Necessary Lies (8 page)

“Six people lived in that tiny house?” I asked. Maybe it would look bigger when we got up close to it. Right now, it looked smaller than the dining room in my new house.

“Right, but Lita won’t be having any more, thank goodness. I was able to get her into the Eugenics Program after she gave birth to the last one, though it wasn’t easy.” She looked at me. “You probably don’t know what that is, do you,” she said.

The only time I’d heard the word “eugenics,” it had to do with Nazi Germany, and I couldn’t imagine that’s what she was talking about.

“Not really,” I said. “It makes me think of Hitler.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She laughed. “Get that out of your mind right now. We have a Eugenics Board we can petition to get certain of our clients sterilized. It’s been a godsend to many of them and Lita Jordan’s a good example, but it was rough going, getting the board to okay her petition.”

“Was this something she wanted?”

“Heavens, yes. She was tired of having babies—I think she thought she was finished and then another one came along and surprised her a few years ago. She heard about the program from a friend at her church and pleaded with me to be sterilized.”

“Then why was it hard to get them to okay it?”

“She didn’t meet the qualifications. She needed to meet one of three criteria. Mental retardation, for one. She’d have to score low enough on the IQ test to be considered feebleminded. Do you know anything about IQ testing? What that score would be?”

I tried to remember the little I’d learned about intelligence tests in my psychology classes. “Seventy?” I said.

“That’s right. You have to score below seventy to be considered feebleminded. And she scored one fifteen. A hundred and fifteen! Most of the poor folks out here barely test in the normal range, but that woman could run this farm. She graduated from the colored high school in Ridley, which is no small feat given the environment she grew up in.”

“Oh, she’s colored.” I’d been picturing a white family. I had to alter the mental image I’d had in my mind of Lita Jordan and her children.

“Yes, colored. And definitely promiscuous. Five kids and no father in the home? Promiscuous she is, but on its own, that’s not enough reason for her to be sterilized, although there are some social workers who’ve managed to make that case.” She looked out the window away from the Jordans’ house and appeared momentarily lost in thought.

“So,” I prodded, “mental retardation is a yes. Promiscuity’s a no.”

“Well, if the case can be made that a promiscuous woman is unable to manage the children she has, then the board would consider it, but Lita Jordan’s children have never been in trouble and Davison Gardiner says she’s a sterling example of motherhood. So my hands were tied there. Mental illness and epilepsy are the other two reasons the board will agree to a sterilization, by the way, and she was neither mentally ill nor epileptic.”

“What about birth control?” I thought of my pills and how lucky I’d been to get them.

“I had the public health nurse, Ann Laing, bring her whatever she could—condoms and diaphragms and whatever, but she still got pregnant with the littlest boy, Rodney. If we ever get access to the new birth control pill, we’ll be in hog heaven, except the people out here who need it most don’t have the discipline to take a pill on a regular schedule.”

“So how were you able to get the Eugenics Board to say yes?”

“Ah. I finally remembered the ‘one hundred and twenty’ rule. You multiply her age, which was then thirty-three, by the number of children she has and if the result is more than one hundred twenty, she can be sterilized. Five times thirty-three and there you have it. I petitioned the board and she had a tubal ligation—that’s where they cut the fallopian tubes—after Rodney was born. She was one grateful woman, I can tell you.”

I looked toward the long clotheslines. I was too far away to tell what was hanging from them, but I could imagine all the work this Lita Jordan had to do with a house full of boys. “Shouldn’t the father … fathers be helping out? Financially, I mean?”

“Jane,” she said, “look at that field.”

I did, and I suddenly saw the workers out there in a new light. They weren’t just faceless field laborers—they were men who wanted a bed and a woman at the end of the day. And Mrs. Jordan’s little house butted right up against the edge of the field where they worked.

“It could be one of a hundred,” Charlotte said. “Or more likely five of a hundred. Life is very bleak for lots of folks out here, and you can’t blame them for taking comfort where they can find it.” Her tone was sympathetic. “Sometimes it’s in a bed. Other times in a bottle. Whatever gives them momentary pleasure, because the future doesn’t hold much promise.”

