“Blood poisoning is what they think,” Leadfoot said, pointing down the hall, where four doctors were headed in our direction along with a couple of nurses. “And they’re taking him out of the ward to a private room.”
I didn’t have time to get out of the way before the doctors were in my path, and one of the nurses with them took hold of the back of my chair and wheeled me toward the Girls’ Ward.
“What is your name?” she asked.
I told her.
“I’m sure you know that you are not permitted in the Boys’ Ward.”
“I wasn’t in the Boys’ Ward.”
“Anywhere near the Boys’ Ward, Miss Richards,” she said.
She left me next to the nurses’ station, and I pretended to read a nearby bulletin board while I kept one eye on the activity in the Boys’ Ward.
With a nurse holding on to the IV, the doctors pushed Joey’s bed into the corridor and turned left down another corridor, where I had never been before. I watched until they disappeared.
“What are you looking at?”
It was Miss Riley, the day nurse, who sat at the desk, sometimes flossing her teeth, sometimes putting her feet up on the desk and napping.
“They’re taking a boy out of the Boys’ Ward because he has blood poisoning,” I said.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Someone told me.”
“They’re taking him to Second East, but they don’t know that he has blood poisoning, so you can tell that someone he’s probably wrong.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And Susan,” she went on. “I’ve got my eye on you. The Boys’ Ward is off-limits.”
The woman from the cleaning staff was picking the bubblegum off the little girl’s face when I rode by. I stopped and asked if I could help her or read the little girl a book.
She cocked her head and looked at me.
“She can’t hear,” she said. “No good reading her a book.”
I pushed my wheelchair to the threshold of the closet.
“I could help you,” I said. “I’m good at getting bubblegum off faces.”
The woman stopped, folded her arms across her chest, and leaned against the table.
“What is your name?”
I told her.
“Well, I don’t know where you come from, but in Georgia little white girls don’t play with little colored girls, so I don’t need your help, you understand?”
The cleaning woman’s name was Gertrude. She was from Warm Springs and had been on the cleaning crew of the hospital since she was fifteen. Magnolia was her daughter. She was seven, and deaf, and couldn’t go to school because the school didn’t accept deaf children, so her mother took Magnolia to work and put her under the table in the closet so she wouldn’t bother anybody with the noises she made in her effort to communicate.
I have always been good at getting people to tell me things, and by the end of our conversation I knew a lot about Gertrude, including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to play with Magnolia because I was white and the other people in the hospital would see to it that Gertrude was fired if a white girl was found playing with her deaf and colored daughter.
I sat on my bed in the room I shared with Caroline and told her what had happened, and she told me the truth as she saw it.
“You get in people’s business,” she said. “And why do you do that?”
She had a way with people that must have come from her no-nonsense parents and the small Illinois town where she’d grown up, probably in a Protestant churchgoing family. She had a tendency to be didactic, judgmental, and she didn’t try to soften her observations with flattery. I was a likely candidate for her consideration—provocative, stubborn, a little foolhardy, and curious to the point of stupidity.
I had come to admire Caroline, even to like her. We would never be good friends, in the sense of real girlfriends, but I wasn’t necessarily cut out for that kind of friendship. I was by instinct and circumstance an outsider. And Caroline was a good girl, the kind of girl she had probably been before polio, but afterward it was her trump card, what my mother used to call true blue.
“I don’t mean to get in people’s business,” I said.
I must have known that was a lie even as I was saying it, and certainly Caroline knew it.
“So what are you planning to do about Magnolia?” she asked. “Play with her anyway?”
“She’d like for me to play with her.”
“Something bad is sure to happen if you do.” She shrugged, a familiar expression on her face, not of criticism so much as warning.
“It doesn’t make sense that we can’t play together, does it?” I asked. “Does it make sense to you?”
“It’s the way it is.” She looked over at me with her eyes half closed, as if this conversation had already gone on too long.
It made me mad. As if Caroline were thirty-five and I were some dim-witted child.
“I don’t think you know very much about the troubles of colored people,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said.
When we moved to the farm in Vienna, Virginia, in December of 1944, I was just recovering from meningitis and Jeffrey was six weeks old. The farm had an old house with about fifteen acres of land, which my parents had bought for ten thousand dollars. There were a couple of tenant cottages on the property, housing two black families: Mary and John Cash, and Mary’s sister Aida, Aida’s husband Guy, and their children. These families became our built-in social life and, as it turned out, my father’s first real introduction to race in the South. He’d come home at night from Washington, head over to Guy’s house after dinner, and play cards and drink beer and tell stories, perhaps feeling he was replicating the evenings of his childhood. My father had grown up in poverty in an Underground Railroad town in Ohio, where the social divisions were economic, not racial; he lived in a black neighborhood literally on the other side of the railroad tracks from most of the white families.
I remember the farm in high relief. I thought it the most beautiful place on earth, smelling of sugar cookies and newborn puppies, the radio playing in the kitchen, my mother holding me and dancing with Mary Cash, Jeffrey making baby sounds in his carriage. I loved the kitchen, where something was always cooking.
