Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  The position of the mole, Mammy Jane later notices, is in fact “just at the point where the hangman’s knot would strike” even if the boy’s class and race would make him immune to such violence. It’s as though the boy comes into the world with the violence of his historical moment written on him, a violence that the likes of his family have carried out and will continue to carry out, but the effect of which is to make him seem the most vulnerable of all.

  Chesnutt takes great pains to spoof the baby’s robustness as a sign of racial purity. In one episode, little Theodore is passed around the table and duly admired: “Clara thought his hair was fine. Ellis inquired about his teeth. Tom put his finger in the baby’s fist to test his grip.” In Mammy Jane’s words, “dis chile is a rale quality chile, he is,—I never seed a baby wid sech fine hair fer his age, ner sech blue eyes, ner sech a grip, ner sech a heft.”

  At some point in this admiration fest, the baby starts to choke, and Mammy Jane, being the most observant of all of his caretakers, notices that he is gasping for breath. The mother can’t imagine what could be causing the child to breathe so heavily, with a strange whistling noise, but Mammy Jane diagnoses a fbdy instantly, determining in no time at all that he has accidentally swallowed part of an old yellowed rattle that had been strung around his neck. The dilemma now, as in all foreign-body cases of the day, is how to remove it and whom to call upon to perform the work, but instead of telling the tale as so many newspapers would have recounted it—of babies traversing great distances to Chevalier Jackson’s clinics where they were, in no time, saved—Chesnutt asks us to imagine not exactly a medical but a social “complication.” In an age when white mobs routinely “stretched the necks” of blacks, how could blacks trust their babies’ tender necks and throats to white hands, however “caring,” and what would it take, under what circumstances and on what terms would it become acceptable for a black man, first, to be allowed to earn a medical degree and, second, to treat white bodies?

  The local doctor, a white Southerner named Price who is also the “family physician and father confessor,” examines the baby and concludes his diagnosis with language that could be derived from many a Jackson case study. “It’s a curious accident” (and don’t we know it; italics mine). “So far as I can discover, the piece of ivory has been drawn into the trachea, or windpipe, and has lodged in the mouth of the right bronchus. I’ll try to get it out without an operation, but I can’t guarantee the result.” Unable to dislodge the fbdy, Price concludes that “it will be necessary to cut into [the baby’s] throat from the outside”; normally, he would undertake the operation unassisted, but because he knows how much the Major “values” this baby, he explains that he would like to call upon a specialist to help him, a specialist from, of all places, Philadelphia.

  The Marrow of Tradition weaves the life and work of Chevalier Jackson between its lines. Jackson’s clinic was in Pittsburgh, not Philadelphia, at the time of the novel’s publication, but it is easy to imagine Chesnutt reading some sensational story attached to Jackson’s pioneering work and drawing from it in establishing his novel’s premise. But with a twist. Because he uses what he might have read of Jackson’s feats with people’s airways and foodways to attenuate the meeting of race and body politics—in short, to foreground the politics of medical practice, even to wonder about the strange superimposition, the uncanniness of the development of a medical specialty focused on the throat coinciding with a period in which one group of Americans was routinely choking another group to death.

  As the plot unfolds, we might imagine Charles Chesnutt having created a sort of racially split version of Chevalier Jackson, because he introduces both Dr. Burns, the white specialist who will make the trip from Pennsylvania to the South, and Burns’s former student Dr. Miller, a black doctor who, like Jackson, not only studied in the North but in hospitals in Paris and Vienna. Miller has made the decision to return to the segregated South, where he is establishing a teaching hospital for the black community in his hometown. He and Burns happen to meet on the same train, and Chesnutt uses the occasion of the two doctors meeting, one white, one black, ruthlessly to expose the double and triple standards of Jim Crow: the conductor, assuming that Miller is Burns’s servant, reminds Burns that the laws require Miller to sit in a separate train car. When Burns suggests that he will fight fire with fire simply by moving with Miller, who is not his servant but his friend and colleague, to the “colored car,” he is informed that he is not allowed on that part of the train either; in this way, the conductor explains, both parties are served. Burns and Miller will make the rest of the trip in separate cars, but their plan, based partly on Burns’s having read an article by Miller detailing a rare and remarkable case he’s treated, is to meet at Major Carteret’s house where they, one white and one black doctor, will together perform surgery on the white child.

