The Underground Railroad

From the front, the hospital was a smart, sprawling single-floor complex that seemed as long as the Griffin Building was tall. It was stark and unadorned in its construction in a way Cora had never seen before, as if to announce its efficiency in its very walls. The colored entrance was around the side but apart from that was identical to the white entrance, in the original design and not an afterthought, as was so often the case.

The colored wing was having a busy morning when Cora gave her name to the receptionist. A group of men, some of whom she recognized from socials and afternoons on the green, filled the adjacent room while they waited for their blood treatments. She hadn’t heard of blood trouble before arriving in South Carolina, but it afflicted a great number of the men in the dormitories and was the source of tremendous effort on the part of the town doctors. The specialists had their own section it seemed, the patients disappearing down a long hall when their name was called.

She saw a different physician this time, one more pleasant than Dr. Campbell. His name was Stevens. He was a northerner, with black curls that verged on womanish, an effect he tempered with his carefully tended beard. Dr. Stevens seemed young for a doctor. Cora took his precociousness as a tribute to his talents. As she moved through the examination, Cora got the impression she was being conveyed on a belt, like one of Caesar’s products, tended down the line with care and diligence.

The physical examination was not as extensive as the first. He consulted the records from her previous visit and added his own notes on blue paper. In between he asked her about dormitory life. “Sounds efficient,” Dr. Stevens said. He declared the museum work “an intriguing public service.”

After she dressed, Dr. Stevens pulled over a wooden stool. His manner remained light as he said, “You’ve had intimate relations. Have you considered birth control?”

He smiled. South Carolina was in the midst of a large public health program, Dr. Stevens explained, to educate folks about a new surgical technique wherein the tubes inside a woman were severed to prevent the growth of a baby. The procedure was simple, permanent, and without risk. The new hospital was specially equipped, and Dr. Stevens himself had studied under the man who pioneered the technique, which had been perfected on the colored inmates of a Boston asylum. Teaching the surgery to local doctors and offering its gift to the colored population was part of the reason he was hired.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“The choice is yours, of course,” the doctor said. “As of this week, it is mandatory for some in the state. Colored women who have already birthed more than two children, in the name of population control. Imbeciles and the otherwise mentally unfit, for obvious reasons. Habitual criminals. But that doesn’t apply to you, Bessie. Those are women who already have enough burdens. This is just a chance for you to take control over your own destiny.”

She wasn’t his first recalcitrant patient. Dr. Stevens put the matter aside without losing his warm demeanor. Her proctor had more information about the program, he told Cora, and was available to talk about any concern.

She walked down the hospital corridor briskly, hungry for air. Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority. The directness of his questions and his subsequent elaborations threw her. To compare what had happened the night of the smokehouse with what passed between a man and his wife who were in love. Dr. Stevens’s speech made them the same. Her stomach twisted at the idea. Then there was the matter of mandatory, which sounded as if the women, these Hob women with different faces, had no say. Like they were property that the doctors could do with as they pleased. Mrs. Anderson suffered black moods. Did that make her unfit? Was her doctor offering her the same proposal? No.

As she turned these thoughts over, she found herself in front of the Andersons’ house. Her feet took over when her mind was elsewhere. Perhaps underneath, Cora was thinking about children. Maisie would be at school, but Raymond might be home. She had been too busy the last two weeks to make a proper goodbye.

The girl who opened the door looked at Cora with suspicion, even after she explained who she was.

“I thought her name was Bessie,” the girl said. She was skinny and small, but she held on to the door as if more than happy to throw her weight against it to keep out intruders. “You said you was Cora.”

Cora cursed the doctor’s distraction. She explained that her master named her Bessie, but in the quarter everyone called her Cora because she looked so much like her mother.

“Mrs. Anderson is not at home,” the girl said. “And the children are playing with they friends. You best come back when she’s home.” She shut the door.