The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  The morning sickness subsided and I set to work studying for the written board examination in June. As many as forty-five percent of candidates fail the boards each year, and I didn’t intend to be among their number. Every night I set the alarm for 2:00 A.M., studied until 6:00 A.M., then went off to the hospital to see patients and operate. In the evening I came home and made dinner, studied some more, and fell into bed. If we hadn’t had an angel named Bev Thomas to look after Woody, I don’t know what I would have done.

  One evening Shearwood arrived home with the news that, as of January 1, he was being sent to Okinawa for three months. “Okinawa!” I screamed. “I’m four months pregnant, we’ve got a small child, and you’re going to leave me? Tell them you’re not going!”

  “‘Yvonne, we’re in the military. I can’t tell them I’m not going. They’d send me to Leavenworth.”

  “You got me into this and you’re leaving in January for the South Pacific—twelve thousand miles away!”

  “I’ll be back in three months.”

  “Don’t bother coming back!” I stormed, which was how upset I was.

  But, of course, when December 31 came and I drove him to the airport, we were both tearful. It would be the first time we’d ever really been apart since medical school. As I held Woody in my arms and watched Shearwood go through the gate, I thought: This is how Mommy must have felt when Daddy disappeared down the subway steps on his way to the war. Woody picked up on my desolate feeling and began to cry. “Here, honey, have a biscuit,” I said, which cheered him up but my cheeks were wet all the way home.

  When we got back to the house, the telephone was ringing. It was Shearwood. A flap had fallen off the plane and the passengers had been returned to the terminal to wait until it was fixed. I was sorry for Shearwood’s sake that he had hours of idleness ahead, but, oh, it was as reassuring as warm milk just to hear his voice one more time.

  After he finally arrived in Okinawa, we talked every night, at first using the military’s system of hopping from station to station for free, but that could take as much as three hours to get a call through, so we gave up on that and called person-to-person and ran up bills of two thousand dollars a month. I didn’t care. I had to hear his voice. I had to say; “Shearwood, it’s really bad,” and hear him say back, “You can make it, Yvonne.”

  I wasn’t at all sure I could. That February, Maryland had the worst snowstorm on record. While the snow was still falling, the hospital called; a patient had been transferred to Bethesda with preeclampsia and needed to be delivered. It was nine o’clock at night. I had to get there. Five months pregnant, I shoveled and shoveled so I could get the car out of the driveway. The baby in my belly was kicking and kicking. “Oh, Lord,” I moaned, “I’m going into preterm labor.”

  Bev, struggling through snow and black ice, arrived to look after Woody. I climbed into the car. It wouldn’t start. I roused a neighbor and asked him to drive me to the hospital. At the hospital there was an air of crisis: “It’s twins and her blood pressure is 210/120.”

  “Stabilize her. We’ll do an immediate cesarean section under general anesthesia,” I ordered. “Let’s go.”

  The anesthesiologist said, “I’m not going to give her a general. I want to use an epidural.”

  “Do you know how long it takes to get going with an epidural” I’m the responsible physician here. She needs to have a general. Put her out now so we can deliver these babies.”

  “I’m going to put in an epidural.”

  I stared at him, then ordered, “Get your superior in here.”

  His superior arrived, and when he saw me, he got that look on his face. “I don’t know whether or not you’re even qualified to do a cesarean section,” he said. “I have to assume you are or your boss wouldn’t have sent you down here. Nevertheless, we’re going to do this the way we want to do it.”

  Thirty minutes went by as they tried to get the epidural into the woman’s spine. Forty-five minutes. By now it was obvious even to them that time had run out. They gave up and administered a general anesthetic, and I delivered the twins at one o’clock in the morning.

  I arrived back home crying and raging. I assume you know what you’re doing. If I’d been a man, he wouldn’t have talked to me like that. If I’d been white, he wouldn’t have questioned my ability to do what was right for my patient. I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. I got out of bed and drafted letters to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the Surgeon General of the Navy, and to the commanding officer of the National Naval Medical Center, letters that outlined what had happened. Each letter ended with: “Now you know why not many black people come into the Navy, especially black officers, because we are treated with such disdain.” In the morning I put the letters in the interoffice mail.

