The Power of One

Sister Anne Brooks and the Tutwiler Clinic

Sally Palmer Thomason, Jean Carter Fisher

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496829160
• eBook ISBN: 9781496829177
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

For thirty-four years Sister Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun and doctor of osteopathy, served one of the nation's most impoverished towns and regions, Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi Delta. In 1983, she reopened the Tutwiler Clinic, which had remained closed for five years, as no other physician was willing to serve in Tallahatchie County. Starting with only two other nuns and regularly working twelve-hour days, Brooks's patient load—in a region where seven out of ten patients that walked in her door had no way to pay for care—grew from thirty to forty individuals per month her first year to more than 8, 500 annually. Sally Palmer Thomason tells the powerful story of Sister Anne Brooks, beginning with her tumultuous childhood, the contracting and overcoming of crippling arthritis in early adulthood, and her near-unprecedented decision to attend medical school at the age of forty. Dr. Brooks's remarkable dedication and accomplishments in caring for the health and well-being of both the individuals and the community of Tutwiler attracted ongoing attention and was often featured in national publications and media, including People magazine and 60 Minutes. Thomason not only shares Brooks's powerful story but reveals, through excerpts from journal entries, letters, and interviews, the intimate musings that connect Brooks's faith in God to her profound compassion for others. Whether it is Brooks's efforts to desegregate Tutwiler or provide free healthcare, her constant devotion to others is striking.

Chapter One

SETTING THE STAGE

Hope is a gift that has been given to me. I would like to pass it on. I had a need to give my life to people who needed it, a need to bring hope to people who didn’t have it, to share the gift of health that I had been given, and to share my experience of God.

—Sister Anne Brooks, DO

Carl Mungenast, a self-proclaimed, practical-minded, no-nonsense businessman, is a longtime ardent supporter of Anne Brooks and her mission. He recently recalled a life-changing program he saw on 60 Minutes nearly thirty years ago. “On Sunday evening, September 23, 1990, I was sitting in my living room in Naperville, Illinois, when a particular program caught my attention. I am not an emotional person, but Dr. Anne Brooks’s words rang true. She was making the point that charity was not giving money to people but creating opportunity. She didn’t believe in just giving things to people in need.” Mungenast said, “I was so touched by Anne Brooks’ words I immediately got up and went to my desk to write the biggest check I’d ever written to charity in my life. I was so impressed with Dr. Brooks’ interpretation of what charity really means. It doesn’t mean giving things to people, other than opportunity and guidance.”

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And on that Sunday evening in 1990, millions of other people across the nation learned about Dr. Brooks and her amazing work in Tutwiler, Mississippi. The weekly televised “newsmagazine” program 60 Minutes, with an audience of over twenty million viewers, held the number one spot among all television programs in the Nielsen ratings of 1990. Founded in 1968, 60 Minutes’ unique format appealed to viewers who wanted the “real story” behind what they read in their daily newspaper or saw on nightly TV news programs. Its producers and reporters did their own investigations in an effort to deliver probing, behind-the-scenes journalism, which featured powerful personality profiles. It was a format designed to create a strong psychological sense of intimacy between the journalist and the viewer, a format that was highly successful. During any given week, conversations around family dinner tables and at workplace coffee breaks often centered on the past Sunday’s 60 Minutes featured topic.

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Harry Reasoner, a leading television personality at the time and one of the original two correspondents of 60 Minutes, had introduced the Dr. Brooks’s program with these words: “Every so often we get a letter here at 60 Minutes about a person so unusual or a place so extraordinary we just have to take a look for ourselves. Well, tonight we have a doubleheader. A doctor [Sister Anne Brooks, DO] like no one you’ve ever met, in a place like none you’ve ever been—Tutwiler, a principal town in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. A place so impoverished they call it America’s third world.”

