The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  Wow! Whoopee! I almost ran through the door getting out of the bathroom. “I’m accepted! I’m accepted! I’m going to medical school!” I hugged and swung Mommy, Daddy, Linda, and Rita. I was laughing and dancing and crying and waving the letter. “I’m accepted! I’m accepted!”

  Daddy said very calmly, “Is that the medical school that made you cry? You ain’t goin’ there.”

  “Daddy, it’s Columbia! It’s Presbyterian Hospital where I was born!”

  “I don’t care what it is. You’re not goin’ to any school that don’t appreciate you.”

  He was serious, I could see that. I didn’t say anything then but I did a lot of intense thinking. Daddy went with me to all the remaining interviews, and I made sure to ask very specifically about the housing arrangements. “You don’t have dormitories for the medical students?” I’d say. “Not even for the female medical students?”

  “You sure?” Daddy persisted when we were talking to the dean at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry.

  “Mr. Thornton, people coming to medical school at twenty-one, twenty-two years of age prefer to make their own living arrangements, we’ve found.”

  “I can relate to that,” I said. “It must be fun to have your own pad off campus.” Daddy frowned. I went serenely on. “Come and go as you please, have people over, have fellows come to study.”

  I expected Daddy to cross this school off the list as soon as we got outside. Instead he said, “This is where you’re goin’, Cookie.”

  “You don’t mind my having to live off campus?” “I got it figured out. You don’t have to. You can commute from home. It ain’t that far.”

  I thought fast. “That’s true, but I’d still have to have an apartment for those nights I’d be working late at the lab or be on duty at the hospital. I’m going to have to have an apartment wherever I go. Except at P & S. They have a dormitory for women.”

  “They do?”

  “Right there in the medical school.”

  “Okay, that’s where you’re goin’.”

  And that’s why I went to Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, at least as far as Daddy was concerned—not because it was one of the top medical schools in the country but because it had a dormitory for its women students. Looking back, I think that I was accepted because the bus broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was another of those bits of magic, like Daddy finding the extra five dollars in his pocket when he went to fetch Mommy and me home from the hospital. If I had been on time for the interview, I wouldn’t have been seen by the dean of admissions who had the authority to admit me on the basis of his own impression despite my having gone to a college he had never heard of.

  I don’t believe there is a doctor in the country who can’t tell you the day, the hour even, he or she got accepted to medical school. It is a red-letter day in one’s life. Having been granted early acceptance in October of my senior year at Monmouth College, it was as though I was walking on air from then on, through my twenty-first birthday in November right through to graduation in May. At Monmouth, because of the number of students graduating, only the top person in each discipline goes up to collect the diplomas, and I said to myself that it had to be me going up on-stage because Mommy and Daddy would be taking pictures and bursting with pride. I calculated the grades I would have to get: A’s in these courses, not less than a B in this. I just made it.

  Dr. Garner called me in. “Yvonne, in your biology major you came out with a 3.76 average. Would you be ready to do the honors for your fellow students?”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. When they called off the names on graduation day, no peacock could have strutted more than I as I headed up on that stage. And when the president made a special announcement: “Miss Thornton has been accepted at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, the first person to go on to medical school from Monmouth College,” my day was complete.

  10

  P&S

  I MIGHT BE FROM MONMOUTH COLLEGE, not Radcliffe or Wellesley or Bryn Mawr, but I didn’t intend to arrive at medical school looking like a yokel, like I couldn’t hold my own in the big time. Mommy and I went shopping and I bought the snappiest outfits in the stores, everything matching, color-coordinated—miniskirts, frilly blouses, high heels, the right purse for each ensemble. I was going to be the best turned-out person ever to walk through the portals of P & S, right down to my eye makeup, which, on account of being in the band, I used a lot of. I really felt good about myself, ready to take on Columbia, New York City, the world.