  Even with the baby’s life in the balance, once Burns has arrived, he and Price and Carteret spend time arguing over whether Miller should be allowed into Carteret’s house, and, if so, whether he should use the front door rather than the back door. This is a place where unwritten laws—“certain inflexible rules of conduct by which [Carteret] regulates his life,” certain sacred principles “lying at the very root of our social order, involving the purity and prestige of our race”—dictate that black doctors are not allowed to treat white patients. Carteret wins the argument on the basis of his also having “personal” reasons for not wanting to let the black Dr. Miller into his house, and the operation, about to proceed without Miller, is interrupted by the foreign body having shifted on its own. It is released through the child’s mouth thanks to a few sure claps between the baby’s shoulders from Burns (a fictional treatment method, to be sure).

  Little Theodore’s body, nevertheless, remains not only central to the narrative, it frames the book: that something might get stuck in the male heir’s throat rendering him unable to breathe, speak, or swallow is the novel’s defining anxiety, beginning and end. The book reaches its climax with Theodore falling ill in the middle of the riot of white against black, leaving Carteret no recourse but to turn, after all, to Dr. Miller to save his child’s life. The child has developed “membranous croup,” he “struggles to cough up the obstruction to his breathing,” he gasps, but the town is in chaos and there are no other doctors to be found, certainly none who can perform the necessarily “delicate” operation (once again, the kind of operation that Jackson was expert at, a tracheotomy), that would free the child’s windpipe and enable him to breathe. One of the victims of the massacre is Miller’s only son, who has been fatally shot by a stray bullet in the violence that Carteret was a key player in fomenting, thus presenting Miller with an ethical dilemma that seems impossible to solve.

  The reckless precariousness not of the black male body but of the white male body gets top billing here. The maintenance of the integrity of the white male body is imperative, according to The Marrow of Tradition, and no black doctor is going to be allowed access to or penetration of his white American counterpart; subsequently, if not exactly vice versa, black patients will have reason to mistrust white doctors for decades to come.

  It would be interesting to imagine what position Jackson would take if he were the white Dr. Burns—or, alternatively, if Jackson as we know him attempted to fill the shoes of the black Dr. Miller. Or what if Jackson were the white teacher of the black student? What if Jackson, instead of having children rushed to him for treatment, took his practice south?

  In his lifetime, Jackson did go south, where he picked up postcards, maybe in train stations, where, as an unhappy traveler, he languished, maybe on the run without much thought to content, but more likely carefully he chose a postcard from a kiosk, and more lovingly than obligingly affixed a stamp. The ink from his fountain pen took to the cardboard like blood to a blotter on which he fashioned short notes bound for home, and the people waiting there and the place he missed: the security of his study, where he wrote undisturbed; the quiet
of his dining room, where his wife served him daily. On August 2, 1930, he chose a tinted photo of a “Negro Baptism, Near Norfolk, Virginia” (see figure 26) to send to his live-in sister-in-law, Jo. Yellow-painted boats teem, over-brimming; they’re filled with bobbing red hats, white lace, brown jackets, and bowlers. Sail-less masts crisscross the sky like divining rods or searchlights; projecting a fanfare of guide wires, the boats tilt without toppling toward telegraph poles that careen like scarecrows. A boy’s face reflects itself in the water, while the men who surround him bend their necks humbly toward the pool. Jackson is inspired: he heads his note with a funny caption: “Amos Nandy get religion.” The letters bleed into one another, and the script is shaky as though written on a train; unembarrassed by the public-ness of his joke, he nonchalantly records his bearings: “still on way south but start home tonight Love Chevie.”

  Fig. 26. The Chevalier Jackson Postcard Collection, Conwellana Templana Collection, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  In the 1930s, black Americans appear on postcards as though they are a site on a tourist’s itinerary, an ethnographer’s find for white visitors, the featured attraction for the white person traveling south, a bit of local color. Perhaps knowing his father’s tastes, Chevalier L. chooses another “negro scene” to send his father while on a trip to Cincinnati but with the inscrip - tion “homeward bound.” It’s 1939, and the photo is of a work scene on a pier with the title “Loading Cotton on the Riverfront” and an accompanying explanation—“Loading cotton: Husky, singing negroes handle these great bales of cotton as most people would handle bed pillows. On the great Mississippi river, packets and barges are piled high with the billowy white cotton, tightly encased in burlap wrappings.”

