Defying the Verdict Read online

  When we arrived at the clinic, my friends explained my situation to the receptionist. We sat in the waiting area until my therapist called me into her office. Today, I chatted with her as I would with an old friend. “Your hair looks great! Have you done something different with it?” I asked, although it looked the same as always. Fortunately, Dorothy had accompanied me into her office to share the reality of my situation. After the doctor who was summoned spoke to me, the therapist informed us they were checking for an open bed on the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Finding no vacancies there, they found availability at Johns Hopkins Hospital at Wyman Park.

  The therapist set up the transfer and my friends drove me to the psychiatric unit. Now that I had insurance, for the first time I was sent to a private hospital instead of a state facility.

  My friends delivered me to the hospital safely, but were not allowed to remain with me. Later that day, my mom and Karen arrived to find a groggy, medicated Charita confined to a hospital room. I remember my mother commandeering my bankcard, checkbook, and ID. She asserted, “You won’t be needing these.” I thought, I guess they don’t trust me to be financially responsible. You write one bad check and they take your stuff.

  During this hospitalization, I had many visitors, including my family and friends from church. Because the hospital was across the street from JHU, where I worked, several of my friends and coworkers visited as well. One of my friends brought her pastor to pray with me. A coworker, a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, discussed the Bible with me in what I saw as a good-hearted attempt to convert me. Overall, knowing people apart from my natural and church families knew about my condition was embarrassing.

  My time at Wyman Park was more therapeutic than the state hospital stays had been, once I was medicated out of the mania. Clinicians discussed the illness and its prognosis with me. According to them, I should have been grateful for the three-year remission I had experienced . . .

  To my surprise, for my birthday on December 15, the facility supplied a cake. I saved a piece for Brother X. Karen insisted, “He definitely won’t be visiting” and ate the cake herself.

  I was left with nearly one thousand dollars’ worth of clothes, some worn, that I couldn’t afford. When I shared my plight with my pastor, he formulated a plan. He, Dorothy, and I took the clothes back to Lexington Lady, where Dorothy was a frequent shopper. While I waited in the store, they went in the back to the manager’s office and explained the shopping spree was a manifestation of bipolar mania. I felt humiliated by my out-of-control behavior, but was grateful that the store accepted every item purchased, leaving me with a zero balance. Thanks to my advocates’ insistence, the manager even wrote off the lost necklace I failed to return.

  Because my illness was arrested before developing into the full-blown manias of 1980, 1982, and 1983, the ensuing depression did not last as long as it had in those years.

  When I was released from the hospital, Sister Hurst insisted we collaborate on a short play, Is the Price Right? for the church luncheon in April. Incidentally, by this time, the ban on attending plays had been lifted. She was sure writing a play would lift my spirits. “Even if you don’t feel well enough to participate as an actress, writing the script will make you feel better,” she assured me. By April, I had recovered sufficiently to act in the vehicle I created.

  By the end of January, or early February, I returned to work, taking a medicinal dose of lithium that was slightly lower than the toxic dose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “If you have a powerful gene, you get the illness no matter what—it will come bursting through”

  —GLORIA HOCHMANN (A BRILLIANT MADNESS)

  BY 1986, I spent most Wednesday evenings with Aunt Nellie. She shared details of the Stanley family’s intergenerational illness with me. Amazingly, she was not ashamed of her family’s history of mania and depression. Though she had suffered bouts of despair, she had never suffered full-blown clinical depression.

  My aunt wanted me to understand how my grandmother’s illness affected my mother. She shared an incident that occurred while my mother was a teenager. During a manic episode, Granny Ruth disappeared from the residence she and my mother, her only child, shared, abandoning my mom. Mama hid my grandmother’s absence for several days. When Aunt Nellie discovered her sister was gone, she brought her niece to live with her and her youngest sibling, Theodore, in the family home on Caroline Street. By this time, both of my great-grandparents were deceased. My mother never talked to her children about Granny Ruth’s mental health history; I think it was too painful—and personally shameful—to discuss. As an adult, I mentioned inheriting bipolar disorder from the Stanley side of my family to my mom. She countered with, “Your father’s sister was mentally ill.” I corrected her, “Auntie was mentally challenged. That’s not the same thing.”

  “Hmmph,” she responded, shrugging her shoulders, thereby ending the conversation.

  Because I was suffering the generational impact of the disease, Grandma Aunt Nellie—as I affectionately called her—thought it important for me to know how manic-depressive illness had affected the Stanleys. She told me how smart my grandmother had been, graduating from high school at age sixteen. My grandmother had told my older sisters and me she accelerated high school completion because she didn’t like school, and dropping out was not a Stanley family option. Aunt Nellie remembered my grandmother’s mania beginning as early as age seventeen. She also recalled my grandmother attracted “pretty” men. My maternal grandfather fit that category.

  Other than my Great-Uncle Henry who suffered a head injury as a young child, my grandparents insisted the nine remaining children receive high school educations. Some pursued higher education. Great-Uncle Charles graduated from the school of music at Cornell University. Great-Uncle Theodore was a chemist who graduated from Morgan State University. This was an impressive family record for colored children raised in the early twentieth century.