If there was rising tension on the farm, I didn’t notice it. But my parents, especially my father, must have been aware of some discomfort developing between the black families and them. My father had become a regular at the houses out back, crossing the boundaries of race and class with which the black families on the farm were familiar. They came to our house for dinner from time to time but refused to eat in the dining room, preferring to stand in the kitchen, dishing up their meal from the pots on the stove as if they were hired hands and not guests.
On the Fourth of July that year, my father and Guy and John Cash butchered a pig and hung the carcass upside down by a big hook, the blood draining out on the floor of the shed that was attached to the kitchen. Why they butchered so early in the summer, I don’t know. And why they shot the pig with a shotgun—not the common way to butcher—I don’t know either. There are so many questions I never asked, never thought to ask, until there was no one left to answer. But the butchering did leave a couple of loaded shotguns around our house and theirs, in easy reach for the Fourth of July celebrations.
That night, John and Guy and some friends were playing cards at Guy’s house and got drunk and started shooting their shotguns in the air. Somehow, someone shot Aida and Aida’s daughter, superficial wounds that bled a lot. The women, seeking safety, brought the children over to our house, and my mother took them in.
I was under the kitchen table, more thrilled than afraid to be a part of this high drama. My mother was, always was, preternaturally calm. That night she was wearing a white sundress, and I thought she was brave and lovely, standing barefoot, her white dress striped red with blood, her arms around the women.
The men, by then quite drunk and boiste
rous, came up to the house and shouted at my father that if he didn’t let the women and children go, they were going to kill him.
My father, who was guarding the back door, asked my mother to call the police, who told her to handle the problem herself. They refused to intervene in a family struggle involving race, they said, and told my mother that she had been foolish to take the women in, that what she should do was open the door, turn the women out, and lock the door behind them.
All night I sat with my parents in their double bed, from where we could see the tenant houses, and watched the men set off fireworks in the Cashes’ front yard.
The following day, my parents put the farm on the market and we moved back to the city.
For my father, the incident was a failure of understanding, his failure, but it didn’t stop him from trying again. By the time I was seven we were living in segregated Washington with a college-educated black woman who could not get a civil service job because of Negro quotas and the fact that she was a single mother of two children. She worked for my parents, but at their insistence an illusion of equality prevailed. It would be dishonest to say that we were not separated by class and color, because we were. But I was young, and my perception of the world of race was influenced by my father’s romanticism and my childhood history of proximity and comfort. The idea that I wasn’t allowed to play with a little black girl because her mother might be fired for it was a challenge.
Magnolia was lying on her stomach under the table in the cleaning closet several days later when I wheeled down the corridor in search of news about Joey Buckley. She made a sound and I turned and she smiled at me, crawling out from under the table over to my wheelchair. I picked her up and set her on my lap and wheeled down the corridor past the nurses’ station, where Miss Riley looked up and smiled. Miss Riley actually smiled at me, as I told Gertrude later, so I punched the down arrow on the elevator and headed to the Children’s Ward with Magnolia.
It made me blissfully happy to ride into the ward with Magnolia on my lap, her skinny arm wrapped around my neck, and if the nurses in the ward were disturbed by it, they didn’t show it.
The Children’s Ward
I HAD MADE A LIFE in the Children’s Ward even before my mother returned to Washington to take care of Jeffie.
“He’s not happy in school, but he’s happy that I’m back,” she wrote in one of her letters about daily life on Macomb Street.
I kept her letters in a little purse, like a passport case, that my mother had made for me years before which I could hang around my neck; it had a list of emergency telephone numbers in case something happened to me. The letters from my mother were short but frequent and sometimes funny, like the one she wrote after she got home:
Grandma Richards has traded in the extra bourbon for sashaying past Granfer Swindells’s house although Granfer isn’t interested in dating Grandma R. in spite of the crinoline skirts she wears under her dresses and the nice rubbery boobs she purchased at G. C. Murphy’s.
P.S. I hope you’re having fun with the babies.
On weekdays in October, my mother would take a break from designing my Sunbonnet Sue costume to come with me to the Children’s Ward, so I’d be permitted to go in with the babies by myself after she left.
That first fall, we went to the Children’s Ward for short visits, my mother wandering after me while I went from bed to bed. She made friends with one of the nurses, a tiny, round, red-faced blonde with a tight permanent like yellow Slinkys all over her head and a crooked smile. Miss Browning, I called her, and after my mother went home, she told me I could call her Paisley Jean if she was the only nurse on duty, but Miss Browning if one of the other “broads” was there. She called women “broads” and men “barn rats” and the babies “my precious ones,” and I liked her better than any of the other nurses at Warm Springs, who tended to be strict about rules.
I called the ward the Babies’ Ward. Just the word “babies,” repeated in my head, had a visceral effect, as if my body warmed to the sound of the double b’s spoken in my own voice. There were ten babies when I first arrived in late August, but one of them, Belly Boo—I called her Belly Boo because she was round in the middle and very quiet but I could make her smile by playing peekaboo—left to go home to Nebraska, a limp little Raggedy Ann with floppy legs and a circle of curly red hair at the very top of her head.