  Jackson did travel south; even earlier in his life, this southward movement forms a substratum. When he makes the move for a second, more permanent time, it’s from his clinics in Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Though it’s considerably early in the century, he’s no longer a boy; he’s a man gaining accolades for his humanitarianism and medical advances when he writes his mother:

  September 30, 1917: The large estates of the wealthy suburbanites remind me so much of England—and the weather has been very English. I know you would like a ride through the suburbs; but you would not want to be bothered with the raft of servants these big places need. Help has been mostly Irish, but now there are many negroes from the south. Many of them very repulsive looking.

  The letter continues as though nothing untoward or out of keeping has been said:

  If you want to talk to me anytime, Stanford can get me on the Longnecker phone and I will send money to Stanford for the charges.

  I hear a church at one window and Estery’s organ and piano Building on the other, so I get plenty of music here at the office. Wish you could hear some of it.

  The racist inlay seems to be a way of remaining familial and parochial in spite of his move to work in Philadelphia, a way of not straying far from back-home ways. While Jackson writes of the “repulsiveness of negroes,” has someone brought a black child in to receive his care? Or is this the private glue that makes his familial feeling stick, a privacy we have no right investigating, incommensurate with the public man?

  In his autobiography, Chevalier Jackson takes great pains to assert the rare equality that characterized his practice. In one episode, he explains how he gives equal credit to “the colored woman who wheeled patients in and out of the operating room” as he does to himself; he even thanks the woman, named Hattie, for helping to calm his child patients by whispering encouragements in their ear (LCJ, 160). In another instance, he ventures a form of medical ethics when he writes, “With physicians a patient is a patient; race, religion, color are considered only in so far as they may concern the scientific problems” (LCJ, 184). Of course “the scientific problems” are never neutral, but that contradiction aside, we still are left with all manner of paradox. Jackson wanted to convince us that in his world, the “colored nurse” was not only admitted but given equal credit for an operation when we know that, as late as the 1930s, in the larger world of which Jackson was a part, black doctors, including those trained at the Woman’s College that he at one time presided over, were routinely turned away by the hospitals where they sought employment. What Jackson wants to claim about his medical ethics doesn’t hold up alongside his personal correspondence, nor does the personal note accord with public knowledge. Can a doctor, can anyone, separate out the racism of his everyday life from the way he apprehends his patients inside the four walls of his medical practice? Is it possible to be racist in one part of one’s life and in another, not? There’s unconditional love, and conditional racism. There’s no such thing as a little racism or a lot. What sort of gleaming surface or foreign body facade could reflect an answer to the fundamentally irresolvable question of the 1930 case study: why did four-year-old Fred J. have to die?

  Yes, in retrospect it’s curious to note

  How a series of events seemingly remote

  Dovetailed together with uncanny precision

  To help me arrive at a great decision.

  I acquired an array of unrelated knowledge

  Aside from facts I learned from college.

  As a plumber’s cub in my father’s hotel

  I learned fundamentals that served me well,

  And later saw a curious parallel

  Between plumbing pipes and valves and tubes

  And the pathologic mechanism of bronchial tubes.

  —Pittsburgh Historian, undated pamphlet in the National Library of Medicine

  At the Idlewood Cottage Hotel, dinner was served between one and three o’clock and supper from six to seven. Boiled corned beef and legs of mutton in caper sauce were the featured hot dishes, while the cold part of the menu included sugar-cured ham, roast beef, and tongue. Cape May tomatoes, Winslow’s corn, hominy, new beets, and cabbage could be had, topped with relishes that ran a short gamut from horseradish to tomato catsup. Almonds, figs, cream nuts, and filberts comprised a modest dessert for the summer-dwelling businessmen, doctors, lawyers, judges, professors and their families who chose to stay at the Jacksons’ establishment over and against a more fashionable and far-flung watering hole. From ages nine to eighteen, Jackson worked alongside his family to maintain this “family hostelry without a bar” (LCJ, 44) that was his father’s attempt to recover from a bankruptcy following a trusted employee’s embezzlement of funds.

