The few solitary moments we parents experience are cherished. On rare mornings I sit alone at the kitchen table using a repurposed, giraffe shaped kiddie knife to stir unhealthy amounts of cream and sugar into my coffee. Pure heaven. Free to scroll through the Apple News on my smartphone peering through readers that have recently become necessary to view all things near. (Yes, I gave up and bought the $20 reading glasses when I realized my arms were no longer long enough to bring that tiny screen into focus…the final act in my acceptance of middle age.)
The peace is always short-lived, however. Its eventual end signaled by a creaking floorboard above. Another creature is stirring and it’s not the giraffe.
The other morning while thumbing past news of Trump’s impeachment, my eyes landed on a most inspiring image. Posed beneath the eaves of a well-preserved slave cabin stood a group of Tulane University medical students, each clad in white, each black. The caption below the image reads: “We truly are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Nothing could be truer.
I spent the last two years researching, creating and writing a curriculum aimed at teaching public school students about the institution of slavery while maintaining the humanity of those enslaved. I’ve poured over countless stories of heart-wrenching horror and heartwarming heroism; my emotions have run the gamut. Nikole Hannah-Jones describes the emotional spectrum felt by those enslaved ancestors best in her 1619 podcast, “...fear...turned to despair, and the despair to resignation and the resignation gave way, finally, to resolve.” For those who understand the plight of Africans in America, from enslavement to Jim Crow to present-day injustice, those Tulane University medical students are a source of great pride bringing broad smiles to so many strangers who know them so well.
I thought my understanding of the struggle was deep. I mean, I’m a history teacher. Surely by now, I’ve waded through most of the worst. But my research efforts over the past two summers have threatened to drown me beneath a tidal wave of atrocities previously unknown to me. The documented instances of cruelty and endurance seem unending.
But not all there is to know has been written.
The photo of those Tulane University medical students brought to the surface a long-buried childhood memory, “Beware of the Gown Men.”
As a kid, post-church Sundays followed the same basic format: Mom put the finishing touches on the bearnaise sauce with one hand, pulled rolls out of the oven with the other while puzzling over something the crockpot timer had done... or hadn’t. Dad reclined in his bedroom rocker resting his voice, worn from another spirited sermon. This “rest” somehow included chatting incessantly on the phone. He laughed, bantered and threw his baritone voice over an old western rerun that blared in the background. Meanwhile, I sat within the deep recesses of my room staring past an open book, quietly marveling at the imprints left on my calves by ribbed dress socks. If that failed to hold my attention, there was always a big brother or sister to annoy. At some point I overheard my father say, “Do I remember the Gown Men? Man please, no question!” The voice on the other end became animated. “That’s right,” my father agreed, “Right, right...Tulane University medical students. You ain’t lying, they’d take us away in a heartbeat! My mother used to say, ‘Beware of the Gown Men!’”
Take us away? Beware? Gown Men? Suddenly the ribbed markings on my calves weren’t so impressive. As soon as my father hung up the phone, I rushed down to the hall. This I had to hear.
“Dad!” I said, “Who are the Gown Men?” My father, quite matter-of-factly, spoke of men dressed in long white medical smocks, or gowns, who canvassed dark New Orleans streets hunting black people. He went on to explain that his mother and father, like many parents in 1940s New Orleans, gave strict warnings about these nighttime thieves of human flesh, “When you’re out, watch for those Gown Men! And don’t be alone...” Cutting through the shadows in noiseless electric motored vans, the Gown Men were said to creep up on unsuspecting African Americans, nab them, whisk them to some poorly lit examining room and commence sinister medical experiments.
My imagination ran wild; images of the frightful Plague Doctor danced in my head. I’m sure the Plague Doctors had nothing on this. Rumor had it that the Gown Men were white students from New Orleans area medical schools, among them Tulane University. Once, my father recalled a childhood visit to New Orleans’ Touro Hospital. While there he asked the doctor if he too had heard of these incidents. The doctor answered simply, “Yes. Yes, I have.”
My mind was blown.
Hospitals experimenting on people? Abducting them under the cloak of night? I thought this had to be a case of an urban Boogey Man; parents telling their children fake stories to safeguard them from the real terrors of life in the Jim Crow South. I decided that must be it. Cased closed. Time to move on. No nightmares for this kid.
But as the years went by, I found that medical procedures involving unwilling participants and unwilling black participants, in particular, were no rarity in the United States. Most famously there was the Tuskegee Experiment, a 40-year “study” waged against black men from the 1930s to the 1970s. Eugenics programs aimed at the black, as well as other communities. Mid-19th-century experimental procedures performed by Dr. J. Marion Sims on enslaved women he rented from nearby plantation owners. Certainly, many more examples exist. Suddenly, the stories of abduction and the Gown Men didn’t seem so far-fetched. The Boogey Man is real.
The image of those proud future African American doctors posing in front of the slave cabin went viral. They “truly are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” But those 15 medical students could also be beyond the wildest dreams of people more near to us, too recent to be considered ancestors.
Go rewrite history for the histories not written!
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