Rebels in White Gloves (33 page)

Like Janet’s father, it was Calvin who played the more tenderhearted role in his son’s life. Separated from Grant for most of his elementary school years, Calvin “missed the mundane things I got to do with Grant,” says Janet, “like driving the soccer team to Annapolis or listening to slide-trombone lessons. That made it harder for him later, when Grant left the nest. His apron strings were stronger.” Janet, who felt close to her son “no matter where we each were in the world,” found it easier to be away. When she had to work twelve-hour days or travel for weeks at a time for the Pentagon or her consulting firm, she would call Grant every day after school and “have the same conversation a mom at home would have.” She suffered little guilt over her absences, not only because “Cal made accommodations for my life and work as often as I made them for his,” but also because she remembered her mother’s work life without resentment and believed her own work just as worthy. “I’m proud of Cal and Grant’s careers. I’m also proud of my own.”

Neither did Janet, who both owns her own consulting firm and sits on the boards of numerous corporations and Duke’s business school, rely for her sense of success on the reflected glory of her husband and son. When sportswriters ignored her, “writing about Grant as if he were his father’s immaculate conception, as though he’d sprung full-blown from Calvin’s head,” she reminded herself of the lesson of her childhood, a lesson many of her classmates would struggle to learn later, as they attempted to wrestle free from confining social expectations: that self-pride does not depend on the world’s admiration or fail with its disregard or contempt. “I never much cared if
Sports Illustrated
knew what my contribution was. I knew, and that was enough.” It is a lesson she now repeats to her son as his fame grows, warning him not to get hooked on it or succumb to its temptations. “I tell Grant not to believe too much of his press, even when it’s good. I also tell him that I don’t respect all athletes simply because they’re famous; I think talking trash or having sex with seventy-five women does not make a man; it diminishes
him. I have advised him to use his father, who’s always been respectful to women, as a model.”

The idea of role models—so central to Janet’s professional concern for the “talented tenth,” and yet another variation on the idea that an individual’s personal behavior can have public meaning—is equally strong in her prescription for parenting. She admires “the picture my husband and son offer the world, of strong black men and strong black male role models.” She believes more strongly still in “cross-gender” and “cross-race” role modeling. “My father, my husband, my son, my business partner—all have encouraged me and shaped me. All successful women, I believe, have been influenced by men. And all successful men have been influenced by women. I like to think I’m a role model not only for my son but for lots of young men—especially white men. When I hear my classmates worry about what kind of models we provide our daughters, I find myself hoping that they worry just as much about the model we offer our sons. I hope our sons see in us women they can look up to, so that when they grow up they will do better than their fathers at creating respectful relationships with women at work and at home. I’ve encouraged my son to find someone to love who has her own commitments, who does not define herself through him.”

Though Grant is as polished as his mom, his assimilation of her moral lessons seems genuine. Shortly after becoming NBA Rookie of the Year, he launched (with Fila, with which he signed an endorsement contract worth $80 million) the Grant Hill Summer Youth Basketball and Literacy Program for boys and girls, prompting
Gentleman’s Quarterly
to dub him, on its cover, “the savior” of sports.
Esquire
also put him on the cover, and lauded his elegance: “He calls coaches sir and does no big mouth or dances.”
Sports Illustrated
deemed him “wise beyond his years … a counterpoint to the spoiled behavior of some of the league’s other young players.… He has gracefully borne the burden of being perceived as Mr. Virtue.”

Grant, a three-time All-Star and 1996 Olympic team player, has often publicly credited his parents for “teaching me right from wrong.” At his 1994 farewell banquet at Duke, where he led his team to three national championships, he devoted his brief speech before thousands of fans to righting the misperception that his mother’s achievements were all by association. “It’s about time, Mom,” he began, “you get the credit you
deserve. No more wife of, no more mother of, and especially no more classmate of. Tonight I am the son of Janet and Calvin Hill.” When his sports career ends, he says, he would like to join Janet’s company. “I respect my mom’s spirit and activism. She taught me not to limit myself. She taught me about love and loyal friendship. My dad and I compete for the spotlight. She can live without it. She knows she’s the real backbone. Really, the thing I admire most in my dad is his choice of my mom. If I could find someone like her, I’d be fortunate.” The question of whether he is a feminist evoked a shy grin. “Yeah, I suppose I am. Mom taught me to respect women because she commands so much respect. I believe the people who really change the world are people like Janet Hill, who work at it every day.” Again, he flashed his trademark multimillion-dollar smile. “She’s got it goin’ on. If you’re gonna step to her, you better be right; don’t be half-stepping. We can call her Janet X.”