I nodded, fanning my face with my hand and trying not to look too obvious about it. I was perspiring, but Charlotte’s flawless skin was still powder dry.

“So.” She smiled. “You’ll discover we’ve got a lot of mothers in our caseload, and precious few fathers. Immaculate conceptions happening all over the place.”

I laughed.

“Always check for a man living in the house,” she said. “I don’t worry about it with Lita that much, but some women hide the fact that they’ve got a man living with them to keep the welfare checks coming in.”

I wondered how you checked for something like that. “So what do you do for these families?” I asked. “What do
we
do?”

“Plenty! We figure out how much aid they get and evaluate the family for problems that need addressing. Avery—that little Jordan boy with the vision problem—well, he’s not so little anymore.” She laughed. “He’s fifteen, but looks older. I drive him to the itinerant Braille teacher in Ridley every week unless someone from their church can take him, so you’ll be taking over that responsibility.”

I pictured myself driving a blind teenaged boy. What would I talk to him about?

“How do you get people to talk to you?” I thought of the intimate conversations Charlotte must have had with Lita Jordan to get her to talk about birth control.

“You become a good listener.”

“But … do they just automatically start talking about their personal things?”

“You feed back what they say. They say they feel overwhelmed, you say ‘you feel overwhelmed?’ And you’ll be surprised how that opens the spigot.”

“Really?” It sounded silly, but I figured she knew better than me what worked and what didn’t.

“Really,” she said. “I’ll give you some books.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful.”

“If you’d had social-work training you’d have learned interviewing skills, but Fred and I are the only degreed social workers in the department. Gayle has a bachelor’s in psychology, so that certainly helps, but Paula—”

“A degree in English,” I said. “She told me.”

Charlotte laughed. “However,” she said, “Paula’s been a caseworker now for six years, so she certainly knows the ropes. And she certainly knows how to manipulate them.”

“Manipulate them?”

She brushed away my question. “So,” she said, turning the key in the ignition and pressing lightly on the gas, “this week you just observe and next week you can take a more active role with me supervising. It will work out.”

I was relieved to have air blowing into the car once more. We skirted the tobacco field and drove up the dirt lane till we reached the dilapidated house. It looked even smaller close-up. We parked on the hard-packed dirt that was the front yard. “In the office, I’m Charlotte and you’re Jane,” Charlotte said. “When we’re in the field, though, I’m Mrs. Werkman and you are Mrs. Mackie.”

“Forrester now.”

“Yes. Forrester.”

As we got out of the car, a woman appeared in the open doorway of the house.

“Hello, Mrs. Jordan!” Charlotte called, her voice cheerful.

“Hey, Miz Werkman. Who’s this you got with you?” She was holding one hand above her eyes to block the sun and eyeing me up and down. A little boy stood at her side, hanging on to her dress.

“This is Mrs. Forrester,” Charlotte said. “She’s going to be taking my place. I’m moving into an administrative position.”

“You don’t say.” Mrs. Jordan frowned, and I could tell she was none too happy about the change.

“Can we come in for a chat?” Charlotte asked. Gayle had told me it was important to see inside the house. She said she recently found a fancy television and new furniture in a client’s living room and she cut off that family’s welfare check.

“I ain’t got nothin’ to offer you,” Mrs. Jordan said, adjusting the blue kerchief that covered her hair, “but you’re welcome to come in.”

She stepped aside while Charlotte and I walked through the doorway. I was carrying my new briefcase, which now contained both my notepad and the manual Charlotte had given me. I loved feeling the weight of it in my hand.

Charlotte bent down to greet the little boy. “Hello, Rodney,” she said. “I think you’ve grown two inches in the last two weeks.”

“Ain’t that true,” Mrs. Jordan said. “All my boys is like that. Growing too big too fast.”

I could see the whole house from inside the front door. We stood in a small, dark living room. Beyond that, I could see a kitchen, a pot of something savory on the two-burner stove. Whatever was in that pot made my mouth water. I saw the edge of a table and the corner of a cot. Someone slept in the kitchen. Through an open door on my right, I saw a cast-iron bed. I couldn’t imagine how five children and their mother ever fit into a house the size of a postage stamp. No wonder she sent one of them away.

