The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,37

accident, leaving Emma to care for a young daughter, Carrie Buck.

Emma and Carrie lived in squalor, depending on charity, food donations, and makeshift work to support a meager lifestyle. Emma was rumored to have sex for money, to have contracted syphilis, and to drink her wages on weekends. In March that year, she was caught on the streets in town, booked, either for vagrancy or prostitution, and brought before a municipal judge. A cursory mental examination, performed on April 1, 1920, by two doctors, classified her as “feebleminded.” Buck was packed off to the colony in Lynchburg.

“Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm.

Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots. The word colony gave its purpose away: the place was never meant to be a hospital or an asylum. Rather, from its inception, it was designed to be a containment zone. Sprawling over two hundred acres in the windward shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about a mile from the muddy banks of the James River, the colony had its own postal office, powerhouse, coal room, and a spur rail-track for off-loading cargo. There was no public transportation into or out of the colony. It was the Hotel California of mental illness: patients who checked in rarely ever left.

When Emma Buck arrived, she was cleaned and bathed, her clothes thrown away, and her genitals douched with mercury to disinfect them. A repeat intelligence test performed by a psychiatrist confirmed the initial diagnosis of a “Low Grade Moron.” She was admitted to the colony. She would spend the rest of her lifetime in its confines.

Before her mother had been carted off to Lynchburg in 1920, Carrie Buck had led an impoverished but still-normal childhood. A school report from 1918, when she was twelve, noted that she was “very good” in “deportment and lessons.” Gangly, boyish, rambunctious—tall for her age, all elbows and knees, with a fringe of dark bangs, and an open smile—she liked to write notes to boys in school and fish for frogs and brookies in the local ponds. But with Emma gone, her life began to fall apart. Carrie was placed in foster care. She was raped by her foster parents’ nephew and soon discovered that she was pregnant.

Stepping in quickly to nip the embarrassment, Carrie’s foster parents brought her before the same municipal judge that had sent her mother, Emma, to Lynchburg. The plan was to cast Carrie as an imbecile as well: she was reported to be devolving into a strange dimwit, given to “hallucinations and outbreaks of temper,” impulsive, psychotic, and sexually promiscuous. Predictably, the judge—a friend of Carrie’s foster parents—confirmed the diagnosis of “feeblemindedness”: like mother, like daughter. On January 23, 1924, less than four years after Emma’s appearance in court, Carrie too was assigned to the colony.

On March 28, 1924, awaiting her transfer to Lynchburg, Carrie gave birth to a daughter, Vivian Elaine. By state order, the daughter was also placed in foster care. On June 4, 1924, Carrie arrived at the Virginia State Colony. “There is no evidence of psychosis—she reads and writes and keeps herself in tidy condition,” her report read. Her practical knowledge and skills were found to be normal. Nonetheless, despite all the evidence to the contrary, she was classified as a “Moron, Middle Grade” and confined.

In August 1924, a few months after she arrived in Lynchburg, Carrie Buck was asked to appear before the Board of the Colony at the request of Dr. Albert Priddy.

A small-town doctor originally from Keysville, Virginia, Albert Priddy had been the colony’s superintendent since 1910. Unbeknownst to Carrie and Emma Buck, he was in the midst of a furious political campaign. Priddy’s pet project was “eugenic sterilizations” of the feebleminded. Endowed with