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This was not the first time Tallahatchie County had been in the spotlight of national and international attention. In 1955 the trial of the murderers of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who allegedly whistled at a white woman, was held five miles south of Tutwiler in the small town of Sumner in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse. After a five-day trial, an all-white jury found the accused, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, not guilty. Four months later, protected by double jeopardy laws, Bryant and Milam confessed in an article in Look magazine to the brutal murder that left Till’s face mutilated beyond recognition. National and international newspapers reported outrage at the Emmett Till verdict and harshly criticized the racist social conditions in the Mississippi Delta. When his body was delivered back in Chicago, Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, channeled her rage by insisting on an open casket at his funeral and welcomed photographs. She wanted to show the world the horrible reality of intractable racism. Pictures of Emmett Till’s butchered face appeared in magazine and newspaper articles across the nation. Fourteen hundred miles north of Tutwiler, the publicity of Till’s murder made an indelible impression on a seventeen-year-old postulate who had just entered a Catholic convent in Rome, New York—the future Dr. Brooks.

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Now, in 1990, Reasoner in his 60 Minutes broadcast reported that the town of Tutwiler, located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, “was a region so economically devastated that Congress had declared it the poorest place in America.” After World War II, as agriculture became mechanized, much of the rich Delta land was purchased by large corporations that replaced thousands of sharecroppers and field hands in the area with machines. Gainful employment was hard to find for those who had been “replaced.” There was more malnutrition and disease in the Tutwiler area than found in third world countries. More babies died before their first birthday than in Panama or Haiti or Mexico. The infant mortality rate was twenty-three deaths per one thousand births—more than twice the national average. One-fifth of the babies born in Tutwiler were born to teenage mothers—twice the national average. Poverty and illiteracy among the black population were endemic. Unemployment was rampant. Although civil rights legislation and government, religious, and philanthropic programs battled against the pernicious legacy of the rigid segregation of the Jim Crow culture, racism and a strong resistance to integration were still very much in evidence.

Reasoner reported, when a task force of doctors surveyed the area in the late 1980s, they “found people as close to the brink of survival as one is likely to find in this country. In the town of Tutwiler, located in the heart of the Delta, the shanties that many of the black folks lived in were far below substandard.”

Many of the shanties that Dr. Brooks’s patients called home were perched on the Hopson Bayou that runs through the center of Tutwiler. Flooding of the bayou was a major problem. Twenty percent of the homes lacked indoor plumbing, and raw sewage was routinely dumped from slop jars into the bayou’s waters, which overflowed two or three times a year. At least six to eight inches of water annually seeped into those homes along the Hopson Bayou—some homes got twelve inches of water three times a year, with raw sewage in that water. And when the waters receded, filth and dead animals were left behind.

A few blocks away from Hopson Bayou, little remained of what used to be the small, bustling downtown of Tutwiler, Mississippi. When E. B. Seymore was interviewed on the 1990 60 Minutes broadcast, her voice was full of nostalgia as she remembered when Tutwiler was the shopping and entertainment hub for most of Tallahatchie County. “This was a thriving little town. On Saturday afternoons, my mother-in-law used to love to sit in the truck and watch the people go by. She just enjoyed that so much. There were two theaters and a drugstore … four dry goods stores, four grocery stores, a barbershop, a pool hall. We had it all.”

Others, who also grew up in Tutwiler, remember that in those early days there were two sides of town—the black side and the white side—literally separated by the railroad tracks and racial segregation.

♦ ♦ ♦

When Dr. Brooks arrived to reopen the medical clinic in Tutwiler in 1983, she was challenged by Tutwiler’s grinding poverty. This was the type of place she had been looking for—the type of place where she could be of real service. The clinic that was built by federal dollars in the 1960s had been abandoned, shuttered for over five years. Dr. Brooks settled in and brought her wondrous, holistic—some said revolutionary—approach to health care to Tutwiler.

Several years after she had become established at the clinic, the postmaster of Tutwiler, Melvin Browning, said, “We’ve had a couple of doctors come in, and they’d stay a year or so, and then they’d pack up and leave. I’ve seen doctors come and go, but I’ve never seen anyone like Dr. Brooks. She goes around making house calls. I know of lives she’s saved. They wouldn’t have got to the hospital if she hadn’t gone to their house and given them the first aid they needed.”

