The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
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In front of me, three signs declared, “No Medicare, no Medicaid, no exceptions made.” Taped on small filing drawers was another admonishment, “No exceptions, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no personal insurance.” At the west end of the room was a floor-to-ceiling partition of wood and opaque glass. From behind this wall came soft mumblings. It took thirty minutes or so before I realized I was sitting in a segregated waiting room. As a white man, I had walked through the front door. If I had been black, I would have entered the building through the west side door, where blacks had entered to buy tickets and await the Continental Trailways bus in the early fifties.
In the blacks’ waiting room beneath one naked light bulb and a ceiling fan are ladder-back chairs, a couch, more signs advising the prospective patient that Medicaid and Medicare programs aren’t available. Only one of San Augustine County’s three doctors—Dr. Matthew Buchele, originally from Kansas—maintains an integrated waiting room. The elder statesman of the medical community, Dr. N. T. Bennett, 77, school board president and with 2974 acres, the county’s largest individual landowner, has his black patients come in a front-but-separate door and wait in another room. Haley patiently explained, “They are used to it. It just works better for all of us.”
Dr. Haley is a good doctor who works hard, averaging a total of 43 patients—black and white—daily. He is the only doctor in the county who delivers babies. He declares himself to be a strong conservative, an avowed enemy of federal bureaucracy and programs, and says he treats free of charge those he knows cannot pay. I had barely been in town three days before several people had told me that Curtis Haley is an excellent doctor, an archconservative, and a power in the community who actively works to keep younger doctors from settling in San Augustine. They told me of the black women who attacked him in his office after he refused to treat one of their children. Haley held his own in the fight, had them arrested, and charged them with assault.
“They were drunk and cursed the nurse, saying they wanted treatment right then, that they were going to sit with the white folks in front,” Haley said. “I told them they had to wait or they could go to the hospital. They went, then came back madder than before, attacked me after I told them this was a free-enterprise office, that I didn’t have to treat anybody just because they were there, and the best thing for them to do was leave right then. They got some NAACP lawyer and sued me for violation of their civil rights. This case is still pending here in county court, but I won the case down in Federal Judge Bill Steger’s court in Beaumont. His investigation concluded this was not a segregated office. The HEW [U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare] representatives came down and said it was segregated and that they were going to cut off the Medicaid and so forth, and I said go right ahead, I could care less.”
In October 1947, Debra Polk, one of the women involved in the Haley fight, filed a complaint with the HEW’s Office of Civil Rights in Dallas, alleging that Haley maintained segregated waiting rooms. The complaint was forwarded to the Texas Department of Public Welfare. In April 1975, Jerome Chapman, deputy commissioner of DPW, informed HEW officials that they were unable to document or prove whether the allegations were true or false.
Still, the fact that Haley’s office had two waiting rooms and two separate entrances was in the state’s report. In August 1975, Raymond Vowell, the state commissioner for Public Welfare, wrote HEW stating that since the federal court had ruled in the Polk-Haley case that Dr. Haley did not maintain separate waiting facilities, the state was obliged to abide by the court’s decision. HEW, however, was not so obliged. On September 1, 1976, HEW representatives visited the Haley office, interviewed three of the doctor’s patients, and concluded that Dr. Curtis R. Haley maintained segregated waiting rooms and was in noncompliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. He was still in noncompliance with Title VI when I left San Augustine just before Christmas Day, 1977.
So far, government agencies have yet to score a point against Haley. Chiefly because of his opposition to government influence in medicine, San Augustine County is one of three Texas counties with no state health programs. In October 1971, a cervical cancer screening and family planning clinic was set up in San Augustine County by doctors and nurses working out of Texas Public Health Region Seven headquarters in Tyler. One doctor and several nurses saw patients at the county courthouse on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. They checked for TB and venereal disease, gave physical exams, and advised women on birth control methods. In 1972, school immunization programs and crippled-children’s programs were begun. These programs were funded with state and federal tax dollars and cost the county nothing. They were preventive-medicine programs, and patients were referred back to local physicians if cancer was detected or if birth control methods were advised. All 35 counties in Region Seven have these programs except San Augustine and nearby Sabine County, which was close and unpopulated enough to benefit from San Augustine’s programs.
