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We could not effect change if we were hungry. Eat first. Then march.
“That’s what they told the men. They told them they had bad blood. Then they let those men just suffer and die.”
nobody cared about poor colored folks down in Alabama.”
I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy.
people. We are working for the common good. They need us. We are like . . . God’s guiding hand.”
Dr. Harold Upjohn.
Poverty motivated a lot of the city’s crime. Despair. Racism. Lack of opportunity. We weren’t just helping these families. We were doing community work. Better to step in before things got worse. By giving the patients birth control, we were saving them from more dire choices. Mrs. Seager was right to be concerned.
“One day I want to take my girls to the ocean. They need to lay eyes on it.”
The death of his wife hung over the family like a shroud;
“Hey, Miss Sybil. You think maybe you could take me to see them jobs people on Monday?”
“You they goddamn nurse.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the words roared in my ears.
told the Lord to just go ahead and send for me.”
“Now I know the world exactly what I thought it was,” she said and cast her eyes downward.
Do you think that retarded girl could take care of a baby?
He slid his arm around my waist, and something went soft inside me.
If he would just show me some tenderness, after all that had happened, both of us might survive this.
I could not remember the last time my mama had hugged me.
“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow.
the mundane act of nourishment.
“Sterilization is not birth control, especially when applied to minors. It is not the same as a birth control pill. It fundamentally and forever halts the ability to conceive. Frankly, it is mayhem.
this was the first time I done ever felt so betrayed.”
I am part of the problem. I was in their lives making decisions that weren’t mine to make.
Mrs. Seager probably put the girls in three of these misguided categories: poor, Black, and mentally unfit.
Maybe if they had a mama it might not have happened.”
I had tried to do what his wife would have done.
lips. “Shh. There you go walking all up in it again. Stop asking so many questions. I ain’t your case.”
“I don’t know what you think of me. Woman, you mess me all up inside.”
I loved this family, plain and simple. I fought the urge to go join them. They were not my family. They would always belong to Constance. Still, I loved them.
situation that was the biggest event of our entire lives.
that. The Williamses had always fed my soul, even when I did not know I was hungry.
“You free, Civil. Use your freedom to change as many lives as you can.”
of Relf v. Weinberger. In June 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, sisters aged twelve and fourteen, were sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Alabama, by a federally funded agency.
about medical ethics and racism, but how could these events have been allowed to happen in plain sight? I began to ask questions about culpability and silence that contemporaneous documents in the archive could not answer.