There is one member of the Wellesley class of ’69 who has managed a nearly perfect integration of home and work, of her private and public lives. In an era when the moral life is increasingly defined as a matter of honoring “family values,” Dr. Lonny Laszlo Higgins has consistently honored responsibilities of kinship that go far beyond simple blood ties.

During the summer of her junior year at Wellesley, Lonny worked with the Frontier Nursing Service in Appalachia, riding horseback with midwives to help with home births in the coal-mining country around Hazard, Kentucky, and assisting Mary Will, a woman doctor whose work among the poor made a lasting impression on Lonny. While in medical school at Tufts, Lonny married David Higgins, a handsome and wealthy Harvard-educated lawyer who had rowed in the 1968 Olympics and served in the Navy Reserves. She was a fourth-year medical student when she gave birth to their son, David, and a resident when their daughter, Jessica, was born. Whenever she was on call, David would bring the babies to the hospital so Lonny could nurse them, and the whole family would sleep together there.

Offered a job in obstetrics, Lonny set about transforming the hospital’s “cold, antiseptic” approach to delivering babies, which she felt robbed a woman of the full experience of birthing and distressed the baby, who was typically whisked abruptly away and not returned to the mother for many hours. Lonny became one of the first obstetricians in America to use the Leboyer birthing technique—underwater delivery, in
dimmed light, with the baby left at its mother’s breast. The method received a great burst of publicity when Lonny was made the subject of a documentary on PBS.

The women’s health movement was then just beginning to emerge, helped along by a groundbreaking book developed in a 1969 workshop in Boston.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
advocated self-care and natural remedies, taught women how to look at their own cervix and masturbate, inspired thousands of women’s health groups, and—millions of copies and several editions later—is still in print. More change followed, for both women practitioners and patients. In 1971, pressure by women led to congressional hearings on the high-dosage birth control pills then routinely prescribed and the passage of legislation requiring that patients be advised of such side effects as thrombosis and embolism; the same year the Women’s Equity Action League successfully sued the nation’s medical schools for sex discrimination, forcing them to open their doors to many more female students. In 1972, Barbara Seaman’s
Free and Female
became a best-seller, challenging the practice of having “women shaved, humiliated, drugged, painted and stuck up in stirrups to deliver their babies.” Theologian Mary Daly’s 1978
Gyn/Ecology
targeted paternalistic doctors who treated women as children. Drawing on French eco-feminism, she linked men with everything technological and artificial, from anesthetics to polyester; because they were alienated from nature, Daly argued, men could not lead a revolution against its destruction. It was women, with their deep connection to the earth, who would recover natural childbirth and foods and remedies, replace their mother’s Valium with calming herbs, and dump their damaging IUDs and hormones in favor of barrier techniques, like the diaphragm brandished by the heroine of
Fear of Flying
, Isadora Wing.

Lonny did not remain in conventional medicine very long. When her son was two, she was working a hundred-hour week. “I didn’t want a whole period of time to go by without my knowing him; I needed to feel my influence exerted on him. And David and I were barely seeing each other.” The year after Jessica was born, in 1979, the couple chose a radical solution: Selling their house in Boston for $60,000, they bought a wrecked ninety-six-foot schooner that David fixed up and, with their six-year-old and one-year-old, set out for what they thought would be an eighteen-month journey around the world.

