Facebook Publication Date: 6/17/2022 9:06

I want you to do something for me.

I want you to jump to the very end of this article. I want you to see, and viscerally feel, what the two women, no longer young, each have, that they carry with them, and cradle and hold.

Only then do I want you to confront the article. Only then–because I want you to see and fully confront the sisters themselves. I want you to feel this, found earlier in the article:

“Some days I feel sad, but other times just tired,” says Minnie Lee, who explains that she and her sister struggle with hypertension and asthma, and that Mary Alice also suffers from seizures. “Not long ago, I was crying and felt like doing something to myself, like I wanted to go with my mom and dad…”

It is this fatigue, born of a life and identity snatched from her and from her sister, that haunts me. I feel it. I feel it hard.

I am almost 59 years old. The sisters you will confront are my contemporaries. Mary Alice is barely two years older than I; her sister Minnie Lee, hardly older than that. Put another way, one is about the age of my oldest sister; the other is about the age of my middle sister. This matters.

It matters because this: this is not a story of women who survived the heinous in antebellum, and then only marginal post chattel slavery days, nor even in the days we think of as ‘Jim Crow Times’.

No. What happened to these women, who, had I been with them in Alabama, would have played double dutch with me; who would have found rocks at the riverbank; who would have spent the odd (and rare) nickel at the corner store, deciding between a pickle and a pickled pig’s foot–or maybe a bag of sour balls or peppermints.

We would have watched each other’s arms swell and get red from the mosquitoes that buzzed; ten year old me would have polished our one pair of good shoes for church on Saturdays; polish and shine, polish and shine, then put them on the old newspaper to dry real good so the polish wouldn’t get on my white anklets as I put them on for Sunday morning, listening to Gladys and Curtis Mayfield and Issac Hayes.

It wasn’t 1837 or even 1937. It was *1973*.

I would have been so jealous of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice, because at 14 and 12, they would have been in heels with stockings, wobbling in the half inches (just like my middle sister did) they earned as they became young women.

Or maybe not.

Mary Alice and Minnie Lee didn’t just live modestly, like we did, in Arkansas, and later, in San Diego. Minnie and Mary were poor. Poor even by rural Alabama standards. Houseless, with parents who had more children than the County thought they could handle. Poor girls who got in the crossfire of a system that first did indeed care for them (with the ministrations of a black caseworker), until it deemed them unworthy. Unworthy for aid. And unworthy of bearing children.

Minnie Lee and Mary Alice were sterilized by the hands of the State, even as Stevie Wonder came out with his seminal album, ‘Talking Book’ even as the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land–even as (mostly) white women lobbied for, and won, bodily autonomy in Roe.

1973.

The year (mostly white) women reclaimed their bodies, Minnie and Mary’s bodies were emptied out.

As you will see as you do the deep work of reading and processing this article, you will find that Alabama was by no means the only state, and crucially for you as you may attempt to distance/deflect/minimize, not the only state both north *and* south of the Mason-Dixon line.

My own state, California, engaged in this practice.

Other states (not California, and certainly not Alabama) have begun the process of apology and restitution. Wholly inadequate; the average payout being tossed around is $25,000.

The price of babies never birthed. Of mamas never made. Of legacy (however modest by the world’s standards) denied.

We have been hearing more and more about the legacy of lynching and burning, mostly (but by no means totally) of young black men–and teenagers–and rightfully so.

But I invite you to consider that forced sterilizations are lynchings of a different kind. Lives thwarted, stunted, and precluded–regardless of the delivery system–are dreams deferred and denied.

So read. It will be hard.

Read it anyway.

Come back and comment and respond. All norms apply.

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