalpel ruled.
Anna’s new ward nurse had seemed kind enough at first, with a soft Southern drawl that felt familiar, and a gentle touch as she spoke about the “hard truths” Anna needed to accept. Because of her condition, Anna wouldn’t be able to attend school with the “regular” kids, so college was out of reach. And her body would never be able to perform full-time work. But Anna shouldn’t worry too much: the government had programs to support people like her.
Anna absorbed these losses, and turned to other hopes: love and family. She had often dreamed of having children of her own. But like a thief, that same nurse snatched those dreams away too: “My sweet dear, you won’t be able to have little ones. Your body couldn’t carry them. It’d kill you and the baby.”
This cracked Anna’s heart wide open. But what she found inside wasn’t sadness. It was something new: rage. The weakness in Anna’s muscles had created opportunities that had made her mind and heart grow strong, and now she was being told that those strengths would be of little use—that love, marriage, and children were all hopes too big. Her only future, she was told, was on the government dole. She couldn’t bear this news, so she wouldn’t accept it, and that little spark of rage began to burn and glow.
From all the years Anna lived in hospitals and rehabilitation wards, she saved only two things: her autograph book from Warm Springs and an eleven-page essay from New Orleans titled “Our Suffering.” I only recently found it, next to her birth certificate and a childhood attempt at a family tree, locked in an old leather briefcase shoved in the back of a clo
set. No author is credited, but it seems to have been written by a patient. Perhaps Anna contributed herself. Regardless, it clearly meant a great deal to her—its corners were bent, its pages well worn from repeated readings. Another rare and sacred clue from the past. So I sat down and tried to read it with the same care she might have fifty-five years earlier in a loud but lonesome hospital far from home. Among its words lives a deeply personal, intimate look into the lives of these frightened children. Several passages leap from it, passages that became touchstones in Anna’s struggle to survive, such as:
Nature does not intend that a rosebud remain as it is. In order for it to be truly beautiful, it must open and expand. We are like the rosebud, for God wishes for us to open and expand, to grow and not to remain as we were or as we now are. And we must not cling to our present condition as if it were final. We suffer because we do not see far enough ahead. But in order to see far ahead, we must accept the voice, the presence, and the love of God.
In the absence of any tangible signs of hope, Anna was being told to put her hopes in the hands of a higher power in order to keep moving forward. This wasn’t unique to Anna’s situation; it’s a common practice in the world I come from, a world where many have little but their beliefs, where the fullness of God more than makes up for an empty bank account. It’s partly why Sundays were and still are so central to our kind of American life, why we still find such community and comfort in our churches. It’s a big part of why I loved going to church as a child. And in New Orleans, Anna turned the blind optimism she’d inherited from her mother into something new: faith. Few in her family had been particularly devout. Hospital-bound most of her life, she hadn’t learned to pray in her family’s local Baptist church. Anna was a child with no denomination. Yet she began praying to God each morning and night, beseeching Him to let a brighter tomorrow come.
The trouble was, a child living in Anna’s new ward needed a hell of a lot of God and faith to chase away all of the fears this place provided. The New Orleans doctors rarely shared their designs with the children. Anna would be wheeled away without notice, only to wake up with fresh new incisions running the length of her limbs, decorated with gruesome staples and stitches like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster where doctors had cut back more muscle and bone, or attempted to graft tendons and ligaments into her legs. And the only cure for her pain was morphine, which filled her dreams with ants—swarming and devouring what little she had left of her body.
The horrors of Anna’s time in that New Orleans hospital are worthy of their own book, a book about the right to health care and the rights of children, but this is not that book. And most of the stories from New Orleans were so painful, Anna refused to share them for fear of making them real again. But we do know this: she always put on a brave face for her mother. Perhaps too brave. On a rare visit to the New Orleans hospital, Cokie stepped away for a moment, and Anna confided in her big sister Martha, who had joined her mom on this visit. The doctors were considering a major new scoliosis surgery, and Anna didn’t think their mom understood just how painful or dangerous it would be. She told Martha that the patients who’d survived it said it was like having a “tractor run down your back.” This was as scared as Martha had ever seen her little sister.
The next morning, when Cokie and Martha were well into their journey back home, the doctors came for Anna again. Anna’s heart quickened with panic. Sweaty and trembling, she was wheeled into an operating room that by today’s standards looked medieval: crude blades, suction tubes, clamps, and a terrifying apparatus made of stainless steel bars and bolts intended to live inside her if she made it out alive.
She held no love or affection for these doctors and nurses. So she refused to allow them the gratification of comforting her for their crimes that morning. If she was going to die today, she would do it on her own terms. She knew that if she could control nothing else, she could control her tears. They were hers. So she refused to cry for them that day.
