We were right.
When Stacey arrived the two immediately hit it off. Within two months of their meeting they were married. In the summer Stacey moved back to Jackson, found work driving a truck at the box factory, and they moved into the house on Everett. In the fall, when school began again, Dee continued her teaching at Great Faith School and stayed during the week with Mama, Papa, and Big Ma. By this time Stacey and Dee were expecting their first child. Marie was born, and with her arrival came a new generation. Rie was a beautiful baby and, as Big Ma liked to say, she was the best thing since peanut and butter. Rie was the first Logan grandchild and everybody fawned over her. Actually, with so much attention, she carried the risk of being spoiled, but I knew that would never happen. Both Dee and Stacey were too sensible for that, and their own upbringing pretty much guaranteed that Rie would be brought up the same.
Although Dee had fought Stacey about coming north, once in Toledo she had adapted to the move and did all she could to make their lives a good one. She too had wanted a house. Unable to qualify as a teacher in Ohio because she had not graduated from an accredited college, Dee had worked the evening shift at the tool plant making machinery parts for the war. With the end of the war, her job was terminated, but by then, she and Stacey had bought the house and, like Stacey, she envisioned that once they had a house, the family would follow.
I figured she would be right about that too.
I had known Dee less than five years and she was several years older than I, but she was now a sister to me, the sister I never had. I listened to her and trusted her opinion. She finished alternating the layers of sweet potatoes and dough and topped off the cobbler with the final uncut thick layer of dough. As she headed for the stove, I finished my dress.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I hated going to the doctor’s office. The few times I had gone, once for myself, the other times with Dee and the babies, the waiting room was full, with babies crying and restless children running about in play or pure frustration at the wait. The room was filled with working-class families, both colored and white. Sometimes there weren’t enough seats and those left standing leaned against the walls or stood outside until they were called. In the winter, the room was overheated, hot and stuffy, and the air smelled thick. In the summer, the heat was different, a stifling hot muggy heat that permeated the small building and seemed only to be made worse by the open screen door that allowed in the racket of the passing traffic. Appointments, if one had an appointment, were mainly in the evening when people had time after work to go see a doctor. Afternoons, though, were first come, first served. But whether one had an appointment or not, whether it was evening or not, the wait was long. It always was.
So far, on this day, we had been waiting for more than an hour and I was tired of waiting. “This is ridiculous,” I said.
Dee just looked at me and smiled. Finally our names were called by the white receptionist. All the medical personnel were white. We got up with the girls and followed the white nurse, uniformed in white, down a long hallway. Dee was shown into one room. I went into another. The nurse told me to take off my dress and shoes and handed me a gown. As she left the room, she said after I was undressed, I should sit on the examination table. I did as I was told, then waited for the doctor. I wasn’t sure which doctor I was seeing, for several worked in the office and they saw patients according to the order in which they had arrived. The doctor came in. I had not met with him before. He was a middle-aged man, beginning to gray. He nodded and spoke. “Cassie, is it?”
“Miss Logan,” I corrected. I was almost twenty-two now and expected to be treated as an adult, even by white folks in this northern town.
He just looked at me and sat down at the corner table. Opening the file, he perused it for a few seconds before looking at me again. “So, what’s the problem today?”
“I don’t have a problem,” I said. “I just need a physical exam for a job I’m applying for.”
“What kind of job?”
“Counselor at a girls’ camp.”
“Which camp?”
“One run by the union at Willys Overland.”
“You work there?”
“No. My brother does. I have the medical form you’ll need to fill out.” I opened my purse, pulled out a long envelope, and handed it to him.
As the doctor looked over the form, he said, “I didn’t know they were hiring Negroes for these positions.”
I stiffened, but said nothing.
But then he went on. “As I understand it, girls that go to that camp are white.”
This time I spoke up. “As I understand it, the camps are open to the children of anyone who belongs to the union. My brother belongs to the union and if his children were old enough, the camps would include them too.”
The doctor just looked at me, then put down the form and came toward me. “Well, let’s get started.”
I glanced back at the door. “Where’s the nurse?”
“We don’t need the nurse for this.”
The one other time I had come to see a doctor, a nurse had been in the room, but I didn’t point this out as the doctor came over and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm. He held my arm against his body as he took my blood pressure. “Don’t move,” he instructed. He noted the pressure then took off the cuff.
“How is it?” I said.
“Fine.”
“I mean, what was the reading?”
“I told you it was fine.”
“Well, that’s not telling me what it was.”
“One twenty over eighty,” he said, sounding a bit exasperated. “Mean something to you?”
“Yes,” I said, and looked straight at him. He was talking down to me and I didn’t like it. “It’s perfect, right where it’s supposed to be.” I had read about blood pressure in a class I had taken. I didn’t tell him that. He chose to be superior, and it gave me satisfaction that in this particular thing, I knew the same as he.
His sandy eyes stared at me, but he said nothing. He went on with the exam. He checked my eyes, my ears, my neck, then placed a cold stethoscope inside my gown and listened to my heartbeat. He did the same with my back and asked me to cough twice. After that, he struck my knees with a small rubber hammer and commented that my reflexes were fine. I didn’t say anything. Throughout the exam, he had said little to me. But now he said, “All right, lie down on your back, scoot toward the end of the table, and put your feet in the stirrups. I assume the nurse told you to take off your underwear.”
“What?”
He opened a drawer and pulled out rubber gloves. “I need to give you a pelvic exam.”