  Mommy and Daddy drove me to the city and to Bard Hall where I was to room. “Yvonne,” Daddy said, which marked it as a solemn occasion since he seldom called me anything but Cookie, “this is as far as your mother and I go. We can only take you to the door, hon. From now on, you’re on your own.” I was twenty-one, going on twenty-two, an adult, and I was finally getting away from home, which is what I thought I wanted, but all of a sudden tears were tumbling down my cheeks.

  Daddy reached in his pocket and brought out a glass ashtray. “Just in case someone tries to get in your room,” he said, pressing it into my hand. “This is New York. You gotta be careful.”

  “What am I supposed to do with an ashtray, Daddy?”

  “You put it on top of your door, and then when somebody opens the door, it falls down, which wakes you up and you can grab something to hit him over the head with. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I never put it on top of the door because I knew perfectly well that I’d forget it was there, go rushing out, and I’d be the one to get hit on the head, but I still have that ashtray.

  I hugged my parents, kissed them goodbye, watched them drive away, and went up to my room to stare through swimming eyes at the George Washington Bridge as though it were my last link with home. For the first time in my life I was alone: no mother, no father, no sisters; just me. I felt as though an elevator cable had snapped and I was in free fall—all but my stomach, which I had left several stories behind. I cried off and on for the next three days.

  In the dining room that first evening, the main course was fried chicken. I was reaching for the leg on my plate when I noticed the person across from me pick up his knife and fork. I swerved my hand and closed it around a glass of water, and while I sat back pretending to take a long drink, I watched the other diners over the rim of my glass. They were actually cutting their chicken with a knife and fork. It struck me as a foolish way to attack something that was clearly designed to be eaten with the fingers, but I picked up my utensils and went to work. They weren’t going to catch me looking like I didn’t have the right table manners.

  I’ve often thought since those early days that the reason black people drop out of white colleges in disproportionate numbers is because the culture shock is so intense. The necessity of learning new ways, the fear of making a mistake, and the despair over differentness is such a heavy strain on top of the academic work that it sinks students who otherwise could make it. As a black, you think you know the white world because you have spent so much time looking on at it, but looking on is very different from living in, as I realized almost immediately with the discovery that my table manners needed to be considerably more formal and my clothes considerably less.

  The next day, at a tea given to welcome the incoming students, I quietly drifted into a corner, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. I was pretty certain that, above the eyes, there was nobody better than I and that I could outstudy anybody. With regard to presence and decorum, however, I might as well have come from the Deep South. It was one thing to perform for the kids at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; they loved me in that context. It was quite another to be in a situation where I had to live and work with these kids as a peer. I stood in the corner and prayed, “Oh, God, please don’t let me do anything stupid or awful.”

  I was watching the people from Harvard and Yale, trying to identify the moves that made them look so smooth and suave and utt
erly at ease, when a guy from Princeton came over and said, “Aren’t you one of the Thornton Sisters?” More guys from other places where the band had played joined us, and soon I was the center of a group reminiscing about the dances and the music. Somebody said it was great I was in medical school but sad that the band would be breaking up now.

  “Absolutely not,” I told them, explaining that we would still be playing weekends because Linda and Rita were coming along and there was a lot of education to be paid for yet.

  “But how are you going to do that,” the guys asked, “—take the courses, study, and travel every weekend?”

  “It’s what I’ve been doing since 1963,” I said. “I’ll make it.”

  The group was joined by a huge fellow, six feet five or six, an African-American with hands like a lumberjack’s. “Hi. How ya doin’?” he said, folding my right hand inside his. “I’m Shearwood McClelland. They call me Wood.”

  A bell went off in my mind. That past summer, David Larkin, moving to Princeton to teach in the high school there, had rented an apartment over Miss Burrell’s beauty salon, and Miss Burrell mentioned that the guy who previously had the apartment, and who left a lot of his records behind when he graduated from Princeton, was going to medical school in the fall. “He’s going to be at P & S,” David told me over the phone during the summer, “and his name is Wood. Look him up and ask him if he’s ever coming back for his records.”

