A Framework for Discussing Chip Jones’ Organ Thieves
I must admit that when I learned that The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South would be the VCU Common Book selection for Fall 2022, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, it is important that stories like these are unearthed and discussed, on the other, to those of us with lived experience, having our historical trauma splayed out before audiences who can never know what being Black in America is truly like, can be a kind of trauma all on its own.
I am a third generation Richmonder. My grandparents moved to Church Hill in 1958 during the height of that neighborhood’s White flight. Both of my parents were life-long Church Hill residents. I was born at MCV just a year after the Tucker transplant, and my grandmother attended the nursing school at St. Phillips, the segregated Black hospital where many of Drs. Hume and Lower’s “experiments” were conducted. I grew up in a community of people who were extremely skeptical of the American medical system and saw MCV as a place where Black people would enter and often never return. My grandmother spent time perfecting all sorts of tinctures and potions meant to cure our ailments, and any Black person will tell you that mercurochrome was thought to cure virtually everything. So suspicious of institutional medical care was my grandmother that she pulled her own teeth when they began to bother her.
The lack of trust that Black people have of the healthcare system is legitimized by real life horrors: the Tuskegee experiment, the Indiana radiation experiments, J. Marion Sims and his horrific gynecology research are all prominent examples of such horrors. My people seem to carry in their DNA deep memories of ancestral cruelty borne by White people with scalpels.
What happened to Bruce Tucker is just one of many stories that get passed on to younger generations, often the details are lost, but the message is always clear — we cannot trust the White medical system. The fear and mistrust continue today with good reason. Black Americans represent only about 5% of the nation’s EMTs, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy related cause than White women, and there is evidence that fully half of White medical trainees believe such myths as Black people have thicker skin or less sensitive nerve endings than White people. It is difficult to express just how restricting and powerless it feels to live in a country where finding basic healthcare can literally feel like walking through a minefield.
It is because of this lived experience that I must express some concern over the fact that those who have the power and privilege to write about and profit from the telling of our stories are not those who have to navigate the condition of living in a country where their bodies are considered less worthy of care. As a journalist who once worked for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, the very publication that celebrated the heart transplant, Mr. Jones comes from a place of privilege. He has taken it upon himself to tell the story that Bruce Tucker’s own family doesn’t want to share. That gives me pause.
Do I believe these stories need be told? Of course I do, but I also dream of a day when the people who live them get to use their own authentic voices to communicate their experiences, when the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized have the support and opportunity to benefit from the telling of their stories, when their voices aren’t translated through the lens of privilege. As a Black professor, I must admit to being exhausted by teaching my people’s trauma second hand.
As my colleague, Professor Troy Martin, stated:
When studying ethnographic work about marginalized people, teachers and students are encouraged to examine critically the production of knowledge (Who gets to speak for whom? What are the limitations?). We must also be careful not to assume that we can understand a diverse people or a complex issue just because we’ve examined one piece of research. Ongoing discussion and conversation on how we’re internalizing and interpreting these stories may mitigate against “consuming the Other” or reducing lived experience into spectacle.
As we embark upon the journey of reading and analyzing The Organ Thieves, let us not forget the humanity of Bruce Tucker and his family or the cultural conditions that enabled what happened to them and that continue to trouble our nation’s healthcare system. Let us also remember that for the Black students in our classrooms, many of whom will be learning of this for the first time, having their ancestral trauma on display for dissection and study may prove deeply troubling. Whether they wish to speak or not, listen to them.
