Counting Backwards

16

Carrie

October 1927

I’d been trapped deep inside the walls of the Colony for three whole entire years. Just a few months earlier, I’d had my twenty-first birthday, but all I got to show for it was an extra pinwheel cookie after supper that night. During my time inside, I’d gotten more familiar with the place, working different jobs and even getting friendly with some of the other patients. The first year, I’d been in the laundry, scrubbing soiled linens. Then at the start of my second year, they moved me to the cafeteria on account of my good behavior. I’d been working breakfast and lunch ever since. Folks around the Colony didn’t mind that I liked to keep quiet a lot of the time. It wasn’t as if they had so many choices when it came to keeping company anyhow. Some of the patients were in a truly bad way, never uttering a word, staring out the windows at nothing for all eternity. Those of us who were more alert, we kind of stuck together. When work shifts were over, we idled with each other in the little recreation room. There we could pass the minutes squabbling over who’d get the next turn with the marbles and such.

One Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting with Ma and a pretty lady named Lindy, the three of us arranging dominoes on a square game table. Lindy’d only been at the Colony a month, but with the way time moved inside, it felt like I’d known her forever. Meanwhile, Ma was having one of her clearheaded days, which had been getting fewer and fewer.

“Put one here,”

Ma said, pointing to a spot I’d missed.

I was doing just as she said, taking care not to jostle the others, when that young nurse, Miss Bradshaw, brought in the day’s mail. Only a handful of us ever received correspondence. Gerty Sims, who had nine children on the outside, received a note from her oldest daughter from time to time, and Rosalie Barlow, who’d been brought into the Colony because of her addiction to alcohol, got mail near every week, but she would never tell us who-all was sending it to her.

“A letter from your fella,”

Nurse Bradshaw said, dropping an envelope on the table and nearly toppling our dominoes.

“Ooo-eee! From your fella!”

Lindy hollered, teasing me.

“He’s not my fella,”

I said, just like I did every time a letter from Billy arrived. When I’d first come to the Colony, Billy sent me a letter every month. As the months dragged on though, the letters started coming slower, maybe every eight weeks when I was lucky. The other women heckled me every time, saying Billy and I were sweet on each other. I never paid it mind, but for some reason that day, I found myself wondering if Billy hadn’t met another girl yet. I didn’t like the way it made me feel inside to think of that. There was a tightening in my belly as I held on to that envelope and wondered again if I’d made a mistake not marrying him when he’d asked. Doing so would have saved me from being trapped where I was. That much I knew for sure.

“Well, go on,”

Ma said. I guess she wanted the entertainment of news from the outside too.

Opening the envelope with my short fingernail, I expected to find much the same as usual in his letter, updates on his brothers and some news about his construction job. I wanted to hear tidings about my baby, Vivian, but he never offered any tidbits having to do with her. Before I got the letter out of its jacket, a newspaper clipping fell into my lap. Unfolding it, I saw the words up top said, “Supreme Court Votes to Uphold Virginia Sterilization Law.”

It had been near three years since they’d taken me to that courthouse, and I’d not heard anything about it since. I thought, after a time, that the matter had been put to the side or forgotten, and I’d been relieved, allowing myself to forget it too. But now that I saw the news Billy sent, my heart started to hammer once again.

I read through the article quickly, and I was comforted to see that it didn’t say anything about me. It talked instead about that man Laderdale, who, at the trial, had more to say than anyone else. I remembered how he’d compared wanton women to inferior cattle that could be bred out from the herd. I’d been shocked by it at the time, but my outrage had long since faded, the way things do when you get further and further away from them. But as I held the article all those years later, I worried that someone like the horrid Mr. Laderdale might be coming back for me.

Reading on, I learned that the Supreme Court of the United States, which I knew to be the most important court in all the country, had said Virginia’s sterilization law was just fine. The article reported that a great humanitarian by the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes had written the decision for the court. It spoke of his legal arguments, much of which was too confusing to make heads or tails of. I skipped forward to see if there was any mention of the Colony. As my eyes moved down the paper, one sentence about what Mr. Holmes had written did jump out at me.

“It is better for all the world,”

the court’s opinion said, “if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

A weight settled in my stomach as I remembered afresh the things said about me when they brought me to the Amherst County courthouse. Though I’d hoped that nonsense had been forgotten, the article in my hand said different.

The newspaper praised the court’s decision as being broad-minded and called anyone opposing it a sentimentalist. Then it talked more about that man Laderdale and how his model sterilization law was fit to be adopted in states all throughout the country. Laderdale, they said, was a hero who would be responsible for reforming the entire human race. They called him progressive and said he worked tirelessly to educate other scientists. He had support from our country’s richest families, like the Carnegies and Rockefellers, and others I’d never heard of, and he was getting money from all of them to do more research. His work was keeping immigrants out of the country and preserving the high quality of the American population.

The author of the article seemed to like the idea of sterilization, explaining that Mr. Laderdale found a way to measure the size of heads and arms to know who should be considered “unfit.”

He also figured out how to arrange qualities of the feebleminded into “pedigree charts,”

which the author said was one of the best pieces of support for the new law. The reporter said medical experts could use the charts to stop people with bad traits from making babies and passing on whatever it was the scientists didn’t like.

I started to read the article over again from the top so I could make better sense of it, but Ma interrupted me.

“Well,”

she said, “we’re waiting. What’s your friend got to say for himself?”

Only then did I remember to check for a note from Billy. It was there inside the envelope, in his neat, tight cursive. My hand shook as I unfolded the paper.

Dear Carrie,

I’ve been holding on to this article for many weeks, unsure whether to send it to you. But knowing as I do what happened at the county courthouse soon after you went away, I thought this was something you should see. I hope it doesn’t frighten you unnecessarily, since by now, everyone in that awful place must know that you are not of feeble mind. Even so, I decided you should read it so you can continue to take great care.

Always your friend,

Billy

When I finished reading the letter aloud, Ma asked me to read out the article too.

“He’s right,”

Ma said. “They know you here now. You got nothing to worry yourself about.”

It took only three days for me to learn how very wrong she was. Thirty minutes before I was meant to start the breakfast shift, Nurse Bradshaw arrived at the door of our dormitory with two large orderlies behind her.

When she called out, “Carrie Buck!”

from the entry, the other ladies in our shared room started hooting the way they always did when a girl was about to get punished for breaking one rule or another.

I knew why they’d come for me though, and it was for a lot worse than a scolding.

I looked all around me for another way out, as if I didn’t already know that the windows were barred.

The nurse called for me again, now sounding angry. “Miss Buck!”

I sat down on the scratchy blanket atop my cot, searching my brain and calling on God to help me think of what to do.

“You better go, Carrie,”

Gerty called from her bed. “You’re just making it worse.”

But nothing was worse than what they wanted to do to me.