The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  Willis was Catholic and Donna converted, which didn’t go down well with Mommy, but Daddy said, “What the hell, it’s the same thing. Baptist, Catholic, they’re all a bunch of crooks.”

  To Donna he said, “You see what you’re doin’ for this man? He’s just a husband. He can leave you at any time. He could leave you with a couple of kids. He could just walk away from you. Where are you gonna be then?”

  “Daddy, I have two years of college and I’m a stenographer and a court reporter, I’ll be all right. Besides, Willis loves me. He isn’t going to leave me.”

  Daddy snorted. I think the only man whose faithfulness he ever really believed in was himself. But in the long run Donna was right and he was wrong. The marriage lasted.

  The one he might have done well to warn was Jeanette, for she married her ski instructor even before Donna married Willis. Unlike Donna, who was married in church on Valentine’s Day, 1970, with all of us as bridesmaids in pink satin dresses that Mommy made, Jeanette and her ski instructor, whose name I barely knew at the time and have long since forgotten, were married in her apartment. Jeanette made her own gown of white satin. The two of them knelt on pillows, the vows were said, and that was that. The marriage ended a year later.

  Donna and Jeanette were having dates, going away on weekends, and getting married, but when I asked permission to go to a boy’s house, Daddy’s eyes narrowed. “Charlie Sands’ place? What for?”

  “To study biology, Daddy. There’ll be other kids there. It’s a study session. You go over to somebody’s house and you study from seven till midnight.”

  “Unh, unh, you tell Charlie Sands to come over here.”

  Necessarily, our house became the study house for Charlie Sands, George Kimball, David Larkin, and me. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we called ourselves: two blacks and two whites, three fellows and a girl. Dr. Garner had been right: people to the right and left of us had fallen by the wayside; there were eight of us left out of the 150 students who had started out to be biology majors. And we four stuck together to get each other through.

  When the fellows were there, Daddy kept peeking in, especially if he thought it had grown too quiet in the back room. “How ya doin? You doin’ okay?”

  “Great, Daddy.”

  The guys loved him because he made buckets of fried chicken for us and kidded around with them, especially with George Kimball. George was a white guy, tall, thin, with little buck teeth, a lighthearted fellow, a jokester. He’d say, “Okay, time for a break,” and he’d make up names for rock groups from the things we were studying, like Hassall and His Corpuscles, or Gräafian and Her Follicles, or Zymogen and the Granules.

  Daddy talked to David Larkin, the other black, a lot and really liked him, but he warned me, “Watch David. He’s a climber.”

  “You mean, he’s ambitious? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Naw, I mean he’ll climb all over you if you give him a chance. If you two ever get together and you’re having sex…”

  “Daddy!”

  “I’m just warnin’ you.”

  When I told David my father said to watch out for him, he laughed. “Unh, unh, I know your father. I’m not getting myself killed for messin’ with his daughter.” After we graduated from Monmouth, David taught science in a high school in Princeton. Years later, successful, married with five children and practicing medicine in California, he told me: “While I was teaching in Princeton, I thought and thought and thought about your Dad and things he had said, like, ‘If you’re down, you’ll come back up again if you just don’t lose sight of your goal,’ and I realized I was letting my goal of becoming a doctor slip away. I quit my teaching job and went to medical school and now I’m a urological surgeon, and I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for your father.”

  David, George, Charlie, and I were a study group through physiology, comparative vertebrate anatomy, embryology, and histology; studying hours and hours and hours at a time, testing each other, helping each other along; asking, “Did you get that?” And if one of us said, “I’m not sure,” we all agreed, “Let’s go over it again.”

  I had thought, contemplating having to go to Monmouth College instead of Barnard, that Monmouth was really no better than a fifth year of high school, but in the science department it was far from that. Bell Labs, which was nearby, had beefed up the department with money so that they could send workers there for higher-level training in chemistry and physics, and we under-graduate students benefited from that.

  Professor Gimble, who had wanted to be an M.D. but for some reason had not gone on to medical school, was in charge of the more advanced courses in the biological sciences, such as embryology, histology, and physiology, and Harvard could not have had a better professor. In his course in histology, the study of tissues, the college supplied a box of slides—if you lost them, you had to reimburse the college several hundred dollars—and we bought our own microscopes. The slides were in groups: muscle tissue, thyroid, kidney, etc., and we had to memorize the distinguishing features in each. In class, Mr. Gimble allowed us one minute to identify the slide under a microscope, then we’d have to move to the next microscope and identify that slide, and so on. We protested about having only a minute, but he said, “Either you know it or you don’t. By the end of the semester I’ll give you just fifteen seconds with each slide.” Our group drilled each other, and by the end of the year, ten seconds was plenty of time. The four of us aced the course.

  I worked and worked and worked, following the curriculum and hoping that it was going to lead to where I wanted to go. I didn’t have parents who could guide me, no uncle or cousin who was a doctor and could advise me, but I told myself, “Don’t envy somebody else what they’ve got. Don’t start comparing yourself to other people. That way lies trouble. Just do what needs to be done. Do your best and let it speak for itself.” I knew that once you start saying, “His uncle knows this. His aunt’s got pull there,” right away you’re trying to use somebody else to cover for your inadequacies when really what you should be doing is using your energy to shore up the assets you’ve got, like the capacity to work hard.