Soon the too-familiar cold, wet, stinking rag hit her face. There was no proper anesthesia at the time, no gas, just a cloth dipped in chloroform and pressed down over her mouth and nose. She was told to breathe in the noxious vapors. Little Anna held her breath, taking one more moment of her own, one more moment of life, then she put her fate and future in “the voice, the presence, and the love of God,” and breathed in the horrible vapors. Her life and body were in His hands now—hands that to date had shown her little protection.
* * *
—
Word arrived in Lake Providence a day later. Once Anna’s back had been cut open from neck to tailbone, her spine proved far more twisted than the doctors had anticipated. Implanting the “straightening and strengthening” device became nearly impossible. They had managed it, but the complications meant she’d lost a lot of blood. She was still unconscious, and her blood pressure was dropping. The doctor rang one of Cokie’s neighbors who owned a phone to let her know that Anna’s passing was now more a matter of when than if.
Billie-Ray, Cokie’s second child, had died when Cokie was barely a teen. With the wisdom that accompanies age came the knowledge that there was far more she should have done to save her son. Privately, she blamed herself for his death, and now she felt she owned the blame for her Rose’s condition too: for letting her get the disease in the first place, for all of the pain and isolation she’d endured, now magnified tenfold in New Orleans. And with this new turn, all of her daughter’s bravery would be rewarded with a lonely, horrific death because her mama was too ignorant and poor to do better for her.
Cokie hadn’t told anyone that she’d started getting dizzy at work, that she’d have to sit down to keep from fainting, or that a doctor had told her a part of her heart wasn’t working right anymore. It likely hadn’t been for a long time, but now aggravated by stress and age, it was giving out. Cokie had purchased a heart-shaped locket, which she wore around her neck, filled with the “emergency pills” her doctor prescribed. When she felt her chest tighten and her breath go, she had to take a pill and quick. When word arrived from New Orleans, Cokie’s heart broke. It literally broke. And she could hardly steady her hand to open the heart-shaped locket to save it.
Martha was equally devastated by the news. Half a century later, she had to pause to keep from breaking down as she talked with me about this moment in our family’s history. In the South, we tell each other stories to help make us stronger, and we build our stories up to match the dire nature of our situations—difficult times demand the most inspiring stories. Rose Anna had become the family’s story. She was their light, their pint-size survivor, their reason for strength. “If little Rose Anna can survive shit like X, Y and Z, with a smile on her goddamn face, then we damn sure can survive this or that.” All of her sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles had uttered some version of that sentiment at one point or another to their own children, or privately to themselves in hours of need.
And beyond our family, Anna’s story had given more than a few of her neighbors strength and hope too. Now this story was about to be taken away. Anna slipped into a coma late that night. It seemed that life had finally delivered an injury too deep, even for her mighty will.
III
Most of the folks working in the New Orleans children’s hospital were black, and many spoke Creole. Willie was one of those aides, and the ever-present bird perched on his shoulder had picked up more than a few of Willie’s choice expletives. During her months of living on Willie’s ward, Anna had in turn picked up a few of the bird’s most beloved dirty words.
Willie had long since learned not to talk much with the kids in the hospital. It was best not to get attached. But perhaps sparked by the first-rate education Warm Springs had provided, Anna was proving to be a curious child, and she was fascinated by Willie and his colorful bird, so from the moment she met them, she’d batted her eyelashes and worked her charm to make sure they came t
o visit her whenever Willie was on a shift. Before he knew what was happening, he had fallen hopelessly under Anna’s spell.
Fueled by Anna’s infectious curiosity, Willie soon figured out how to sneak Anna out of the hospital and down to the famed Café Du Monde—a big, bustling café nestled between Jackson Square’s bright gardens and the mighty Mississippi River. Together, they’d listen to street performers play jazz, drink milky coffee, and stuff themselves with New Orleans’s deep-fried, sugar-powdered beignets. Like her old brother-in-law James, Willie never treated Anna with kid gloves, so she quickly learned to love him even more than his bird. And for the short while they had together, he was like the father she’d never really known.
When Mardi Gras arrived, Anna begged Willie to take her out to see all the floats and bawdy costumes, to hear the hullabaloo of wildly exuberant music. A little white lie to the doctors, and Willie put Anna in a wheelchair so they could navigate the rowdy, drunken crowd. For this special occasion only, and under his trusted control, Anna accepted the indignity of two wheels.
They arrived midway through the parade. Anna stared up, mesmerized by the colorful feathers, masks, and beads. Women in the crowd were exposing their breasts in hopes someone would toss down a strand from a float or balcony as reward. A few men flashed their wares too. It was loud, unbridled, vivacious. Anna was in the midst of something she felt sure no one else in her family had ever experienced, but unlike all her other firsts, this one wasn’t painful, it was magical. Then, from a towering float, a woman began flinging out gold and silver Mardi Gras coins into the crowd.
“Are they real gold?” Anna asked Willie.
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