  Almost immediately I received a call from Admiral Horgan, the commanding officer of the base. “Dr. Thornton, can you come to my office?”

  “Yes, sir. Will ten o’clock be all right, after morning rounds?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  At nine o’clock, Dr. Knab came in search of me. “What happened last night?” he demanded. I outlined the facts. “The next time something like this goes on, you are to call me.”

  “At one o’clock in the morning?”

  “Well, then, next time write this kind of letter to me. This is a real fan-hitter.”

  “Sir, I was the attending physician of record, and it was the chairman of the anesthesia department who was talking to me. My understanding is that the only person who can reprimand the man is the base commander, that you can’t do anything because he’s not in your department.”

  “That’s right. But, nevertheless, next time come to me first.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nothing was more predictable than that if I’d gone to Knab, he would have said, “Okay, I’ll take it from here,” and that would have been the end of it; my hands would have been tied because I then wouldn’t dare go over his head, and the arrogant actions that jeopardized the health of my patient would have gone unaddressed. Instead, I had acted on advice my mother had long ago given me: “Things trickle down but they never trickle up, Cookie, so start at the top when you’ve got a complaint.”

  The admiral was a different story from Dr. Knab. “I will not put up with this sort of thing at the medical center,” he said unequivocally, then added a personal note of understanding. “I know the aggravation my mother went through in trying to establish the right of women to practice medicine and be treated professionally.” He got up to escort me to the door of his office and patted me on the shoulder. “Not to worry, Dr. Thornton,” he said. “What you did was right and proper. If you have any other problems, come and see me.”

  Both the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and the Surgeon General of the Navy wrote me letters of apology after an investigation of the incident, and the chairman of the anesthesiology department, who had been slated for promotion to admiral, was denied his promotion and was asked to leave the National Naval Medical Center. After that, after I had gone to the top as Mommy had taught me “because the top person can win your battles for you,” I had no further problems at Bethesda.

  My problems were with studying for the boards and being pregnant and snow and ice and praying to God that I wouldn’t fall and kill myself and the baby and being on-call and Bev having to go home in the evenings to look after her own child and having a husband who was just a voice over the phone saying, “It’s really warm here in the Pacific.”

  “I don’t want to hear how it is over there!”

  “I’ll bring you back something.”

  “Don’t bring me anything!”

  In April Shearwood arrived home, walking off the plane with the uncertain diffidence of a puppy who is anticipating a major scolding. But I was too glad to see him to lash him with too many words—until, that is, we heard about another officer who had just come into the Navy and who had refused to go overseas because his wife was pregnant and he wanted to b
e with her. Then I was furious all over again.

  June came and I started on my month’s vacation. The baby, due on the seventh of the month, did not put in an appearance. Woody had been eighteen days late so I wasn’t too surprised that I was running over, but the board exam was on the thirtieth and I was consumed with anxiety to have the baby born and be back to normal well in advance of that date. The fifteenth of June came and went. I couldn’t study for my boards at home because even with Bev there to look after two-year-old Woody, he’d search the house crying, “Mommy!” if he suspected I was around. Instead, I went to the hospital and studied in the library. But the decibel level began to rise there and Shearwood suggested, “There’s a little conference room in the back of the orthopedic department. Nobody will bother you there and I can pick you up each day and drive you home.”

  The baby still hadn’t arrived by the twenty-sixth of June. I was to take the exam on Monday, the thirtieth. By Friday, the twenty-seventh, I was in despair. If I went into labor on Monday, all the studying would have been for nothing; I’d have it all to do over again the next year. If I went into labor on Sunday, maybe I could drag myself to the exam, which was being given at the medical school on the campus of the naval hospital at Bethesda. But even if I managed to get there, in all probability I would flunk the exam. As I sat there alone in that little conference room on Friday, I began to cry, and with no one there to hear me, I let out a long wail of anguish.