Anne Brooks said, “I see in my patients this enormous struggle just to survive. It makes me in awe of them. If a person is economically poorly off, they are so busy surviving that health actually doesn’t hold a very important place. They are too busy trying to eat, trying to find food, possibly trying to even find a place to live.” When she arrived in 1983, Dr. Brooks saw women who had never had a Pap smear or a breast exam, a man who couldn’t read the instructions on a prescription, fourteen-year-old girls who were pregnant for their second time, and malnourished babies who were fed nothing but soda pop and potato chips.

Reflecting back on her first few months in Tutwiler, Dr. Brooks said the situation was so horrible she was energized by the rage she felt but had to swallow. But gradually, realizing that rage does not solve problems, her emotions made a dramatic turnabout. She stopped being angry. “I think I was able to reach past the anger and look at a person, and if that person was hurting, I’d like to help.” Care and a heartfelt compassion for the whole person, while seeking to implement a practical solution for the horrific, seemingly unsolvable problems an individual faced, became her signature style. As far as Dr. Brooks is concerned, “It’s not enough to treat someone just as a medical patient. Probably the most important thing in medical care is to empower patients.”

When Dr. Brooks arrived in Tutwiler to open the abandoned clinic, the first thing she did was to tear down the wall separating the black and white waiting rooms. The color of a person’s skin made absolutely no difference to her. “I look at the person. I don’t look at the disease. I look at the whole person…. When you talk about the whole person, you talk about their water supply, the roof over their head, how they treat their children, how their children treat them. When someone comes in and says, ‘I’ve cut my leg,’ I say, well, how did you cut your leg? They say, ‘Well, I fell through the porch.’ The next thing I say is well, how can we fix that porch?”

From the very beginning Anne Brooks’s vision and dedication attracted other likeminded nuns to help turn the Tutwiler Clinic into something much more than a doctor’s office and to find ways to bring that impoverished town back to life. Dedicated to taking care of the “whole” person, Tutwiler Clinic became the town’s hub for a variety of social services, so needed and appreciated that eventually these “non-medical” services expanded into a full-blown community center with its own building.

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Genether Spurlock, a retired schoolteacher and the first black woman to serve as mayor of Tutwiler, now serves as a program director at the Tutwiler Community Center. When asked about Anne Brooks, she responded, “What did Dr. Brooks mean to this town? She was our … how can I put it? She was an angel to us. She really was. She brought so much to this town. The town was on the verge of—you know, I probably would have been gone if things hadn’t changed. There was a great migration—everybody was just leaving, ’cause there was nothing to do. But she kinda just saved us…. Dr. Brooks, you can ask anyone in town. She was our guardian angel—we depended on her for so much.”

Chapter Two

ANNE’S BEGINNING

I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were.

—Wallace Stegner

In exploring a bit of Anne (Kitty) Brooks’s background, one finds that there is a strong strain of intellectual, academic, and economic accomplishment. How in the world did Anne Brooks end up in what Harry Reasoner had said was “a place so impoverished they call it America’s third world—Tutwiler, Mississippi”? Her father’s family had deep roots in the cultural/social/professional network of nineteenth-century New England. Her great-grandfather Francis Augustus Brooks was a corporate attorney and railroad president in Boston. His son Morgan Brooks, who was Kitty’s grandfather, was a noted inventor, a nationally known professor of electrical engineering, and a successful businessman. He and his wife, Frona Marie, had nine children. Frona Marie was born in France and held a rare distinction for a woman of her era. She was a college graduate, having graduated from Smith College in 1883.

Anne’s maternal grandfather, Julius Goebel, born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, had begun his illustrious academic career before he immigrated to the United States in 1885. During the next forty years, Professor Goebel taught at Stanford (where future president Herbert Hoover was his student), Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Illinois in Urbana. He was an author who corresponded with Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of the German Empire, and was considered one of the foremost Germanic-language scholars in America. Also a poet, a leading authority on Goethe, he cofounded the Modern Language Association. He and his wife, Kathryn Vreeland Goebel, had seven children.

