The defining characteristic of Bonita Hamilton is that she doesn’t play by anyone else’s rules. So when her hand shoots in the air for the seventh time, and when Madeleine points to a prim woman two seats farther down the row, Bonita stands up. All six feet of her.
“I think I love this woman,” Ruby Jo says.
“Dr. Sinclair.” Bonita talks out of turn, not waiting for approval. “Can you tell us something more about these special populations?”
“I think I’ve already said enough on that topic, Miss Hamilton.”
Miss Hamilton seems to disagree.
“Just a few examples.”
Madeleine’s lips force a smile. “Like I said—”
“Prisons? Orphanages? Sanctuary cities?” Bonita pauses and smiles back at the camera with false ingenuousness. “Or, maybe, state schools?”
“We’re in the process of defining the testing populations. Thank you.” Behind her podium, Madeleine Sinclair straightens a moment too late. Her voice has already cracked.
“Thank you, Madam Secretary,” Bonita says and takes her seat. “Oh. One more thing. It’s really a question for Ms. Peller.” She turns toward where Petra Peller sits on the stage. “How did you come up with the name for your company, the Genics Institute? I’ve always been curious about that.”
I’m not curious, not after Oma told us all about Uncle Eugen, not after I looked up his institute and discovered its real name. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
Eugenic. Well-born.
All Madeleine Sinclair’s talk about a better America and better families and better humans weaves itself into one horrible, sickening concept.
“My granny was in one of them state schools back in the fifties,” Ruby Jo says when Lissa clicks the television off. “Looks like we are, too.”
FORTY-FIVE
When I think back, when I remember sweating through four years of American history, here’s what I recall: dates, presidents’ names, more dates, which archduke’s assassination started which world war, pages and pages of facts and timelines and annexations of land, and more dates.
What Ruby Jo tells us now was definitely not on the syllabus, but it matches everything I read in Malcolm’s books and on the Internet at my parents’ house. The difference is she’s attaching a real name to the nightmare.
“Granny says the testing vans came around a few times a year. Mostly they were these nasty women who made all the kids answer a bunch of bullshit questions.” She looks at Lissa. “Sorry. My momma always said I had a dirty mouth.”
Lissa laughs. “Doesn’t bother me a fucking bit.”
“It was a Supreme Court justice who said three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Ruby Jo tells us. “Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. That’s Holmes, not Hitler. Can you believe it?” Ruby Jo stops, takes a long drink of water, and starts again. “My granny was on a bus to nowhere sooner than you could say Jack Robinson. See, they had a list of undesirables based on the testing and whatnot. And she was no dummy. Or imbecile. Just had some of them mood swings, you know? The kind they treat with pills nowadays. Take a Prozac, the doctors tell you. Back then, there weren’t any pills. But institutions, yeah. Hundreds of ’em.”
I think of my mother telling me about the school in Massachusetts, of Malcolm dismissing her with a bored “No one’s complained so far.”
“They came around a lot to our town,” Ruby Jo continues. “With their tests and their clipboards and their snooty manners. Well, they weren’t snooty at first, my granny said. The women were all smiles and sunshine. They even gave out lollipops to the kids after the testing went on. Funny, though, there weren’t any lollipops at the state school they sent her to. And there definitely weren’t any smiles.”
In the next half hour, we find out Ruby Jo’s maternal grandmother spent two years in a state school, all because of a few test-happy nonscientists who thought the world would be better without her. Everything Ruby Jo has told us sounds like bad science fiction, but it isn’t.
“But she got out. It all ended,” I say.
“Well, I’m here, ain’t I? Ruby Jo Pruitt, daughter of Lester Pruitt,