On December 4, 1976, Dr. Haley sent a letter to Dr. Marietta Crowder, director of the East Texas Public Health Region Seven, requesting the clinic be removed from the county. Haley claimed the government program had “become competitive with the free-enterprise system of private practice of medicine … the medical community was opposed to any scheme of socialized medicine … if the illegitimate birthrate in the county could be reduced, perhaps the group would serve a worthwhile purpose … we have seen no decrease, but rather an increase in illegitimate births, and we ask that this family planning clinic be removed from this county.” The letter was also signed by the county’s two other doctors.
Dr. Cowder was invited to a luncheon at the hospital after receiving the letter and explained the rest. “They were polite but firm. They didn’t want us there. We stopped the programs that day. We were not trying to interfere with their medical practice, rather we were offering a service to people who were offering a service to people who usually could not afford to see doctors. It is true that illegitimate births rose 35.4 per cent in the country between 1970 and 1975, but is that due to the failure of family planning clinics? We immunized 3223 children between 1972 and 1976, saw 880 new patients in the four years we were in the county, saw 443 patients in 1975 regarding venereal disease. Of course, you have to do physical exams, blood tests. Pap smears before deciding on birth control methods. We have had no controversy like this in any other county that I know of.” Crowder was somewhat bewildered.
Wyatt C. Teel, for ten years San Augustine County Judge, showed me the letter, filled in details, and politely answered questions between adjudicating child support cases in his first-floor office in the courthouse. Wasn’t it simply a case of the doctors losing a little money from patients who would normally come to them for these services? “Yes sir, that’s correct. You’re exactly right,” said the judge. The judge also explained that there were no Mental Health/ Mental Retardation (MHMR) programs in San Augustine because the county couldn’t come up with a $4100 contribution to initiate the program, nearly all of which is funded by state and federal money. In addition, San Augustine does not participate in Head Start school programs because of opposition to the federal guidelines. And so, while other counties are as poor, their poverty has been somewhat ameliorated. Hidalgo County, for example, received more than $34 million during the last fiscal year, while San Augustine, even though it is comparably poor received only 1.6 million. To be poor in San Augustine is truly to be poor.
Audrey Lee Adkins belongs to one of the poorer white families in the county. She works the three-to-eleven shift six nights a week as a nurse’s aide for $99 a week at San Augustine Memorial Hospital, a trade she learned by studying nursing nights at Angelina College in Lufkin while working as an egg gatherer at Holly Farms. She is an exceptional woman, her face reflecting lost battles against work, weather, and steady pressures, resulting in premature old age.
She and her husband, Elmer, 49, her daughter, Elizabeth Ann, 4, her son, Jay Mark, 12, and Elmer’s mother, who is 73, live in mid-San Augstine County east of the Ayish Bayou. This is the social divider, the historic bayou that begins north of the town near Bland Lake and empties south into Sam Rayburn Reservoir. West of the bayou’s murky waters lives the middle class: those who are allowed credit at Johnnie and Earl’s Grocery. Audrey Lee is the only person east of the bayou afforded this privilege. For poor whites and blacks times are better than they were during the Depression. Now they have electricity and some benefits from welfare programs like social security and food stamps. No one raises cotton anymore, that hardest of God’s tasks, but east of Ayish Bayou where Elmer and Audrey Lee Adkins live, near the Grapevine Missionary Baptist Churh, the major evidences of the passing of the 49 years since the stockmarket crash are television sets, newer cars, and bass boats.
Almost every family has few cows, some hogs, at least five country dogs, more cats, two ornery but trusting mules, hordes of small children, and a truck garden growing collard greens, onions, and cabbages in the early spring, corn in March, peanuts in June, then watermelon, potatoes, field peas, sugar cane; and there are banty hens, Rhode Island Reds, or guineas. No one has clothes made from flour sacks anymore, but some of the kids have never attended school and still eat bacon-and-egg sandwiches, biscuits poured full of syrup, and squirrel. (Younger squirrels are tender when fried like chicken, the older, tougher ones are stewed with dumplings.)
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