Mississippi's Appendectomy

when I was six

I was sent home from school with a severe

stomach ache

I remember it well.

between lunch

and show and tell

I was all folded up

my insides doing their very best origami impression

and my first grade Spidey senses

knew something was wrong

I needed more than the school nurse

after an emergency room visit

CT Scans and blood work

the doctor said my appendix

was in danger of rupturing.

I needed an appendectomy.

I headed into surgery.

endured a 5 day hospital stay

a limited liquid diet.

the sting of several stitches

and a scar that’s still visible to this day

Eleven years later

while researching the Bad Blood in Tuskegee

I learned about Mississippi

a poor woman who wore the calluses

of a sharecropper’s hands.

Mississippi was

Black Brown

and Native and

sometimes she’d been locked behind bars.

a big girl with hips as wide as the South

Mississippi wasn’t just one woman

she was many

and her appendix never actually ruptured

after anesthesia

she woke up sick tired, and

sterile, with stitches that soon became scars.

Mississippi’s Appendectomy

was a nickname

a euphemism for eugenics

a Margaret Sanger misnomer

a pseudonym for state sponsored terror

Fanny Lou Hamer

was Mississippi

under the guise of simply removing

a uterine tumor

a white doctor

gave her a hysterectomy

without her consent in 1961

Mississippi wasn’t just one woman

she was many

government guinea pigs

for medical residents

turned mad scientists

Black Brown and Native women

forced to agree to be sterilized

or else their livelihoods severely disrupted

their welfare benefits removed

imagine the scars

generations carved from

women’s wombs

leaves snipped from family trees

chopped at the trunk

dug up from the root

a harvesting of organs

a smothering of seeds

in 1967, the US government admitted

to sterilizing 3,406 Native women

without their knowledge nor permission

and during the 1970s federally funded sterilization

without consent became legalized birth control

200,000 cases in 1970

more than 700,000 by 1980

Mississippi wasn’t just one woman

she was many

her sisters were the inmates

sterilized in Indiana

where it had been legal since 1907.

Her cousins in North Carolina were involuntarily

sterilized until 2003.

150 of her aunties in California had been sterilized

by the Department of Corrections

from 2006 to 2010.

Mississippi wasn’t just one woman

she was many

poor women who wore the calluses

of a sharecropper’s hands.

she was Black

and Brown

and Native and

sometimes locked behind bars.

nearly one million

sterilizations

our reproduction ransomed

all of it state sanctioned

sick tired, and

sterile, with stitches

that soon became scars

still visible to this day