Ep 9: Death by Jim Crow

Lee revisits his father Leroy’s final moments in the hospital, and tries to parse out what really led up to his father’s death. Later in the episode, Lee talks with Natalie Slopen, an assistant professor at Harvard University, about ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how they can contribute to shortened life expectancy. Lee also speaks with Dr. Nathaniel Harnett, a neuroscientist and the director of Neurobiology of Affective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McClean Hospital, about childhood trauma and how it disproportionately affects Black children.

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TRANSCRIPT

My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened in Alabama.

This episode is very emotional for me because we’ll be revisiting the details of my dad’s death. My sister, Tiffany, recorded some of our exchanges with the intensive care doctor and nurse in our father’s final hours. It’s difficult to listen to some of it, so sensitive listeners, please take care. I want to understand how the stressful experiences my father had growing up as a child under Jim Crow apartheid affected his health as an adult, and the role I believe racism-related stress played in his death, first in Alabama, but later in Minnesota. The conversations in this episode connect the dots between the Adverse Childhood Experiences of three groups: the twelve generations of enslaved Black people in the US, the five generations of Black people who, like my father, lived through Jim Crow, and the millions of Black American descendants of both who are alive today.

But, if you’re joining us for the first time, you’ll get a whole lot more out of this episode if you go back and listen to the prologue first - that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.

Lee: Don't put our father through any pain with restarting his heart. We know you wanted that and we agreed to that. So now this is where we are…

Roberta: We just want our time with him

It’s 3:30 in the morning on February 28th 2019. My entire family - my mom, two sisters and me, are in my dad’s hospital room. I had been sleeping in my hotel room down the street when my sister Tiffany woke me up to tell me that the night shift doctor wanted to meet with all of us. Four days earlier, he was rushed to the hospital by helicopter after his heart had stopped at the Buddy Guy concert he’d gone to with my mom. It was a date night. They were celebrating their 50th anniversary. Though they were able to restart his heart a few times, his condition wasn’t improving.

The ICU room was slightly smaller than a college dorm room. It had a curtain instead of a door and a window that faced the hospital entrance. Every day, I could see Dad as I approached the room, with a bunch of tubes connected to his upper body. An intubation tube protruded from his mouth, and a breathing tube came out of his nose. An electronic panel behind his head monitored every sign of progress and every setback. Those four days were an emotional whirlwind. My dad still looked youthful with his hair parted on the side as always, and that gave me a little hope. But his kidneys were another story. A dialysis machine had been moved into his room. He wasn’t talking, but there was a good chance that he could hear all the conversations happening in the room.

Eventually, the doctor walked in to give an update. “Your father is a very sick man,” he began. “We see cases like this, and the survival rate is very low. There are so many possibilities with this. His lungs aren’t clearing up, and we’re worried he could develop sepsis at some point. He’s on dialysis now, but if we take him off, he’ll stop functioning within two hours. His organs are shutting down.”

I thanked him for the information and then gave him our position. Knowing that our father was a God-fearing ma