  Mommy was a help to me there. I’d say something about needing to get up at three o’clock in the morning to finish my physics, and at three o’clock she’d be shaking me quietly until I said, “Okay, Mom, I’m awake.” I look back now and wonder at the person who would get up at three in the morning to wake her child to study, but anything to do with education, Mommy was there. She’d go down to the kitchen and make hot chocolate for me and linger until she was sure I was wide awake and studying before she went back to bed.

  In the spring semester of my junior year, when I was still struggling with organic chemistry, I had to take the MCATs, the medical college aptitude test. It was given in May, at the same time as final exams at Monmouth, and to add to my woes, the band was booked to play at Princeton that weekend. I figured it was a prescription for failure, whether it was the MCATs or my exams, but I said to myself, “Let’s see if I can get it all together,” and I arranged to take the MCATs at Princeton.

  I had one final exam at Monmouth on Friday afternoon. When I came out of that, the family was in the limousine waiting for me outside the college and we drove to Princeton. From nine, until one o’clock in the morning, we played at the Quadrangle Club. The sounds were really grooving, and the fellows were yelling and screaming for encores. Finally I said, “Hey, look, I got to get some sleep. I’m taking my MCATs tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Right,” the guys laughed. To them, it was like Tina Turner was going to step off the stage and turn into Mother Superior. They thought it was a big joke.

  At eight o’clock the next morning I was at McCosh Hall. I sat down next to a guy who stared at me in sort of a puzzled way and said, “You look familiar.” I didn’t say anything, just got out my pencils and started in and didn’t look up until four hours later. It was one o’clock when I finished, and I was so tired from the night before that I fell
going down the steps. Guys rushed to pick me up and offered to take me to the infirmary, but I asked them just to please take me to the Cap and Gown Club because I had to play there that afternoon.

  “Hey, it’s one of the Thornton Sisters,” somebody said and they all started applauding and offering to escort me.

  We played that afternoon at Cap and Gown, and that evening at the Campus Club. Sunday afternoon we played at Stevenson Hall, and when that was over, we headed for home, with me studying all the way because Monday morning was my final exam in organic chemistry and Monday afternoon my final in vertebrate embryology.

  At home I slept until midnight, then I got up and studied through until exam time the next morning.

  I came out of the last exam so tired that I was disoriented and with the certainty that I had failed everything. I made it to my car, got the door open, climbed in, and sprawled on the front seat. The next thing I knew, Daddy was tapping on the window and it was dark outside. He’d come looking for me,

  “It’s okay, Daddy, I can make it home.”

  “No, honeybun, you move over. I’ll drive you.”

  When my MCAT scores came back, they were high and I knew I was blessed, that God was in my corner. And when my college grades came out, it was the same; I had made the dean’s list again.

  The fall of 1968 was a special time. I was to have my twenty- first birthday in November, and all thirteen of the medical schools I had applied to had granted me a personal interview, which meant that I was at least getting my foot in the door. The first of the interviews was at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I bought a plane ticket for an 11:00 A.M. flight. Daddy volunteered to drive me to the airport, and because he was working on a masonry job that had to be finished, he was, in typical Daddy fashion, late. We arrived at the airport at five minutes to eleven. The clerk at the check-in counter told us the gate was at the other end of the terminal and the plane had already boarded; we’d never make it.

  “Just give me the ticket,” Daddy said, snatching it from her hand. “Come on, Cookie, run!”

  We got there as they were closing the gate. Panting, Daddy shoved the ticket in my hand. “This is just to teach you, don’t ever let anybody tell you you can’t do something.”

  When the plane was in the air and I had begun to breathe normally again, my stomach hit its own private air pocket. I had forgotten to ask Daddy for money. My wallet held a single dollar bill. Scraping around in the bottom of my pocketbook yielded another dollar in change, and that was it. I was about to land in Michigan with two dollars. “Don’t let anybody say you can’t make it,” I repeated over and over to ratchet up my courage.

  Bus fare to the medical school, I discovered at the airport, was $1.70 round trip, so I was okay, except that I was just going to have to forget about being hungry. At the dean’s office, a couple of people were waiting to be interviewed and I started talking to the fellow next to me, a blond, blue-eyed guy who said his name was Raymond Gonzalez.

  “Who’re you kidding?” I said. “Raymond Gonzalez?”

  “My mother and father come from Spain,” he said. “I really am Spanish.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I kidded him. “You’re just trying to cash in on this affirmative action stuff.”

  We joked around until he went in for his interview. After he came out, I was summoned. There was a clock on the wall, and during the interview, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the minutes ticking away, up to and then on past the time of the last bus back to the airport. There was no hope for it; I would be sitting on a park bench all night until the buses started running again in the morning.

  I came out of the dean’s office and Ray Gonzalez was still there in the anteroom. I was surprised. “Does he want to see you again?”

  “You were telling me you didn’t have any money to get back home, so I thought I’d hang around and buy you dinner.”

