“I think so. I mean, I guess.”
“Are they given something to read and sign about the risks and side effects?”
I tried to think of the women who had been given their first shots since I started. Yes, we had given them documents to sign, but Mrs. Seager had coached us to summarize the document. Just standard language. Nothing alarming. The women I’d seen had not actually read the document. They had only listened to me speak, trusted that I had correctly translated the block of letters on the page. Even the literate ones didn’t read the forms before signing.
“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Alicia said slowly, “even if the drug does cause cancer, it doesn’t overtake our concerns right now. It would take a long time for cancer to show up. That’s far off in the future. But a baby could happen any day now.”
That was probably why Alicia hadn’t mentioned it to me. She thought pregnancy was a more pressing concern and was convinced we were still doing important work.
“Alicia, that argument doesn’t make sense.” Ty shook his head. “You can’t have a baby if you dead.”
Mr. Ralsey, who had been listening quietly, spoke. “Ty’s right. If it’s true that these drugs carry serious risk, then you are essentially experimenting on those women the same way they experimented on those men in Macon County.”
Not just women. Girls. I swallowed. I had tried to forget that I’d given India Williams a shot, hoped that it would just pass quietly through her system until it wore off. Then I’d tried to get them into an apartment to make up for my mistake. But cancer? Ty had to be wrong. Maybe they had altered the medication into a better formula since that study. The clinical studies were on animals, not humans.
Majoring in biology didn’t mean Ty knew everything. Mrs. Seager had years of experience. She was strict with us nurses, but she would never intentionally harm her patients. She was there to help, just like all of us. All we had to do was talk to her and clear up this misunderstanding.
“I’ll wash up the dishes, Mrs. Ralsey.” I collected the plates, my mind already occupied by how I was going to gather the nerve to ask Mrs. Seager about this.
ELEVEN
Ty and Alicia had dropped a bomb on me at Sunday dinner, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t talk to Mrs. Seager before getting more information, and I didn’t like feeling like Alicia and Ty were researching this without me. So I called them that week and asked both of them to ride up to Tuskegee with me. The following weekend we all drove up to meet with Miss Pope, the university librarian. I had first encountered Miss Pope when she cornered me in the library and stuck a copy of Stokely Carmichael’s book Black Power in my hand. Let me know when you finish it, she’d said, as if I did not have a choice in the matter. Later, I discussed his arguments with her over cups of Sanka in her office, both of us agreeing that Carmichael didn’t acknowledge women enough in his analysis. Even though she would never have used such a term, Miss Pope was the first feminist intellectual I ever met.
She was also the one who helped me when I found out I was pregnant. When I told her I didn’t plan to carry the pregnancy to term, she sat me down in her office and asked me if I had prayed on it. We talked about it for over half an hour, but when she saw I was resolute, she told me about a woman she had heard about over in the next county who was known for her safe abortions. She offered to drive me there when I was ready. On the day of the procedure, I paid one hundred dollars, and Miss Pope sat in the woman’s living room with a Bible in her lap and waited while I lay on a bed in the woman’s back room. Afterward, Miss Pope took me back to her house, where I stayed for the next week. She kept my secret with the grace of an angel, never asking me for details, never inquiring about the father’s name.
Ty knew Miss Pope had helped me, but he promised not to say anything to her about it. On the drive up, he was unusually quiet. We entered the campus, winding around the drive. To our left, what we called “the valley” had turned a brilliant spring green, and I remembered the first time Daddy had brought me to visit, the rush of feeling I’d had for the history there, the stateliness of its brick buildings, the angled roof of the chapel. The fall advisory had been under way and I had watched young women in skirts, their hair straightened and pinned, books cradled in their arms. I could not take my eyes off them.
Ty parked in front of the library, and the three of us went through the main door. The automatic library lights turned on with a loud click as we passed through the stacks. The atmosphere of Tuskegee’s library was serious, just like Miss Pope. You did not go in there to play around with your friends. When you asked her to help with a last-minute paper, she would do so, but not without a lecture on how the work suffered when you waited until the night before your assignment was due; and by the way, when you were finished with your paper you could shelve the books in that there pile. During my years at Tuskegee, however, I learned there was more to the woman than her tough exterior. Miss Pope lived a rich life—when she wasn’t working or attending Bible study, she traveled the country by car. She had never married; she and her sister had visited thirty-two of the fifty states, no small feat for two Negro women traveling alone.
“When you called me and told me what you were looking for, I took the liberty of pulling some files you might find interesting. You didn’t give me much time, calling me like I didn’t have nothing to do this weekend.”
“Thank you, Miss Pope, for taking time out of your day,” I said. “We brought you this nice plant for your desk.”
We had taken one of the houseplants from Ty’s house to offer as a thank-you gift. It was not one that Ty’s mother would mourn—like any good garden mother, she had her favorites. Ty had put it in a ceramic pot with bright stones set into the clay. The pot was so nice, I had a feeling Ty was also thanking her for being there for us the year before.
She took the plant and pointed a finger at some chairs that someone had moved out of place. “Young man, move those chairs back to that table over there. I don’t know who’s been moving my chairs around.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ty stared at her for a moment before jumping into action.
Alicia covered her teeth. I tried not to look at Alicia because I didn’t want to laugh. Miss Pope might not help us if she thought we were sassing her.
The librarian’s eyes grazed over Alicia’s dress. “You work at the same clinic as Civil?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Even though it was Saturday, we had worn our uniforms because I knew Miss Pope would like it. She was always proud to see graduates in their professional work attire. I’d once met the first Black policeman from Birmingham in Miss Pope’s office. A Tuskegee graduate. She was so proud of him that she nearly tripped over his feet. As much as Miss Pope loved the work of activists like Jo Ann Robinson and Mary Fair Burks, she believed just as strongly in economic uplift. We could not effect change if we were hungry. Eat first. Then march. A group of us had once held a spirited discussion in the library over how we were supposed to do that when they wouldn’t hire us in the first place. The marching had to come first, we’d argued. Do them both, she’d declared. Oh, yes, Miss Pope was something else.