  On Friday evenings, chicken and waffles were served, and “hops” were held inside a large pavilion built for the purpose just a little beyond the hotel’s curved entryway. A three-piece orchestra of cello, violin, and cornet might furnish the music for dancers who waltzed to tunes with timely titles like “Telegram” and “Hydropathen” or listened to quadrilles whose pastoral undulations mimicked the hills and valleys where the cottages nestled. On Sunday evenings, a Dr. Tindle would gather people in the parlor of the large edifice that was the main building to sing Moody and Sankey gospel hymns. The women among the families who were regulars at Idlewood spent most mornings in idle gossip—indeed, Idlewood was an idyll for the newly idling classes—and one woman recounted how one day, amid fancy work and fast talking, the most talkative among them opened wide her mouth and swallowed a fly, much to the amusement of the others. One writer was known to visit the hotel, and she could be seen at a distance penning her pages in solitude beneath a willow tree.

  Cows roamed beyond a high hedge while visitors set skiffs carved out of shingles onto the quiet waters of a shallow fountain pool whose waters gurgled more than they rose in the dim light of hushed conversations and the loud pranks of kids. Mulberries could be fresh-picked, and an apple orchard attracted children to pluck its fruit even before it ripened or convince Jackson’s older brothers to let them ride atop the fodder brought back in carts for the cows. On one adjacent slope, fearing no nostalgia for the city they’d return to on weekdays, the men tapped croquet balls lightly, or with a thwack s
topped the sound of a red or yellow roller lost in the pith of unmown grass. They pitched quoits or whittled wood and hours away, convinced that the country could be a cure for the urbanity their families thrived on, preferring for a spell the smell of boiling tar used to seal the cans inside a tiny tent alongside the vegetable garden to the dark and heavy smog that seemed to seal the city into itself. The children knew the horses by name—Dick, or Bill, or Barney—big sorrels and a powerful gray that hauled the busloads of tenants, mostly businessmen, daily to and from the Idlewood stop en route to Pittsburgh on the Panhandle Railroad just a mile away.

  Ads for the hotel in the Pittsburgh Dispatch explained how “the proximity of Idlewood to the city, and the fact that, at moderate cost, business men and their families can enjoy all the pleasure of rustic surroundings there while keeping their business hours with the same facility as if living in the city, makes it a permanent favorite.” The hotel, “situated upon an eminence that commands the loveliest of inland views,” worked well for the people who spent their summers there, but the venture never yielded the profits that Jackson’s father had hoped. At Idlewood, Chevalier Jackson mostly worked. And worked. And worked, “sixteen or seventeen hours out of the twenty-four” (LCJ, 45). The stable, the dairy, and the vegetable garden required constant tending, and the various social functions—ranging from concerts to amateur theatricals—needed to be hosted. Eventually, spring water was pumped into the establishment, and Jackson’s father rigged a complexly designed but also dangerous gas-generating plant to illuminate the place, a setup that was in constant need of repair but that Jackson learned to fix by apprenticing as a plumber’s cub. Still, the benefits of Idlewood, from Jackson’s point of view, were multifold. For one thing, he got to study painting with two different visitors there, the artist wife of Judge Kennedy and A. Bryan Wall (1861-1935), a well-known local landscape painter and friend of Thomas Eakins. Imagine a small five-by-seven oil color as the product of those days: in it, fluent lavender clouds throw purple shadows on a house diminished by trees and by the central solitary figure, the painting’s focal point, wending his way down a road. The small painting’s stiff board has been ripped down the middle and then taped back together with broad bands on its back, but a fissure remains, the way time and work engrave deep lines into human skin, or the way, in an etching, an artist insists on a horizon line for the sake of perspective. That frustration and yearning—the sign of the small painting’s tear and repair—was precisely the profit of Idlewood for Jackson, what he called its “impetus”: the model provided by the educated upper classes with whom he got to mingle, seeking an antidote to the “dread” that he might never leave the coal-mining district and its brawling masses.