  A strange yet soothing voice came from behind me. Why are you crying? Have I ever forsaken you?

  I wheeled around to see who had come into the room. There was no one there.

  Oh, my God, am I going crazy? My mind leaped back to the moment when Mommy died and the vapor rose from her body. I hadn’t known how to explain that. I didn’t know how to explain this.

  But my despair had vanished. A feeling of calm crept over me. A little bit of hope seeped into my soul. “Let me just get back to studying,” I said to myself, “and perhaps things will work out.”

  The next morning, Saturday morning, I awakened with a burning sensation in the pit of my stomach and said to Shearwood that I seemed to have some indigestion. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you may be in labor.”

  “It’s indigestion! What do you know? I’m the obstetrician,” I told him. “I’ll take some Mylanta.” I got up, dressed, and fed Woody his breakfast. Every time I grimaced, Shearwood looked at his watch.

  “Let me just call Dr. Knab,” he said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “It’s not even painful yet. It’s not contractions. You’ll make me look like a fool.”

  “You can come home again if it’s nothing.”

  We argued back and forth, and Shearwood won. Thank heavens, because by the time he hung up the phone the contractions were hitting me left and right. Bev arrived to look after Woody, and as Shearwood and I hurried to the car for the drive to the hospital, the contractions suddenly went from every fifteen minutes to every three minutes.

  “Go around back of the hospital,” I gasped. “I don’t think I’ll make it if we go in the front.” I was remembering when I was eight and the baby was born in the elevator.

  We arrived in the labor and delivery suite at 12:00 noon. At 12:22 Kimberly Itaska McClelland was born, weighing eight pounds, eight ounces. If I’d hesitated any longer at home, she would have been born in the car or on the stairs, which would have been pretty embarrassing for a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine. With Woody I had been in labor for twenty-three hours. Textbooks decree that the second baby arrives in half the time of the first, which meant that I should have had twelve hours to get to the hospital. In fact, I had about twelve minutes, proving, as I had long suspected, that the only thing certain about obstetrics is that you cannot be certain about anything.

  After my episiotomy incision had been stitched up and I was settled in bed in a private room, I said, “Shearwood, if you’ll fetch my books for me, dear, I’ll just get on with my studying.”

  The nurse asked, “Do you want rooming in? Are you breastfeeding?”

  The answer was no to both. “Please take my baby to the nursery. As much as I’d love to hold her, I’ve got to study.”

  The board exam started at 12:00 noon on Monday. Shearwood arrived to escort me across the campus. Said the navy nurse on the floor, “You’re not going anywhere. You could have a postpartum hemorrhage. I cannot allow this.”

  “I’m going to take my boards. It’s just across the way at the medical school. I’ll be back in four hours. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “I’ll have to call Dr. Knab.”

  If Dr. Knab had refused permission for me to leave, I think I would have knocked the woman down and stepped over her fallen body to get to that exam. My walk to the medical school on Shearwood’s arm was an exceedingly gingerly excursion on account of the episiotomy stitches, and I still had the hospital bracelet on my arm when he left me at the door of the examination room. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked worriedly.

  “I have to be all right. It’s only four hours and then it will all be over.”

  But what a four hours, sitting on a wooden seat with those stitches in my bottom. I summoned up Daddy’s phrase, as I had done for final exams at Monmouth College: “You do what you got to do,” and at the end of the four hours I was satisfied that I had made a good job of it, that I would not be among the contingent who failed. Sure enough, when the letter came saying I had passed, it contained the additional note that I had scored among the top one percent of all those taking the test.

  I didn’t forget, ever, that my parents had had a lot more struggles than I had, but that first year in the Navy was tough for me, juggling one baby, pregnant with another, working with people who despised the color of my skin, studying for my boards, Shearwood in Okinawa, shoveling snow to make it to the hospital to deliver babies, giving birth to my own baby. When it was over, I exulted: “I am woman! Hear me roar!”

