Composing a Life

Sicilian farmers.
    Johnnetta’s way of looking at cultural alternatives is partly based on the paradoxical experience of being an advantaged member of a disadvantaged minority and partly based on her training and her travels as an anthropologist. She was captured for anthropology during her first year at Oberlin by George Eaton Simpson, who taught a class on racial and cultural minorities. “He put on a record of Jamaican music and right there in front of the class, he started to hyperventilate.” Watching a white man not only talk about a part of black culture, but submit, in that moment in the classroom, to its eloquence, she grasped the idea that one could study culture, one’s own or that of others, truly attending to it rather than using the stance of an observer as a way to dominate. Her willingness to look outward began from an altered way of looking at her own tradition.
    The idea of an anthropology major was far from welcome back in Jacksonville. Johnnetta’s grandfather, Papa, laughed at her. “I told Papa I was going to be an anthropologist, he asked me what that was, and I described it. He said, ‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, you couldn’t feed yourself,’ and I cried. And then I remember my mother comforting me and saying that was exactly what I should go on to be: ‘You have to do what you have to do.’ But Papa’s attitude was that I would go into the insurance business.” Later on Johnnetta nearly married a man involved in a different black insurance company, but eventually she married Robert Cole, a white fellow student at Northwestern. “You went exogamous,” I said, using the anthropological term for marriage outside of one’s own kin group or tribe. Then it occurred to me, “No—that was another kind of endogamy, part of your new academic tribe.”
    Ellen too had ventured outside her own culture. She traced her concern with the problem of homelessness to a summer project in Africa when, for the first time, she had looked at illness as a societal rather than an individual problem. She went as part of a program for medical students sponsored by the Experiment in International Living, doing a survey of tuberculosis in western Nigeria. “The prevalence of TB was astounding, and not just pulmonary TB but kinds of TB that invade the other organs. I remember going to clinics for Pott’s disease, which is tuberculosis of the spine. It’s horrible. You don’t see disease like that in this country. And the lifespan is short. People are just riddled with curable infectious diseases and parasites. Schistosomiasis, which is probably the number-one killer in the world, is rampant in that area. We tested a population of school-age children out in the bush, and I think we found about a third of the kids had it. It’s a horrible disease. And I spent time in leper colonies. I think that experience really spun my head around. And also, it was the first time that I had traveled to a faraway place by myself. It was a Very adventuresome trip, because—I mean, we were, as you can imagine, in a very primitive part of the world. I came back with some minor parasites and some side effects from the—I came back sick, basically.
    “Then I went back to medical school after this very exciting and also very scary trip, really unsure about whether I wanted to be a doctor, whether I wanted all this responsibility. Here was a population just full of tuberculosis, which is a disease you can do something about, and they weren’t even providing treatment. I was ready to go into one of my crusades and beat the bureaucrats over the head, but when you are in a foreign culture your hands are tied. I remember seeing someone dying of rabies and they weren’t even medicating him, because medicine was so scarce it was saved for those who had a chance of surviving. It was my first exposure to a really horrifying systems problem. There’s curable disease out there, and it’s just not being treated.”
    In Africa, Ellen’s vision had broadened to include the social context of disease. This prefigured a shift of focus from treating individual patients toward designing public-health strategies to help large numbers of people. In order to develop treatment or prevention strategies for a particular population, it is necessary first to learn to see them and then to become sufficiently visionary to imagine that their lives might be different. There is a whole structure of assumptions that must be