NONFICTION | Jen Chistensen Making a Way out of No Way in Cuthbert

NONFICTION

Making a Way out of No Way in Cuthbert

By Jen Christensen

About a dozen nurses huddled on the hospital’s tidy front lawn. Black and White women stood shoulder-to-shoulder. They had abandoned scrubs for matching black t-shirts stretched across waists softened with middle age. Above their hearts the shirts read, “Patterson Hospital, 1948-2020.” Imprinted on a broken heart worn on their tired backs, the words “WE GAVE ALL.”

Many had spent entire careers at this single-story 25-bed critical care hospital deep in the heart of what’s known as the historic Black Belt. The Black Belt first earned its name for the rich black soil found in this Southern region, but the name has taken on a deeper meaning and today designates the counties where Black residents outnumber White residents in the rural South. Seven decades ago, the residents of Randolph County pooled their meager resources and built a hospital that would care for Black and White residents at a time when nearly every other hospital in the state was segregated. Residents helped build the facility nearly a year after Cuthbert, Georgia’s first large-scale hospital burned to the ground in 1946. The fire made national headlines. According to the newspapers, neighbors came running when they saw the flames shooting out the

hospital’s first floor. They passed patients down ladders when fire cut off stairways. They rescued all but two of 50 patients.

This generation of neighbors who slowly gathered on the hospital lawn on a sweltering October afternoon in 2020 would be unable to save the hospital. Fire didn’t threaten this time, but a fire sale did. In a year when the county had the highest per capita number of Covid-19 cases in the entire US, the regional hospital authority decided to shut the hospital down. The aging facility needed $10 million in repairs for a leaky roof and old equipment. The county decided it couldn’t afford it. Going forward, the next time someone broke a leg or had an accident, residents with the lowest rate of car ownership in the state would somehow have to find a way to travel to Alabama to receive the closest care. It meant people having a heart attack or a stroke were in trouble.

I had called ahead of time to see if I could talk with workers at the hospital. This would be the 19th rural hospital to close in 2020. It set a record for the most hospital closings in the US in one year, but when you talk to a hospital, you enter a world of “no.” I am a medical reporter, yet a persistent PR team wanted to keep me – someone who has been described as an empathetic observer, an eager advocate for equity, a recorder of important stories – far, far away from the life and death drama playing out at Patterson Hospital.

I asked to meet the hospital PR team, whose one job is to work with media, but they said no. When I asked if they planned anything to celebrate hospital staff, they said no. When I asked if I could get video inside the hospital, they said no, absolutely not, under no circumstance, no. So, of course, I drove down from Atlanta anyway.

Cuthbert wasn’t just losing access to convenient health care.

It was losing the county’s second largest employer in one of the poorest counties in Georgia. The closing could cripple the small community.

We arrived just in time to see two maintenance men, one precariously perched on a wobbly ladder that rocked on the crabgrass. The other watched him take a large mallet to the hospital sign. The bang of mallet on metal echoed across the lawn. The sign dropped into the watching man’s hands. With no expression, he chucked it like a huge frisbee onto a flatbed. They then hoisted up a new sign and laughed a little as they shook their heads. The tacky plastic banner they put up to replace the old sign in big red letters screamed, “Effective October 22, 2020, HOSPITAL CLOSED. NO EMERGENCY SERVICES AVAILABLE AT THIS LOCATION. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, CALL 911.”

I wanted to ask them about it, but how to do it delicately? Growing up in the blunter Midwest, my instincts didn’t always steer me away from stepping in it in the South. I learned that the hard way when I covered courts in Lexington, Kentucky. It was my first year running the investigative unit for a local TV station, and I had just been to a class on court records. The first time I went to the clerk of the court’s office could easily have been my last. I walked in and using my best reporter voice and said, “Please, may I have the files from the Aspinal murder case?” and added. “I know it is my right under the open records law.”

The clerk’s face flashed bright red, the blush so deep it spread up the part in her short gray hair. Without a word, she spun around and turned her back on me.

I was flummoxed and about to ask again, but my pal Connie, a formidable prosecutor, walked in as it happened. With a speed I didn’t know the tiny woman had in her, Connie

zipped behind the counter, put an arm around the clerk, and like a first responder at a car crash walked the stunned woman off the scene and into a side room. They were gone for what felt like hours. I stood staring out the window, shifting in my flats, wishing I hadn’t worn a wool suit that now felt ten times warmer, and wondered why everyone was acting so weird. Another five minutes, Connie came back, handed me the file, put her arm around me just like she had with the clerk, and walked me into the marble hall.

“Miss Jen,” she said in a voice that reminded me of an intellectual Dolly Parton. Connie had grown up in the real Hatfield and McCoy territory and became the first in her holler’s history to go to college. That day she schooled me gently. “Miss Jen, there are only a few sins you can commit in the South. Well, at least here in the courthouse, anyway. And one of them is to not have a conversation with clerks before you ask them for something,” she said kindly, keeping the pity out of her voice. “You can’t just walk in and ask for a file.”

I breathed in, ready to object, but saw the same look on her face that she gave murders under cross examination and kept quiet. “Yes, that’s your right,” she continued. “By law it’s yours. But by God, if you do it that way, they will bury it out back, and you or I will never see it again. We need those files. So please do not do that again.”

Grateful to my Southern translator, curiosity got the better of me. I asked Connie what she told the clerk to change her mind. “Oh, that’s easy, I just told her you were a Yankee. She pitied you.”

Before I had a chance to work up the nerve to talk to the maintenance men, the Cuthbert mayor arrived. No official ceremony was planned, but the town wouldn’t just let the

hospital close without saying how much it meant to them. An impromptu crowd of residents spontaneously started to arrive. They gathered on the sidewalk and spilled over into the parking lot across the street. Men in lab coats from the doctor’s office pulled up in their cars. There were politicians and teachers. Then the fire trucks and an ambulance came. As 75 people or so stood outside the hospital, it was then that the group of nurses in their memorial t-shirts came out to witness all who had gathered there to send them off on this warm afternoon.

One of the maintenance men who had just removed the hospital sign saw his moment and walked up to address the crowd and offer the hospital’s final prayer. “Things in life change. The one thing in life that never changes is God,” he prayed, as those around him bowed their heads.

“It was you, Lord, who has brought some of us through this pandemic,” he said. “I know, Lord, you didn’t bring us this far, this safe, to leave us now. I know the best is yet to come. Let ‘em know you got them. You will make a way out of no way. Tell them that when one door is closed, you will open another door or maybe even a window. You’ve been good to this hospital, and, Lord, we want to tell you thank you.”

The nurses said “Amen” in agreement. “If we learn to trust, we can make it through this,” he said. Then, as he paused dramatically, there was a squelch of a walkie-talkie. The nurses’ bowed heads jerked toward the EMT.

“Randolph ambulance, Randolph ambulance, please respond,” a dispassionate dispatcher called out. As the maintenance man tried to continue with his prayer, the nurses were now distracted, unable to resist their instinct to help. “Copy, this is Randolph ambulance,” the EMT responded quietly into the radio mic on her shoulder, as she and two

uniformed colleagues dressed all in gray sprinted toward the rig.

“We’ve got a hunter who fell. He may have broken his leg. I’ve sent you the location of his blind. What’s your ETA to the hospital?” the dispatcher asked, as the two of the three quickly climbed aboard.

“Well, ma’am,” the final EMT said as she climbed quickly into the rig. “It’s probably going to be awhile.”