  I decided that Daddy was right: there is nothing women can’t do, up to and including whatever it takes to get the job done.

  15

  Civilians and Civility

  “I SHOULD GET ANOTHER BATCH OF KIDS,” Daddy kept saying. “I need another batch of kids,”

  “So, what are you waiting for?” we encouraged him. “Get some kids from the state. Be a foster parent. Get yourself three or four more girls and bring them up like you did us.”

  “No, no girls. This time I’m gonna get me a boy.” Daddy’s voice softened when he said this and his eyes grew dreamy, as though girls were okay, but a son…that was different. The first time around he had played the hand he was dealt, but this time he was doing the dealing and he intended to deal himself a boy.

  I said to him, “Daddy, don’t you think that when you talk like that you’re kind of saying that Mommy wasn’t good enough to give you a son and we were a disappointment to you because we were girls?”

  I was trying to be reasonably tactful, but I did want him to sense our resentment that he was, in effect, downgrading his daughters, making us feel second-class and inadequate. Each of us had experienced over and over the world’s dismissive view of women, and now our own father, who had taught us to be so good at what we did that we could not be shoved aside, was doing the same thing, indicating that a male has value simply by virtue of his maleness while women have to earn and re-earn every scrap of respect they get.

  He brushed aside our resentment. “I don’t want to hear it, Cookie. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about what’s been. I’m sayin’ what’s gonna be, and it’s gonna be a boy.”

  The boy was Alfred, a fourteen-year-old who had already been in several foster homes and had been moved out and on because he was wild. Wildness was all right with Daddy; he wanted a tough case because he figured that was a child he could make a real difference with. He started right in disciplining Alfred. Soon after Alfred arrived, he and Daddy were shopping in the grocery store together and Daddy, selecting
potatoes from a bin, turned and saw Alfred eating a grape. Alfred described what happened.

  “Your father whacked me across the face so hard that the grape was, like, hanging out of my mouth. He said, ‘You haven’t paid for it, have you?’ I told him I pick up stuff all the time, and he tells me, ‘If you haven’t paid for it, it’s stealin’. Don’t ever do that again.’” Alfred laughed. “And I don’t guess I’m about to, at least not when he’s around, that’s for sure.”

  Daddy said, “I’m teachin’ Alfred manners and proper countenance, which nobody bothered him about before.” At the same time, he was teaching him masonry and Alfred worked side by side with him on some of his jobs. “Finally,” Daddy bragged, “finally I’ve got me a son.” So bewitched was Daddy by the satisfactions of this that before very long Alfred discovered he could get around Daddy quite easily. With a bit of care and subtlety and a show of loving attention, he chivied Daddy into buying him silk underwear, handsomely tailored suits, and the most expensive shoes from the best stores. The trap Daddy had excoriated women for falling into of buying men clothes because they wanted the guy to look nice when they went out together, he now succumbed to himself. Even more to the point, however, was the fact that, for fear of alienating Alfred, he eased off giving him unwelcome news about the necessity of getting an education, about dignity and responsibility, about sizing people up and keeping your word. His handling of Alfred and the way he had raised his daughters began to be as different as day and night.

  He said, in effect, at every turn, “Oh, Alfred knows this. Alfred knows that. Alfred’s smart. Alfred, he’s my main man.” After a while, anything Alfred wanted, Alfred got. No lectures. No cautions. No goals set. No pressure to get good grades. The ending was predictable. Alfred dropped out of school, began doing drugs, and stole money from Daddy whenever he needed five or ten dollars.

  When Daddy caught on to Alfred’s stealing, his indulgence ended abruptly and he confronted the boy with: “Okay, you think you’re a man. Come on. We’re going to fight it out.” Alfred swaggered along behind as Daddy marched to a nearby empty lot. He was seventeen, Daddy in his fifties. Alfred assumed all the advantage was on his side. They squared off. Alfred swung. Daddy ducked and countered. His blow landed, splitting Alfred’s lip and dislocating his jaw.