Their shipboard life ended up lasting more than a decade. They spent
the first five years sailing through island groups in Central America, French Polynesia, Tonga, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea; with a nurse and donated emergency supplies aboard, Lonny was able to provide medical care along the way. She soon realized, however, that she was potentially doing more harm than good. “We’d come in on this magic ship with medicine and sutures and perform miracles, and then we’d leave, and all we’d done was undermine the local health workers.” They shifted their focus to education, training locals in primary maternal and child care.

Educating their children and sleeping aboard ship was, Lonny says, like “camping out with them for years.” The family’s adventures were occasionally terrifying. Twice their daughter went overboard—at age two and, again, at four in Tonga. In Fiji, David and Lonny had to swim out together into the surf to rescue a drowning mother and son. In Papua, New Guinea, Lonny took it into her head to go after pirates making off with a stolen ship; when her Boston Whaler struck a submerged rock and began sinking, it was only Lonny’s brazen bluffings, in David’s telling, that saved them from doom.

In 1983, the Higginses’ journey came to a seven-year halt in the tiny coral atolls of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia. In this tropical land of abundance, they found four of every one hundred children dying of dehydration and malnutrition, a mortality rate four times that in the U.S., though the islands had been an American protectorate since the end of the Second World War. The U.S. still had responsibility for health, education, and economic development, which it fulfilled in two ways: by providing flights off-island for those suffering from radiation illness in the wake of the sixty-six American nuclear tests conducted on Bikini atoll, and by importing foods. The food imports’ main effect on the islands was to undermine local agriculture and fisheries and erode the indigenous diet; high in fat, salt, and refined sugar, the imported food brought an increased incidence of diabetes and high blood pressure. Breast-feeding was abandoned in response to Western advertising; Lonny regularly saw children with malformed teeth, the result of suckling on Coke. Social traditions also broke down. The islands had the world’s highest suicide rate among adolescent boys: one in four tried, and one in ten succeeded.

After discussions with the Marshallese health ministry and community leaders on how they might help islanders scattered across a million square miles of ocean, Lonny and David created the Marimed Foundation
and raised $4 million to build a tall ship, a three-masted topsail schooner, with a shipboard laboratory and X-ray facilities, that could sail through the Outer Islands full-time to train and support local public health workers. The Marshallese children christened the majestic vessel with her big-bellied sails the
Tole Mour
—“Gift of Health and Life.” In the four years it took to build the ship, Lonny and her team flew to many of the islands, most of which were without electricity or clean water. They sterilized instruments in water heated over a coconut-husk fire, and Lonny did pelvic exams with a flashlight in her mouth—on women who were stretched across school desks with their feet in buckets. When the time came for training, Lonny herself stretched across desks and let island women do pelvics on her, again and again. To treat prostitutes infected with syphilis, who were too ashamed to come for treatment, Lonny would go to the discotheques, take the women into the ladies’ room, and give them shots.

Lonny’s kids often helped—weighing babies, assisting with immunization—all the time living barefoot and learning the language and ways of the Marshallese. Lonny also learned, developing great respect for traditional healers. “If someone was sick, they would ask, ‘Did he steal his neighbor’s fish? Was there a curse put on him?’ I could give the guy ampicillin, but he wouldn’t get better until he made amends. I came to understand that you don’t come in as the great white fixer but as the guest of the healer, to learn: What are the poultices that draw out infection? What are the uses of taro and breadfruit? I learned that you have to be a listener, notice patients’ body language, what’s in their eyes. The body tells a story, which I would try to frame for them in a way that matched their reality. I would tell them, ‘If the lungs sound like water crashing on a reef, that’s the sound of pneumonia.’ ”

By the time the Higginses launched the
Tole Mour
, dispensaries were in place and locals had been trained on most of the islands. In another few years, the system was so self-sufficient that Lonny and the
Tole Mour
were not needed at all. In anticipation of that time, Lonny and David had begun sailing between the Marshall Islands with troubled adolescents. Though the kids’ grandfathers had been masters of the sea, those seafaring skills had been mostly lost to younger generations. “By sailing on the
Tole Mour
, the kids reconnected with those traditions and returned home heroes, with a great sense of honor,” Lonny says.