One of those seven children was Anne Brooks’s future mother, Anchen (who changed her name to Anne) Vreeland Goebel. Both Anchen and Roger (Anne’s future father) grew up in Urbana, Illinois. They both attended Urbana High School and the University of Illinois, where both of their fathers taught. Two years older than Anne (Anchen), Roger was a corporal in the university’s signal drill team during his sophomore year at the university in 1917. The United States entered World War I that year, and Roger Brooks, according to the university yearbook, with patriotic fervor wanted to become a real military man. He received an appointment to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, which he entered in 1918 and graduated as a commissioned officer in 1920.

With a known future and a regular paycheck, Roger asked for his high school sweetheart’s hand in marriage. On March 20, 1921, surrounded by family and friends, Anne (Anchen) Goebel and Roger Brooks were married in Urbana, Illinois. Although armistice had been declared shortly after Roger had entered the academy as a plebe, the United States Navy continued to patrol the world and monitor local trouble spots, which meant that, as with many “military” marriages, Roger and Anne (Anchen) would not settle into a traditional married life. Over the next ten years, the young couple were separated and lived apart most of the time. Roger served aboard various ships in various oceans, while Anne made her home base in Urbana close to her family and childhood and college friends.

The couple did, however, have an extensive, rather disjointed, delayed honeymoon in several foreign countries in the spring of 1923. To go to Turkey to visit my husband was the reason Anne gave when applying for the passport she received on November 14, 1922. She and Roger also visited Egypt, Spain, and Italy on that trip, and she embarked from Naples to arrive back in New York on July 31, 1923. During the next five years Anne and Roger arranged to meet at different spots, close to a port of interest, whenever he had leave time. But at the start of the new decade, their lives changed dramatically.

In 1930 Roger received an onshore, stateside assignment at the Naval Department in Washington, DC. He and Anne moved to the nation’s capital, rented an apartment in the heart of the city, and for the first time since their wedding day settled into the daily routines of a typical married life. Their first and only child, Kathryn Vreeland Brooks, whom they called Kitty, was born on June 4, 1938. Anne was forty and Roger forty-one—they had been married seventeen years.

Their lives, once again, changed dramatically three years later, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Germany and the Axis powers declared war on the United States of America. Roger, now a naval captain, was called to active duty and assigned to Admiral Halsey’s fleet in the Pacific. This separation was to have serious implications for their family. Before leaving, Roger moved his wife and three-year-old Kitty into a small, two storied, Cape Cod–style house on Livingston Street in a quiet, family-friendly neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Maryland—a move that was to isolate Kitty’s mother.

Sister Anne remembers her many fun times as a young girl living on Livingston Street—going trick-or-treating on Halloween with other neighborhood children and playing hide-and-go-seek and kick-the-can in the summer evenings. However, she noted that her mother always rang a bell when it was time for her to come home from her evening of play in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Setting the Stage
• Chapter Two: Anne’s Beginning
• Chapter Three: A Change in Direction
• Chapter Four: Breaking Away
• Chapter Five: Struggles in the Convent
• Chapter Six: The Teacher Learns
• Chapter Seven: Pain, Recovery, and New Beginnings
• Chapter Eight: Activating Her Power
• Chapter Nine: Saintly Medicine
• Chapter Ten: Physician/Manager/Teacher/Nun
• Chapter Eleven: Rebirthing a Community
• Chapter Twelve: Speak Up and Speak Out
• Chapter Thirteen: The Realization of a Dream
• Chapter Fourteen: Implementing Hope and Health
• Chapter Fifteen: Growth, Challenge, and Recharging
• Chapter Sixteen: The Ripple Effect
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: Poetic Musings
• Appendix 2: Awards and Honors
• Appendix 3: A Timeline Found in Sister Anne’s Papers
• Appendix 4: A Chronicle of Civil Rights Events
• Appendix 5: The Annual Andrew Taylor Still Memorial Address
• Works Consulted
• About the Authors