Yearning toward Carrie Buck

That November day, Carrie had already been locked up for five months, her mother for four years. I read the histories, track the dates, trace the chronology. This story starts in so many places all at once. Starts with Carrie’s mother Emma being arrested, deemed feebleminded, and committed to the Colony for alleged sex work. Starts with the Virginia state legislature passing the Eugenical Sterilization Act, which makes state-mandated and -coerced sterilization legal. Starts with Carrie being raped by a nephew of her foster family and becoming pregnant. Starts with her naming that nephew, calling him out as a rapist. Starts with her foster family, the Dobbs, reacting by declaring Carrie feebleminded and committing her to the same state institution that housed her mother.

It is 1924, and Carrie is eighteen. Three years later, her body—poor and white—lands in the U.S. Supreme Court as the judges decide the case Buck v. Bell. They declare compulsory sterilization laws constitutional, at which point the state of Virginia sterilizes Carrie and only then releases her. Emma, on the other hand, never gets out, dying at the Colony.

I, diagnosed mentally retarded in 1966, imagine, yearn, stretch toward Carrie, judged feebleminded in 1924. So many bodies have vanished into the whirlpool of history. Carrie, I keep waiting for the histories to mourn, rage, reach toward you, your body as solid as your mother’s hand on your shoulder. Both of you look steely-eyed into the camera. You know the photo, you and Emma sitting outside at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. I imagine Carrie’s voice—poor, rough, southern. Imagine her head cocked. Imagine how she might tell this story.¹

The news men come around now and again. They always want to know if I missed having children. Ask as if that’s the only regret they can imagine. Oh, I got plenty of regrets, but kids are only one of many. Least I’ve not been a live-in for a long time. Swore when me and Billy got married, I’d keep my own house. No more sleeping in the butt cold back room of whatever cold-eyed missus I cooked and cleaned for. I liked being Missus Eagle.

I find reams of information, dozens of portraits, a plentiful record of the eugenicists who engineered the case against Carrie—Albert Priddy, and later John Bell after Priddy’s death, Aubrey Strode, and Irving Whitehead. They needed their sterilization law determined constitutional and so went looking for a case to take all the way to the Supreme Court. Have the historians forgotten? There’d be no story without Carrie’s body.

The body as gristle
and synapse, water
and bone, pure empty
space, the body
as legal precedent.

Imagination becomes a kitchen table, formica yellowed and cracking. Carrie sits sucking hard candy. Keeps talking. Says: I’ve seen those pictures. Hell, I sent that bastard Bell my wedding photo when he asked (“Carrie Buck’s Photograph of her Wedding”). Mr. Bell, he was the big boss man at the Colony. I’d flat out refuse now, but back then Mama still lived up there, and me and Billy dreamed of bringing her to live with us. I thought playing nice with Mr. Bell might help my case. So I sent him that photo of us looking so fine, me grinning up a storm. Billy’d just run his hand through my hair, down my back. That man’s hands could be so shockingly soft. We were silly happy that day. And up they went and just cut Billy out of the picture (“Carrie Buck, from ‘The Progress of Eugenical Sterilization’”). Simply cut the photo in two. Threw out Billy’s half. All they wanted was a photo of Carrie Buck for their precious little records. I hated their cameras, their files, their tests. They weren’t even tricky, goddamn liars. Back then I thought I could leave all of the heartache behind by becoming Missus William Eagle.

Aubrey Strode prosecuted the court case named after Carrie Buck and wrote the law under which she...