Pig Candy by Lise Funderburg

Author:Lise Funderburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

He was thirty-two years old and ready to begin a residency that would equip him to carry out the school’s mission, which was to care for underserved minority populations. His career stood ready to take off, and his personal life held equal promise. Ethel had given birth to their first child, Frederick Jr., on the thirteenth of March. My grandfather couldn’t attend the birth. He pawned his gold watch to pay the obstetrician’s fifteen-dollar delivery fee, and the last of his funds were reserved for paying off school accounts, a prerequisite for receiving one’s diploma.

He had planned this June stopover between graduation and another summer of railroading, but the visit could not last long. Like many preprofessional African-Americans of the time, my grandfather earned relatively good wages as a Pullman porter, carrying luggage, cleaning shoes, and making beds for well-to-do white passengers on their way to summer retreats in the Adirondack Mountains. He performed the tasks well enough to make ends meet during medical school, and in fact well enough to curry the favor of one passenger, a Mrs. Chase of the Manhattan banking family, who gave him a small subsidy for school expenses. School was now over, his professional life was about to commence, but the income from railroading was too certain to ignore.

My grandfather started across Auburn Avenue, but a landau blocked his path. The horse-drawn carriage held four doctors, men my grandfather knew, some whose hair he’d cut. The men exchanged amenities with the young graduate, then invited him to climb up into the carriage.

“Get in and go with us!” one doctor entreated. “We’re going out to the cemetery to bury Turner.” The deceased was a black doctor who had practiced in a rural town sixty-five miles south of Atlanta.

Grandfather had heard of Turner: the nation’s entire pool of black doctors consisted of fewer than thirty-five hundred people. But Granddaddy knew him only by reputation, that Turner was from an island in the Caribbean and had graduated from McGill University Medical School in Canada. Because Grandfather was going to meet his wife and new baby, he declined the carriage-borne doctor’s invitation. Some days later, Grandfather again stood on Auburn Avenue. This time, he ran into his old bridge partner, the statistician.

“Funderburg,” the man asked, “what are you gonna do this summer?”

“I’m going to New York and railroad, to work for the Pullman Company as I’ve done in past years. Then I’ve got an internship coming up in October,” Granddaddy told his friend, “on the basis of the second-highest average in my class.”

“Awww,” the bridge partner said, “your days for railroading are over. What you ought to do is to go down to Jasper County and break into the practice of medicine. You’ve taken the board already. Break into the practice of medicine and acquire Turner’s library and office equipment.

“I’m co-executor, with his wife, of his estate,” continued the partner, who, like Turner, was West Indian. “I’m going down this weekend, and I’ll make arrangements for you to stay with her.

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