“I was afraid you’d be at the barn and we’d miss you,” Charlotte said, as we followed Mrs. Jordan and the little boy into the kitchen.

“Getting dinner ready for the boys,” she said.

We sat down at the table that took up half the room and I got a good look at Mrs. Jordan. A bit of her coarse black hair poked out of the dusty kerchief, and her dark eyes slanted up at the outer corners as though she had Oriental blood. Those eyes gave her a pretty, exotic look.

I tried to be observant and study everything I could see. The cot was made up with sheets that hung to the floor. Rodney climbed onto it and bounced up and down until his mother grabbed his arm and told him to go outside. There was a hand pump above the sink. No faucet. I’d never seen that before. A narrow icebox stood next to the back door. Open shelves stretched across the wall above the counter, sagging beneath the weight of Mason jars filled with vegetables and tomatoes.

“We have some clothes for the boys in the car,” Charlotte said. Then to me, “Don’t let me forget them.”

“That’s good,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Eli, he need them most. The others get the hand-me-downs, but Eli’s growin’ so fast and he ain’t got much that fits no more. Davison … Mr. Gardiner … give him some of his old overalls.”

Charlotte turned to me. “Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Gardiner have known each other since they were children.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering how that came to be.

“What Eli really needs is shoes. His shoes is so small we had to cut room for his toes.”

“Oh my.” Charlotte pulled her notepad from her briefcase. She set it on the table and wrote something on it. I assumed she was writing “get shoes for Eli.” I wondered if I should pull out my own notepad. The Jordans would be my clients, after all. I loved the sound of those words. “My clients.” It filled me with a sense of responsibility that I welcomed. “What else do they need?” Charlotte asked.

Mrs. Jordan rattled off a few things, mostly clothes and linens and asthma medicine for Avery, the partly blind boy. Mrs. Jordan seemed to like and trust Charlotte. It was like watching two old friends chatting together. There was something about Charlotte’s way of talking that put people at ease. Mrs. Jordan kept cutting her eyes at me like she wasn’t too sure about me, though, and I sat there with a half smile plastered on my face, wondering if I could ever master Charlotte’s easygoing, self-confident style.

Rodney ran into the kitchen. Around his body, he wore an old, falling-apart cardboard carton with headlights painted on it, and he ran from room to room saying, “Vroom, vroom!” I laughed, he was so cute. He barreled out the back door knocking a hole in the flimsy screen with a corner of his box, but it was one hole of many.

“We could use us a new screen door,” Mrs. Jordan said, her voice tinged with irony, and we all laughed.

Rodney banged into the house again. The box was gone and now he carried a tree branch twice his size.

“Rodney, take that thing outside!” Mrs. Jordan said. “You don’t bring no trees in my house.”

Rodney stood still in the middle of the kitchen, clutching the branch in his hand as though trying to make up his mind whether to obey or not. He looked at Charlotte, then me, as though we could help him out.

“You hear me?” Mrs. Jordan said. “Get that nasty thing out my house.”

He ran through the door again, and Mrs. Jordan rolled her eyes at us, but she was smiling. “I’m glad he’s my last, but he’s the best,” she said. “He keeps us laughing.”

Rodney popped back into the room without the branch.

“Rodney,” Charlotte said. “Come over here, angel.”

He marched right up to her and put his hands on her knees. Charlotte pulled a lollipop from her purse. “You sure are getting to be a big boy,” she said.

He smiled, little white teeth showing as he reached for the candy. “I want that!”

“You so rude!” His mother laughed and swatted his arm. “How you ask?”

He looked at her like he had no idea what she was talking about.

“What’s the word?” she asked.

“Please?”

“That’s better.”

But Charlotte still held the candy out of reach. “What color is this lollipop?” she asked him.

“Green,” he said.

“What shape is it?” Charlotte asked. He looked perplexed.

“Is it a square or a circle?”

“Round,” he said.

“That’s right. A round circle. You’re a smart boy.” She unwrapped the lollipop and handed it to him.

“He gonna be the smartest of them all,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Too smart for his own good. He’s my little travelin’ man.” She hugged him close to her, though he only had eyes for the lollipop.