Counting Backwards

12

Carrie

October 1924

It wasn’t but a couple of weeks after my meeting with Dr. Preston that I got summoned back to his office. When I arrived, another fellow was already with him, an older man with a shiny bald head and a crisp suit. They were standing close together in the back of the room, each holding a glass filled with amber-colored liquid.

“Ah, Carrie.”

Dr. Preston greeted me with a broad smile, like he and I was old friends. “Come and have a seat.”

He motioned me toward the sofa as he and the other man came closer, each taking seats in the armchairs across from me.

“This here,”

Dr. Preston said, looking toward his friend, “is Mr. Sterling Whitmore. He’s going to be your lawyer.”

A lawyer! Joy overtook me and I smiled big. Now that they’d got me a lawyer, I figured they were getting me out after all, that there was just procedures we needed to do or some such.

Dr. Preston faced Mr. Whitmore. “As you can see, the girl is quite simple. So many characteristics of a textbook imbecile.”

He spoke those unkind words as though I weren’t even in the room, and it wiped the grin off my face real fast. I worried I’d misunderstood why they wanted to see me.

“I’m sorry, sir,”

I said to Dr. Preston, “but what exactly are you planning for me that would render me needing a lawyer for myself?”

The two men shared a small smile before Dr. Preston looked toward me again.

“Well, you’re the lucky girl we’ve chosen to receive a very wonderful procedure.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I kept silent, waiting for him to explain.

“Yes, yes,”

the other fellow said. “I certainly do see it. Very limited.”

“You see,”

Dr. Preston went on, “medicine is a wonderful field, and we have discovered a way to make your life easier now, and for your whole future. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Carrie?”

“W-well . . . well, yes, I suppose,”

I stammered as I tried to figure out what-all was going on.

“Girls like you, Carrie, the hardworking kind, when they have only a little schooling and scant means and, well, tendencies like yours . . .”

He again shared a look with his friend. I knew he was thinking about my pregnancy, suspecting that I was a promiscuous girl. I didn’t defend myself like maybe I should have. The business with Clarence was my private story that I wasn’t wanting to tell. He didn’t wait for me to speak anyhow, but just kept talking at me.

“You wouldn’t want to be saddled with more responsibilities, obligations a girl like you could hardly satisfy,”

he said. “Especially if you were to end up with one child after another, after another, after another. Can you imagine the hardship on a person like yourself?”

“I’m not so sure, sir,”

I answered, thinking that a home full of babies would be a blessing for a girl as lonely as me. It’d be quite the opposite of hardship in my opinion, but I didn’t think the man really wanted to hear my thoughts on the matter.

“Well, we can save you from all that, Carrie. With a very simple procedure, we can make it so you never have to worry about conceiving another child, not ever again.”

“No more children?”

I couldn’t keep quiet about that. “That’s not something I want at all. No, thank you.”

I stood from my chair, ready to leave. I wasn’t going to let them do any such thing to me.

“We don’t mean to do it this instant.”

Dr. Preston laughed and turned to Mr. Whitmore. “Look at her, champing at the bit.”

He turned his attention back to me. “No, not right now, Carrie. You see, there are rules about these things. We need special permission from the government of this state, so as we don’t get in trouble. Mr. Whitmore here, that’s how he’s going to help.”

“But I don’t want the procedure,”

I said. “I do want more babies one day.”

“Come now, Carrie,”

Dr. Preston said. “A girl like you can’t hardly know her own mind. How would you take care of those children you’re imagining for yourself? What money do you have to feed and clothe them? To educate them and ensure they don’t grow into socially inadequate adults? Criminals, loose women, and such?”

He looked at Mr. Whitmore, who nodded back in agreement. “We’ve come to understand that feeblemindedness like yours is hereditary. That means it passes from a mother to a child, you see. Like it did from your mother to you. And then you’d pass it to your child, and so on. Most likely, any babies you bore would end up back in this very institution, wards of the state just like you. Even more members of the Buck family line would be separating the good, taxpaying citizens of Virginia from their hard-earned money. But with a simple procedure that takes only a few minutes, we can save everybody from all that trouble.”

“I know my mind, and I don’t want your procedure!”

I was hollering now. There weren’t nothing wrong with my mama nor with me, and I didn’t like all the mean words he was saying. I looked back toward the door, feeling myself in danger in that very moment and hoping again for some way to escape that god-awful facility. Dr. Preston followed my eyes.

“There’s nowhere else for you to go, Carrie. You should be grateful to be here. Getting free food, free medical care. And now that we’ve chosen you as the test case, you’ll receive the sterilization procedure for free as well.”

He said it like I’d won some sort of prize.

“I don’t want any procedure, and I won’t do it. You’ll see. I won’t!”

“Well, then, Miss Carrie”—Mr. Preston sounded mad now—“I suppose it’s a good thing you have this lawyer here to try to stop me.”

“I . . . I don’t understand,”

I said, looking from one man to the other.

“No,”

Dr. Preston said, “of course you don’t, which is just the point I’ve been making. But I will try to be very clear. You see, we here at the Colony, we’d like to offer these sterilization operations to a certain category of girls and women, those like yourself who simply shouldn’t be reproducing. There’s a wonderful new law in Virginia that should allow us to do as we please, but until a court of law has the chance to review this new law, certain rules are a bit unclear. If we take your case to court, letting a judge uphold the new law precisely as it’s written, then we’ll get our answers. After that, we’ll be able to proceed with these operations at a breakneck pace, I wager. We just want to do what’s best for the inmates, you understand, and society as a whole. Just think of it.”

He turned to Mr. Whitmore again. “With enough time, we could cleanse society of mental defectives entirely.”

He stood then and rang a bell so the nurse would come fetch me and return me to my room. Dr. Preston was right about one thing: I didn’t understand what he’d said to me, not at all. How could these men think anyone would benefit from what they described? How had I ended up in a place of such great danger? The only thing that eventually became clear to me was that I had played right into their despicable hands.