“Where did you believe they were taking your daughters?”
“For shots, sir. That’s what she say and I believe.”
“Birth control shots?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you signed the paper?”
“I put my mark on it; yes, sir.”
“Then what happened?”
Mace shifted in his chair and ran a hand over the top of his head. “That afternoon I get a call at work saying they done had an operation. Miss Civil, they nurse, called and told me. And this here news got all over me.”
“I’m sorry, could you speak into the microphone, Mr. Williams?”
“I say this got all over me, sir. Like a fester.”
“You are saying you were upset, Mr. Williams?”
“After the surgery, they said to me . . . ‘Daddy, we ain’t never gone have no babies?’ And it break my heart to have to answer that. They just children. They don’t even know no boys. It ain’t right.”
A lone camera bulb popped. I saw that Erica was closely watching her father. India fingered the sailboat in her hand, turning it over and examining its parts. I wished they didn’t have to be here for this. I should have kept them in the hotel room watching television, but perhaps if they remembered this day it would help them somehow. Somebody had cared about two little Black girls from Alabama. Somebody important.
Mace’s eyes roamed the room behind him. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. It was too crowded in there.
“So you were upset about it?”
“Yes, sir,” Mace said, holding his chin down and looking across at the row of senators. “Wouldn’t you be?”
The senator wisely pivoted to Mace’s mother. “Mrs. Williams, could you tell us about what happened, in your own words? Talk right into the mic so we can all hear you.”
Mrs. Williams told a similar story about that morning, how the nurses had come into the house saying they had to take the girls immediately.
“Did they tell you that they were giving the girls shots?”
“Yes, sir, I believe they did. They said they was going to get shots.”
“And when you talked to your granddaughters for the first time after the surgery, what did they tell you?”
“They say, ‘Grandmama, they done surgery on me. They say I can’t have no babies.’ Mr. Senator, so many people come to my door. Government this and government that. I can’t keep ’em straight sometimes. But this was the first time I done ever felt so betrayed.”
“Would you have permitted it if you had known about it?”
“No, I would not have allowed them to do that. Not to my grandbabies. They just babies theyselves.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Williams, if my questions seem simple. I just want to get all this down for the record. Would you go back to that clinic?”
Mrs. Williams put her mouth right on the microphone. “Sir, I wouldn’t send a cockroach to that clinic.”
People chuckled, then quieted, as if not sure whether to laugh in so serious a moment.
“Thank you, Mrs. Williams. Mr. Williams. As I mentioned earlier, what we are trying to do in this committee is make sure that this never happens again. You have two wonderful daughters. You are a lovely family. We all owe you a very deep sense of gratitude for coming here all the way from Alabama and sharing your personal experience today. Do either of you have anything else you would like to say? Mrs. Williams? Mr. Williams?”
Mace shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Thank you. Thank you again,” said the senator as he turned to whisper in someone’s ear.
THIRTY-TWO
We returned to Montgomery on a high, but a few days later the evening news reported that Lou Feldman had dropped the case against the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic.
“What’s that all about?” Mama walked into the room, drying her hands on a towel.
“I don’t know.”
I called Lou’s office from the hallway. The telephone just rang and rang.
“Mama, I’ll be back!” I called out as I left the house. When I got to Lou’s office, I knew he was there because the upstairs light was on. A cook from the restaurant stood outside smoking a cigarette.
When Lou opened the door, I could tell that he had not slept. His clothes were wrinkled, face unshaven.
“You didn’t answer your telephone,” I said and followed him inside.
He sat down in a chair and pushed his fingers through his dark hair. “Too much work to do.”
“What work? I just heard on the news that you dropped the case.” I was too wound up to sit, so I gripped the back of the chair in front of me.
“We didn’t drop the case exactly.”
“What do you mean by ‘exactly’？”
“Civil, this thing is bigger than the Montgomery clinic.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “The federal government funds it.”
Lou sat up straighter. We hadn’t talked since returning from Washington. I was afraid of what he was about to say, thinking we might have made a mistake by going there.
“There’s a doctor out in California who called me to say there are thousands of Hispanic women getting sterilized out there without their knowledge. There are incidents in North Carolina involving women going in for a Caesarian section and the doctor removing their uterus. Some have even been told by the doctor that if they don’t consent, the doctor won’t sign the forms authorizing their Medicaid. One doctor is doing it as soon as a woman delivers her third child. No consent whatsoever.”
“So it’s happening all over the country?”
“Poor Mexican women. Black women. One doctor in Georgia told a woman while she was in labor that he wouldn’t deliver the baby unless she signed the form!”
I rubbed my head. It was unfathomable. After learning about the Tuskegee experiment, I knew people were capable of all kinds of harm. But hearing this was like learning that evil people were everywhere. I put a hand to my chest.
“Sit down,” I heard him say, and I sank into the chair.
“They trying to kill us off, Lou?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“It’s like the Holocaust, what they did to your people in Europe, isn’t it? What you say your parents fled.”
“Not exactly. But it’s bad.”
Those words sat between us for a few moments. I had learned about the Holocaust at Tuskegee. I remember thinking that I could not believe they hadn’t taught us about it in high school. How could they leave something like that out? When we got to that unit in my college world history class, I’d sat in the library just staring into space. The horror of the events was overwhelming. I had not known white people had gone through something so tragic, and I remember walking around that weekend wondering if every white face I met was a Jewish face, a descendant of a survivor, or even a survivor themselves.
“Listen, we are still naming Erica and India in the lawsuit. But this time we’re going after the big fish—the federal government. The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Office of Economic Opportunity. We’re taking this case to the very top. When this is all over, the girls can sue for monetary damages. But first we’ve got to stop the government in its tracks.”