  With my hand still in his, I told the guy hello and then asked, “Did you used to live at 21 Leigh Avenue in Princeton?”

  He looked at me with the disgruntled astonishment of someone confronted by a psychic. Muttering, “The woman’s getting into my business,” Shearwood McClelland turned and stalked away.

  Dr. Perera, who knew all of the incoming students by name because he had had the final say on each acceptance, spoke at the tea. The gist of what he said made us all stand taller: “This institution was the first medical school in the American colonies to award the M.D. degree. It is the oldest four-year college of medical training in the country. Because we have a strong tradition to maintain, each of you has been handpicked. You will become a doctor—there is no doubt about that. The only question is what kind of a doctor you will become. We don’t want you to be technicians; we want you to be physicians. We can teach a chimpanzee to do surgery, but you’re here to develop into that very special kind of physician who is a P & S graduate.”

  He was referring to the P & S tradition of blending being a doctor with being a nice person, of being bright but also interested in people, of not talking over the patient’s head or pontificating, but of saying, “Hi, Mrs. Jones, It’s nice to see you,” and touching her and listening to her and doing a thoughtful physical examination. “When you go forth from here,” Dr. Perera summed up, “just from the way you speak, your attitude toward the patient, the way you arrive at a conclusion about the patient’s illness, everyone will immediately recognize that you are a graduate of P & S.”

  It was heady stuff and I was thrilled by his words, feeling myself infinitely lucky to be at this very special school. But I couldn’t shake the consciousness that I was coming from Long Branch, New Jersey. In class, I was very, very quiet. Professors began to chide me: “Yvonne, whenever I ask you a question, you have a great answer. Why don’t you volunteer?” I didn’t because I wasn’t sure of the proper way to say things. I kept remembering a T-shirt I’d once seen: NOBODY KNOWS YOU’RE IGNORANT IF YOU KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT, BUT IF YOU OPEN IT, YOU REMOVE ALL DOUBT. So I kept my mouth shut and put my answers down on paper. A wonderful thing about science is that you don’t have to know the grammatically correct way of stating something. In organic chemistry the answer is yes or no, aldehyde or ester. You don’t have to know the graces and cultural arts to excel, and I was grateful for that.

  One of the first classes I had was in histology. The professor was a woman, Dr. Sara Luce, a female doctor of the old school, mousy graying hair, wire eyeglasses, bitter corners to her mouth. She looked me up and down and said, “Who are you? Are you a first-year student?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m Yvonne Thornton.”

  “Well, Miss Thornton, what are you doing with all that makeup on your face?”

  “I play in a band with my sisters and we wear a lot of makeup when we’re performing.”

  “Well, you’re not performing here, Miss Thornton. You look like Cleopatra. Where did you go to school?”

  “Monmouth College in New Jersey.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  By now, I was thinking, "Oh, gosh, I’m in for it. This is one wicked witch."

  The routine was the same as it had been in the histology course at Monmouth: microscopes with slides in them lined up on tables around the room. The professor said, “You have just two minutes to look at each slide and attempt to identify it before moving on to the next one.”

  I raised my hand. “May I go first, Dr. Luce?”

  “Why not, you from Monmouth College with the makeup and the miniskirt?” She may not have quite said that, but that’s what her withering look conveyed.

  I was through in fifteen minutes. Dr. Luce looked at me almost with pity, as though saying to herself, “Poor thing doesn’t know anything, coming from that Monmouth College.” She clearly thought that I was one of the affirmative-action people allowed into medical school on sufferance. Most of the professors looked at me that way at first: “Oh, she’s black. Okay we’re going back to remedial reading now”

  I got a perfect score on the lab test. Dr. Luce called me in and, believing that I had somehow managed to cheat, ordered me to take the test again by myself. Again I identified every slide correctly.

  “I’d be happy to take it a third time,” I volunteered.