  I could hear Daddy’s voice; He’ll get you outside where it's dark. He’ll ask you for some pleasurin’: He’s plannin’ to rape you. But I was so hungry. “That’d be lovely, Raymond,” I said. After dinner, he put me in a cab and handed the driver the fare to the airport. “Raymond, you don’t have to do this,” I protested.

  “Good luck in medical school, Yvonne,” he said with a grin and stepped back and waved goodbye.

  When Daddy heard this, he demanded, “And he didn’t do nothin’ to you?”

  “You’re always saying there are nice people willing to help along the way.”

  “Well, I’m right, aren’t I.”

  My next interview was at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, on October 22, 1968, with a Dr. Lamb. This was the school I wanted, and I boarded the bus to New York City with high hopes. The bus broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike. On that day of all days. I was frantic. I was delayed an hour and a half. The minute I got to the Port Authority bus terminal I called the medical school and told a secretary what had happened, trembling with fear that they would reject me then and there for being late. But the woman was very nice and told me that because I was late, Dr. Lamb wouldn’t be available to interview me but that Dr. Perera was free, adding, “Dr. Perera is dean of admissions.”

  At four o’clock I was shown into the office of a distinguished-looking gray-haired gentleman who was seated at one end of a long, long desk. I apologized for missing the earlier appointment as he waved me to a seat at the opposite end of the desk. “These things happen, my dear,” he said. “So you’re Miss Thornton.” He peered at me through the smoke from his cigarette. “Somehow I expected there to be a halo around your head after reading the letters from your biology and chemistry teachers.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t seen the letters so I didn’t know what my professors had said. “That’s very nice.”

  “Monmouth College. Is that accredited?”

  “I think it is,” I replied, not having the faintest idea if it was or not.

  He passed a list down the long desk. “This is a roster of the colleges our applicants are attending.” I ran my eye down it: Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe, Barnard… See, Daddy I should have gone to a good school. “I’ve never heard of Monmouth College,” he said. “How do you think you could hold your own with students coming from such high-powered schools?”

  I was raging against Daddy in my mind. All the work, all the A’s, and it’s all going down the drain, your dream and mine, because this man has never beard of Monmouth College. “Not one of them wants to be a doctor more than I do,” I told Dr. Perera, “and not one of them can work harder than I can.”

  He nodded noncommittally and went on to ask: “What do you do for an avocation? We have chess masters and students who are interested in Chinese art, for example.”

  “I play in a band with my sisters on the weekends.”

  “What kind of a band?”

  “A college band. We’ve been the number-one band on the Princeton campus since 1963.”

  “Oh? My son goes to Princeton.”

  “Then he must know the Thornton Sisters.”

  We talked some more about the band and my playing with it, and then he said, “You know, Miss Thornton, we’re trying to enroll more women at P & S and we’re finding they make good physicians, but our concern is their getting married, raising a family, and not utilizing the knowledge they have gained here. What if you find Mr. Right?”

  “If I do, he’s just going to have to wait until I finish medical school and become a doctor.”

  “And what if he doesn’t want to wait?”

  “Then he’s not Mr. Right.”

  “Hmm.”

  Dr. Perera thanked me politely for coming and showed me out. I cried all the way home on the bus.

  “What’s the matter, Cookie?” Daddy demanded.

  “He never heard of Monmouth College!” I wailed. “I told you I should have gone to Barnard! He wanted to know how I expected to hold my own with people from the high-powered places.”

  “What�
��s the matter with him? Don’t he realize you’re a good person?”

  “He doesn’t care about that! He cares about a track record, and Monmouth doesn’t have a track record.”

  “You’re makin’ the record for Monmouth. Why’d you let this man intimidate you?”

  “Oh, Daddy, you don’t understand. I told him how long I’ve wanted to be a doctor. I told him why I had to go to Monmouth. That’s all I could say.”

  “Well, I don’t like any man who makes my baby cry.”

  Three days later I had an interview at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This time Mommy and Daddy went with me, one on the right, one on the left, both determined that nobody was going to make their baby cry again. The interview went well enough, except that Daddy didn’t like the sound of off-campus housing and muttered against a school that didn’t look out for girls better than that.

  When we arrived back home that evening, there was an ivory-colored envelope addressed to me from Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons. They had kept their promise of prompt notification. It was a thin envelope and I knew what that meant—rejection—because if you have been accepted, they send a fat envelope full of all kinds of information. I snatched up the envelope and headed for the bathroom, the only room with a lock on the door, because I knew I was going to start crying all over again and I didn’t want Mommy and Daddy to know how desperately my heart had been set on the wonderful-sounding College of Physicians and Surgeons. I slit the envelope and began reading.

  I can no longer quote it exactly but the letter said something like this; Dear Miss Thornton: Even though the history of the College of Physicians and Surgeons is an illustrious one, and even though we are unacquainted with the college you are presently attending, your college record and recommendations are out-standing and your interview with me suggests that you are a person on whom we should take a chance. Therefore, we are happy and proud to offer you admission as a first-year student at Columbia P & S, class of 1973.