I loved all those babies, with their silky skin and red-hot cheeks from the endless summer heat pressing into autumn. I’d take one out of her crib onto my lap and she’d wrap her tiny arms around my neck and look at me with a trust and adoration I had never known, and I’d fill up as if the soft summer air were stretching my skin until it became something more than simply skin.
I’d move from crib to crib, gentling them one after the other, telling them stories, taking them in my lap for a wheelchair ride.
Magnolia made her hollow, grunting noises when we went through the door into the ward, and the babies had their eyes on me as they always did when I arrived, pulling themselves up by the bars of the cribs or lying on their backs, waiting for me to lean over their beds, lift them out, and set them on my lap. I could tell they didn’t like the sounds coming out of Magnolia, so I put a finger to my lips and then to hers and she went silent.
Paisley Jean was in a rocking chair with Rosie, rocking her to sleep, and the only other nurse in the ward had left after I arrived.
We stopped at Little Maria’s crib first.
Little Maria looked Spanish, maybe Latin American, and she could walk by holding on to the side of the crib. She would lean against the railing and stretch out her arms for me to pick her up.
“This is Little Maria,” I said, putting her on my lap next to Magnolia. “She’s going home next month to Chicago to see her big brother and her daddy.”
Magnolia turned her head away.
She couldn’t read lips, but she looked at me when I was speaking, and I talked to her as if she could hear.
“Watch this,” I said to Magnolia.
I played a finger game with Little Maria, a ritual I had begun by playing the same game every day with each child, changing the game depending on the child, so I was someone to each of them. No one could take my place.
“Want to play church?” I asked Little Maria, and she clapped her hands.
I’d make a church with my fingers folded in.
“Here’s the church and here’s the steeple,” I said while she tried to put her hands together like mine.
I opened my thumbs, turned my hands palm-down so the woven fingers showed.
“Open the door and see all the people!”
And Little Maria fell over backward with squeals of laughter, giggling until I lifted her into her crib and she cried out to me, “Mamamamama.”
I loved that.
“I promise I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said to Little Maria.
I kept my promises with the babies.
I wasn’t permitted to pick up Sue Sue because she was too fragile. She lay on her back, her head turned in my direction, her eyes glazed, a tiny smile on her face.
I pulled my wheelchair right next to her bed, lowered my voice, and whispered the story I told her every day, the same one each morning.
“Once upon a time there was a very small rabbit with a pink nose and long whiskers and one eye,” I began, speaking through the bars.
I’d finish the one-eyed-rabbit story and then I’d reach through the bars and run my fingers very lightly over Sue Sue’s cheeks, the way my mother did with me before I went to sleep at night.
Violet Blue was lying on her side, pale-skinned with straight black hair and bangs.
I don’t know where I got the name Violet Blue, but it came to me the first time I saw her. She was the only child in the ward who was not a baby—two years old and paralyzed below the waist, with large, oval, olive-colored eyes flecked yellow and a violent temper.
What I especially loved about Violet Blue was her temper and the way I could mak
e it disappear.
This morning, with Magnolia still in my lap but getting restless, Violet Blue was sitting up, supported by the crib rails behind her, hammering her little fists against the mattress. She didn’t stop when she saw me approach, and as I drove my wheelchair up beside the crib, she threw herself backward, hitting the top of her head, screaming bloody murder.
Magnolia was fascinated. She climbed out of my lap, wrapped her fingers around the metal rails of the crib, and pressed her face against them.
Usually a nurse would come by and lift Violet Blue into my lap, since I couldn’t pick her up without help, but this time only Paisley Jean was left, and she was rocking Rosie, my beloved Rosie, the ultimate object of my adoration. I loved each of the babies, but I loved Rosie best.
Magnolia squished her face against the rails.
Violet Blue lay perfectly still, watching her.
Magnolia must have been uneasy with such scrutiny, a little girl used to being left alone under some desk or table looking out at the world. She began to make low growls, which soon became a roar.
Violet Blue reached out and took hold of the railing, her fat little fingers wound around it. She pulled her limp body along and sat very close to Magnolia, both hands gripping the railing, unsmiling, looking at the deaf child with what might have been hostility. It was something close to anger in any case, and I must have known then that trouble was about to happen.
On a typical day—and most days at Warm Springs were the same, different only in what a child made of them, and mainly in her head—I’d arrive at the Children’s Ward in the morning, after breakfast. I’d drive my wheelchair through the double doors as if it were a convertible with the top down, my hair flying, the wind stinging my cheeks, racing to my babies. That was what I pretended.
I was in charge of the Babies’ Ward, the one person in the hospital responsible for this gathering of innocence. Without me, these orphan wonders, terrorized by the nurses and doctors, would fold themselves into the corner of their cribs and die.
Warm Springs Page 9