  “No. No, that’s all right,” she replied, somewhat baffled.

  I told her then about my histology professor and our study group where we had drilled each other so hard and so long that finally we didn’t even need a microscope to identify the slides; just by holding them up to the light, we could recognize the type of tissue.

  “Hmmm,” said Dr. Luce. “I need a teaching assistant in the lab. Would you be interested in the job?”

  I accepted happily and called Dr. Gimble at Monmouth College to thank him for the way he had trained me. It had made an enormous difference to me to come out of that first test so well. There were students in the class who were the sons and daughters of physicians, some of them the third or fourth generation in their families to go into medicine: Bob West, son of a P & S graduate; Ed Leahey, son of an orthopedic surgeon on the faculty at Columbia; Bob Santulli, son of a surgeon on the staff at Presbyterian Hospital; Doug Halstead, descendant of the surgeon who invented the Halstead clamp used in thyroid surgery. How could I compete with a tradition like that? But I could, I decided, after that first histology test: I’m here and I’m well trained, and it’s one-on-one just like at Monmouth.

  Usually the first two years of medical school are didactic years: lectures, labs, textbooks to study, course work. However, beginning with our incoming class, the medical college instituted a new concept known as the “core curriculum”—one and a half years for the basic sciences and two and a half years for clinical work. That meant the time allotted for each basic science course was abbreviated and the subject matter condensed to allow the students more time for clinical experience. Over and over again the various professors would say: “Last year I had eight weeks to cover this subject but I have only two weeks this year. Nevertheless, you are responsible for knowing the entire subject and you will be tested on all the material, whether we have covered it or not.”

  It wasn’t easy but I managed to get the work done and still travel with the band. My tuition was twenty-five hundred dollars a year, which doesn’t sound like much now but at the time was one of the highest in the country. Rutgers, by way of contrast, was about half as much. Linda and Rita were both at Monmouth College, with Linda aiming for dental school and Rita for medical schoo
l. Tuition ate up the money as fast as the band made it.

  The three of us kept looking at each other, wondering if one of us was going to falter. Linda and Rita assumed it would be me because of the demands of medical school, but I said over and over, “Look, I’ll hang in if you’ll hang in. I’m not going to pull a Jeanette.” Sometimes I was so tired, I didn’t know if I could stay on my feet, but I believed, as my father believed, as my mother believed, get the job done. Get the job done. If your job is to be part of a team, and if by leaving you’re going to weaken that team, then you don’t leave. You stick around until the job is finished.

  This is the way Mommy and Daddy looked at marriage along with everything else: Whatever it is, we’re here, good or bad, that’s it Because I’m black, people sometimes say to me in surprise, “You had a father?” Yes, I had a father. He stayed to raise us. He stayed to get the job done. So, when Linda said, ‘“You’re gonna leave, Cookie,” I said, following Daddy’s example, “No, we’re here together. I’m here as long as it takes to get the job done.”

  The band was the three of us, plus Mommy occasionally, by the time I was in medical school. Donna had developed epilepsy and was on considerable amounts of medication to control her seizures. Also, she had a baby, a little girl named Heather. Daddy told her, “It’s okay, honey, we can go on without you. You stay home with your baby.” Donna’s leaving the band was a different breaking away than Jeanette’s had been. Daddy had known it was coming, and he appreciated that Donna had made an effort to keep on and wasn’t just listening to her own imperatives, which meant that he wasn’t traumatized by Donna’s dropping out as he had been by Jeanette’s.

  The aftermath of Jeanette’s leaving had been so horrendous and seemed to me so directly the fault of men and dates that I had taken little interest in either since. At Monmouth College, I had met up again with the nice Jimmy Hutcheson who had taken me to my senior prom and we became friends. He played folk guitar and I sometimes went to hear him at a club in Sea Bright. I bought a guitar, paying for it myself so Daddy wouldn’t have anything to say about it, and Jimmy taught me to play, but we never had anything like a formal date.