I press down the guilt. I have let too many years pass.
“I’ve been waiting to ask you, Civil: Do you think the cancer has to do with those Depo shots she got?” She speaks softly, as if it is a secret.
I shake my head. “It’s not likely just from two shots. At least, I don’t think so.”
Alicia stands and begins to put the dishes in the sink. I open the dishwasher, and she turns on the water. She rinses, and I load. After we are done, she makes a pot of coffee. We settle in her living room on the sofa with our big mugs. Hers reads I Am Black History. Mine is blank. “Why did you disappear, Civil?”
“I went to med school.” I know I sound a little defensive; it’s instinct.
“They got telephones at Meharry?”
“Come on, Alicia. You know the commitment.”
“You did the very thing you said you never was going to do.”
What is she talking about? Hold on to my sanity? Try not to mess up things worse than I already had?
“Did you ever contact that green-eyed daddy of theirs? I know you had a crush on him.”
Of course I had never contacted Mace. Surely she knows that. She just wants to torture me a little, and I deserve it. I cannot explain to her why I had to put distance between myself and Montgomery. I don’t know how to say that without sounding selfish. I’m ashamed that I walked out on our friendship, but I also know that if I had to do it all over again I would make the same decision.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do better, Alicia.”
She waves my words off. “Save the apology tour.” Then she leans forward. “Wait, is that what this is? An apology tour?”
“No, of course not.”
“Honey, you might be making this trip to get some closure, but saying I’m sorry to everybody will not give it to you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. What are your questions, Civil? What do you need answered?”
“You sound like my aunt Ros.”
She doesn’t say anything, her face steady and even. Suddenly, I get a sense of the older Alicia. The power between us is not the same as it used to be. I have underestimated the weight of forty years.
“I envy you. This house. This life you’ve made. I suppose I’ve spent my whole career trying to rectify that wrong.”
“Why is that your responsibility, Civil?”
“You know why.”
“You damn near seventy years old. There is no need for you to carry around all this baggage.”
“You call what happened to those girls baggage?”
“Everybody has learned to live with what happened. Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I keep asking myself, Did I do enough? Did we do enough? Were we right?”
Alicia folds her arms and leans back. “You’re a doctor, Civil Townsend. And from what I read online, you’re a good one. So you ought to know good and well where those kinds of questions will lead you.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
She just looks at me. I want to ask her to come with me because no one understands the way she does. But I don’t say anything.
THIRTEEN
Montgomery
1973
After I learned more about what had happened at Tuskegee and read through Miss Pope’s materials, I became even more concerned that I might be wading in the same harmful waters Eunice Rivers had. I needed some reassurances this wasn’t the same thing. Did Mrs. Seager know about the dangers of the drug, and were there other underage patients on it? Was she recording the experiences of patients on Depo? The only place I knew where I might get straight answers was in the patient files. I tried to volunteer to close up the clinic on Monday, but Mrs. Seager had already assigned the task to two other nurses. I was going to have to snoop around while the clinic was still open.
Mrs. Seager stored all of the patient files in a cabinet in her office. The nurse-receptionist, usually Lori, was in charge of retrieving the correct file from Mrs. Seager’s office when a regular patient arrived. She was the only one allowed access. Searching Mrs. Seager’s office while she was in the other room was nothing short of a suicide mission, but there was no getting around it.
There were a few things I already knew. For example, not all of our patients received Depo-Provera shots. A number of them used oral contraceptives, which they picked up each month. We prescribed drugs for sexually transmitted diseases, urinary tract and yeast infections. We also performed cervical exams. First, I would have to pick through the files to find the patients who were being given Depo-Provera. That was going to be difficult. The second challenge was to find Mrs. Seager’s notes. Surely she had some kind of journal or book where she had written down general thoughts. My daddy kept a medical journal, so I assumed Mrs. Seager did, too.
Mrs. Seager had been head of medical records at Professional Hospital before coming to the clinic, and she had once boasted to us during training that she hadn’t lost a file in over twenty years. I had never looked in her cabinet before, and I figured it would probably be locked. She was a locked-cabinet kind of woman. I was not wrong about that, but I didn’t expect to find the key so easily—beneath the porcelain bell on her desk.
I could hear her speaking in the room next door. She was trying to convince a woman with six children to have a tubal ligation. Mrs. Seager had been working on this woman for months, and one of the nurses, Fiona, had remarked just this morning that every time the woman came in, Mrs. Seager spent at least thirty minutes talking to her about the benefits of getting her tubes tied. Lori thought the whole thing was sad because one day the mother had brought all six children into the clinic with her and they looked hungry, so Lori had given them her lunch to split among themselves. Of course, it was barely enough.
I could hear Mrs. Seager’s every word through the thin walls.
If you have this surgery, you won’t have to worry about birth control anymore. You could just spend time with the children you already have.
I hear you, but God promised me a husband. And what if I want to have a baby with my husband?
But you have six children already. Ain’t that enough for any husband?
Last I checked, there were no patients out front. Among the nurses, only Lori remained. I’d just seen her in the break room heating the water kettle. She’d be a few more minutes, at least.
The key turned easily. I stuck my fingernail between two folders, sliding one out and marking the next one out so I’d know where to return it. Mary. Age 13. Depo-Provera shots administered 01/05/72, 04/06/72. Patsy. Age 16. Depo-Provera. IUD. Yolanda. Age 14. Epileptic. Depo. I flipped through more files, searching for parental signatures and consent forms. Based on the addresses, most of the patients lived right there in the neighborhood surrounding the clinic. A few lived out in the country, maybe not too far from the Williamses, or in Clayton Alley.
At the bottom of the charts, nurses had made the kinds of notes we were trained to write down: patient complains of excessive bleeding; patient is amenorrheic; patient complains of headaches; patient experiencing abdominal cramps; patient has vaginal discharge; patient tolerates medication well—no side effects.