Balm in Gilead:
Redmont, Jane
TO MAKE THE WOUNDED WHOLE BALNINGILEAD Journey of a Healer Sara Lawrence Lightfoot Addison Wesley, $18.95, 322 pp. Jane Redmonl read biographies and autobiographies looking for ourselves. Even...
...Balm in Gilead is the fruit of an extended conversation between mother and daughter, psychiatrist and sociologist, and this dialogue is woven into the narrative...
...It also leads to an examination of American society, of racism North and South, of the healer's vocation in our country, in this century...
...Margaret, dark-skinned like her father, experienced early the hierarchy of skin color "so central to black folks' valuing of one another and the subject of jokes that mask deep pain...
...she needed to understand more about the connections among history, culture, and disease...
...Even when we embark on them as safe journeys into a foreign land, intimate views into others' souls, they pull us back to our own history...
...Balm in Gilead paints a portrait of the black middle-class, of highly educated families committed to working for the whole of the black community...
...between physical disorder and psy chosocial forces...
...Both privileged and scarred, the lives of black professionals have too often been absent from American literature...
...The biography of Margaret Morgan Lawrence helps to fill the gap...
...Her story challenges us to acknowledge our own wounds, triumph, and cultural strengths...
...Her dream and her confidence were shaken when the dean informed her that her application had been turned do wn: "Twenty-five years ago there was a Negro man admitted to Cornel] Medical School and it didn't work out....He got tuberculosis...
...Even in the antireligious culture of classical psychoanalytic training during the forties and fifties, Margaret Morgan Lawrence held fast to her religious roots, continuing, as she refined her clinical skills, to "be in touch with the Spirit...
...Margaret Cornelia Morgan, born in New York City and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi in a solidly middle-class black family, was the second child of an Episcopal priest and a schoolteacher...
...Her vocation as a healer is rooted not only in trauma, but in the familial, religious, and cultural traditions that shaped her spirit...
...While her classmates lived in the easy community of the college dormitories, she earned her living as a maid, waiting on table and eating separately in her employer's kitchen...
...She saw the corrosive effects of poverty and racism, and recognized that to be a doctor in Harlem meant fighting against the oppressive conditions of her patients' lives...
...Lightfoot gives an earthy, intimate account of her parent's courtship and marriage, complete with bits of letters, recipes for low-cost meals, and stories of buying furniture, juggling schedules, and caring for young children...
...they were married at the end of her second year of medical school...
...Balm in Gilead is the story of Margaret Morgan Lawrence, a black child psychiatrist now in her early seventies...
...Jer...
...In the summers of her college years, Morgan developed a strong relationship with Charles Lawrence, a sociologist and social activist from Utica, Mississippi...
...8:12-22...
...Lightfoot, in her title, answers in the words of the Negro spiritual: "There is a balm in Gilead/to make the wounded whole...
...It is also a family history, a love story, and a reflection on culture, trauma, healing, and social change...
...Instead, she emerged as an integrated self delighting in creation and concerned with mending the world...
...Margaret Morgan spent her high school years in New York, living with her aunts and grandmother in Harlem...
...The family 's first and only son, nicknamed "Candy Man" because of his fair skin and blond hair, died at eleven months, a year before his sister's birth...
...The spiritual takes a text of sorrow and turns it into solace...
...During her internship at Harlem Hospital, she realized that "in order to be a good doctor...
...In the lives of high-minded idealists, there are still dishes to wash and trains to catch- and daily domesticity has its own heroism...
...Sara Lawrence Lightfoot's book about her mother pulls the reader into the deep waters of self and family...
...Morgan attended Cornell University, where she was the only black undergraduate...
...Lawrence's ability to make connections has been the key to her power as a healer...
...Lawrence could have split her religious self from her psychoanalytic self, dissociated her professional success from the life of her community, treated illness as a purely individual phenomenon, followed the family patterns of bitter relationships between the sexes, been defeated by the assaults of racism on her body and soul...
...and between poverty and vulnerability to illness...
...Lightfoot, aprofessor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and MacArthur Prize recipient, spins a dense and intricate account...
...between public policy and medical practice...
...She determined at the age of nine or ten "to be a doctor in order to save a child like my brother from death...
...His memory haunted the family forever...
...The women in her mother's family were a powerful force, strongly allied with each other in a "psychic fortress" bitterly exclusive of men...
...Certain that her exemplary academic career would open the school's doors for her, Morgan applied to Cornell Medical School...
...So too Lawrence remembered her pain, but drew on her strength...
...Holding fast to her hope, Margaret Morgan applied and was admitted to Columbia Medical School...
...The title of the book's most painful chapter, "My People's Wound," is taken from the prophet Jeremiah: "I am wounded at the sight of my people's wound...Is there no balm in Gilead, no physician there...
...She chose not to pit one culture against the other, but remained quietly bilingual...
...Balm in Gilead is a celebration, a strong and healing book, a book for all of us.ook for all of us...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 11
