What I’m Working On
For years, I’ve been compiling information about a housing development in Polk County called Indian Lake Estates. When we first moved here, we looked at a house there, which was almost perfect. Ultimately, we didn’t get it, but this development was started in the 1960s and is still somehow incomplete. Once I found out the developer who created ILE had committed suicide, I was hooked.
So I’ve been spending time in newspaper archives when I get a chance and sometimes, I get sidetracked, which is probably a good part of the reason why this idea is taking so long to solidify into a story. But anyway, take a look at this page from a 1961 issue of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware:
First of all, hug your nearest copy editor if you still read newspapers because you’ll never again see a page as busy as this one. Where to start?
2. The wordplay is just there for the taking in that Grabs centerpiece. What, they didn’t have puns back then? They didn’t have “19th kid up for Grabs” back then?! Come on!
3. Good to see our struggle with proper mask wearing goes back decades, as Mr. Grabs demonstrates. There’s a joke in there about him, masks, and contraception in there, but I’m not making it.
4. Part of what’s fun about reading old newspapers is realizing how little has actually changed. Take a look at the story in the second and third columns at the bottom of the page, the “Brood Eager to Blast Off” story. It suggests that commercial space travel could be available by 1975-1980. Well, we’re close. The world’s richest men are getting ready to gallavant around space. And this round trip from the Earth to the moon has got me stumped, I have to say. Were we going to make the moon a vacation resort?
5. The idea that we wanted to go to space and couldn’t figure out why discriminating against black people here on Earth is wrong would be funny if it weren’t so very American. The article about the restaurant policy is fascinating. OK, so the federal government was trying to convince Maryland restaurant owners to serve black people because it made America look bad overseas. The response from these owners, some of them, was to leave the room because they didn’t want to lose their white customers by being inclusive. Even the pressure from the government resulted only in the owners forming an exploratory committee into the restaurant policy. They were going to look into the racism, folks. The closing quote on that story is something else, too: “If you don’t want to have in 10 years … a Red flag flying over the Capitol, I think that we have to start wondering what this uncommitted world is thinking.” Mr. Sanjuan, sir!
What I’m Reading
You ever find yourself following someone on Twitter because their tweets are funny, but you don’t know anything about them?
Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I use social media, and part of that consideration involves the idea of maybe actively following someone from Twitter and not just “following” them. That’s why I finally cracked open “Thick and Other Essays” by Tressie McMillan Cottom.
All I knew about her previously was that she was an academic, an author and co-podcaster with Roxane Gay, and through that association, I thought I understood what I’d be getting in this book. It really wasn’t what I expected at all. Her writing combines research, personal essay and cultural critiques in a way I haven’t seen before and the results can make you laugh, make you point at the book like this
and make you angry.
The angriest I’ve ever been reading a book, in fact, was in reading “Thick.” I don’t think I’ve ever had to put a book down before and take a minute before this book, specifically the essay Dying to Be Competent. McMillan Cottom recounts her miscarriage and how she had tried to advocate for herself, tell the staff that there was something wrong. Once, she was told she wouldn’t get pain medication if she weren’t quiet. This might have been the first time I put the book down. Then, after her daughter dies, a nurse told her that they couldn’t have done anything more because she didn’t tell them she was in labor.
“Like millions of women of color, especially black women, I was churned through a healthcare machine that neglected and ignored me until I was incompetent,” she writes. Statistically, black women are dying either during or after childbirth at rates that compare to women in poorer countries, all because their humanity isn’t honored, even in what is supposed to be the best moment of their lives.
But her experience was familiar. I had two babies at the same hospital and each birth showed what I thought was merely an incompetent health care system. Now, it feels If women like McMillan Cottom, an academic, or one like Serena Williams, a global celebrity, can’t get the maternal treatment they deserve, what about us?
What about me? My daughter was about a week late and she went from zero to get-me-out-this-womb in about 36 seconds. It was after 2 a.m. when I got to the hospital, partly because I had been afraid to move because any slight shift caused a wave of pain. I looked like a mess — dressed in my husband’s oversized, non-matching sweats that he had to apply v-e-r-y slowly and my hair, I don’t even know. Maybe I looked strung out. I don’t know. Anyway, she arrived shortly after I got there and she was fine. The next morning, the pediatrician doing rounds happened to be my regular one. He checked out my chart and chuckled. “What, are you smoking weed or something?” I didn’t get the joke. It turned out my daughter’s urine had been screened for drugs. No one could answer for this while I was in the hospital and at one point, they’d even denied this had happened. My pediatrician, to his credit, did not go along with that narrative. And the hospital shouldn’t have either, by the way. One look at my records would have shown I’d been under a doctor’s care for the entire pregnancy.
If I had been a “normal” black woman, they would have ignored my repeated requests for more information about the drug screening. I know this because that is what they did for weeks. Until I let them know that I was also a columnist for the local newspaper and planning to write about my treatment at their hospital. You can’t just be a new black mom looking out for you and your baby. You have to pull a Serena “Do You Know Who I Am” Williams card to get hospitals to take you seriously. And when I pulled mine, suddenly I was provided with my medical records, where I did indeed see that a drug screen had been ordered. I demanded a meeting with the medical staff and an explanation. I got the meeting, but no real explanation. When I asked point black if I was profiled that night, they fell all over themselves in denial. One of the women acted shocked and almost insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.
The thing is, as McMillan Cottom notes, is that these kinds of things don’t happen to everyone. They happen to black women. When my column published, I got a voicemail from a reader who said only, “I hope you know that happened to you because you were black.”
One of her other essays, “Girl 6,” was about her desire to see a black woman as an op-ed writer for a newspaper of record. I think the thing about McMillan Cottom’s work is that I had thought that many of my experiences were exclusive to me, and she demonstrates how untrue that is in her work. In this essay is a nod to black women, like herself, who research and write about race, but never really get to do that work full-time. It took me back to my days as a columnist in Pittsburgh. My full-time job was as editor for three community newspapers and I was given the chance to try out doing a column. Five years, billboards around the city, and a few local, state and national awards and citations later, I asked if I could do the column full-time. The answer was no — they needed me in my first-shift job as editor, as McMillan Cottom would put it. Even now, I squeeze in the type of writing I want to do behind my full-time job and parenting responsibilities. As does a brilliant mind like McMillan Cottom. Me, I get. Tressie?! This book is brilliant and everyone should read it. No skips on these essays.