  Great-Uncle Edgar suffered from bipolar disorder as well. My sister Karen and I remember Uncle Edgar well. When he visited my mom, he always brought a half-gallon container of what we know and love as “cheap vanilla ice cream,” our favorite. Aunt Nellie described him as a brilliant man whose jobs included being a normal school principal. In her words, “Edgar’s life would fall apart and he’d have to put it back together again.” His manias began around age twenty. At that time, there was no medication for those suffering with bipolar illness. The afflicted would be institutionalized until the doctors at the facility thought they were ready to go home. When my aunt was eighteen, she managed to care for her youngest brother, Theodore, as well as her mentally ill older siblings in the family home. My grandmother and Uncle Edgar were twenty-four and thirty-four, respectively. Their parents were deceased.

  Aunt Nellie never expressed resentment over the challenges of caring for her family members, although she sacrificed her personal freedom and sometimes safety to do so. Uncle Edgar was known to bring random strangers into the house during his manic phases. She served her family, which included me. Given her experience as a caregiver, Aunt Nellie often reminded me, “God blessed you. When your grandmother was sick, there was no medicine available to treat her. Your body responds positively to the medication that treats your illness.” She also knew lithium treatments didn’t work for everybody.

  Thanks to my cousin James Stanley’s genealogical research, I’ve come to understand how our family tree developed so many disease affected branches. In a phone conversation, he shared that he was able to trace our family back to 1705.

  That year, Mary Stanley, a white woman, conceived a child with a black man through a consensual relationship. The Stanley family, a pocket of free blacks, intermarried and created their own community in Cambridge, Dorchester County, Maryland—the same Maryland County where Harriet Tubman, née Araminta Ross, was born on a plantation in 1822 and then escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1849. She was the famed conductor of the Underground
Railroad, a secret network of places and routes created by abolitionists to safely transport slaves across the Maryland line to freedom in the northern bordering state of Pennsylvania. Tubman returned to Dorchester County more than one dozen times, alluding slave poachers and sheriffs.

  By remaining in a tight-knit community, the Stanleys protected their status as free blacks. This desire to remain free forced them to intermarry, incubating certain strains of DNA. In our case, the Stanley descendants, including me, became more susceptible to clinical depression and bipolar disorder. Although this is akin to a generational curse, I owe my existence to their instinct for self-preservation.

  In 2013, Dorchester County established the 11,000-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, part of the National Park Service. For easier accessibility to important sites from Harriet’s time, the Park Service created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a driving tour that allows visitors to stop at significant landscapes related to that invisible railroad. Site number six on the tour, The Stanley Institute, was named in honor of my great-great-great-grandfather, Ezekiel Stanley. Hidden in the woods during the time of African-American enslavement, this one-room schoolhouse was moved, intact, to its present location in 1867—three years after slavery was abolished in Maryland.

  Students were educated there until 1962. The school is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this is where my great-grandfather George, received his early education. This school is a testament to the community’s determination to educate their offspring in a time when colored people were refused the privilege of learning to read and write.

  Conducting my own research at the Enoch Pratt Library, I located information about my great-grandfather George Stanley, whose race was recorded as mulatto on the 1910 United States Census. Digging through old newspaper records, I found documentation naming him the first African-American to serve as a Maryland customs inspector. He also became the first African-American letter carrier in Baltimore. Shortly before marrying my great-grandmother Rosa King in 1895, he became an original stockholder and bookkeeper for The Lexington Savings Bank, an institution managed by prominent African-American men. The Morning Herald reported that the bank “was the only one of it’s kind in Baltimore. It was supported entirely by colored people . . . [and] the institution catered entirely to the poorer classes.” The business enterprise, lauded by Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper, folded in 1897 after a major scandal erupted surrounding the bank president’s alleged embezzlement of its funds. The Afro included a sketch of my great-grandfather, a man who could have passed for white, if he had desired. Mama described him as a blue eyed red-head.

  My great-aunt Polly passed first-hand information to her son, Jimmy. A close friend of Aunt Nellie’s, she met and married my great-uncle George Stanley Jr. According to Jimmy, Granny Ruth’s sibling group was stigmatized and taunted openly. Although Aunt Polly didn’t share specific descriptions of the family’s behavior, Jimmy recounted his mother’s memory of neighbors calling my grandmother and her siblings the Crazy Stanleys.

  I have endured being called crazy at different times in my life. I understand witnesses to my off-kilter behavior lacked the understanding and language necessary to process what they were seeing. With limited understanding, they reached conclusions similar to those I formulated as a nine-year-old child after my visit to Springfield State Hospital.

  Now that I have achieved a largely asymptomatic, even mood, people who know nothing about my mental health history sometimes speak quite pejoratively in my presence about those who suffer with bipolar disorder. Some people expect those suffering with bipolar disorder to swing from chandeliers and exhibit all manner of outrageous behavior, continually. I have remained silent, never attempting to correct their unlearned notions.

  I now understand the truest motivation for my silence. I did not want anyone who had no idea to know I was one of the crazies of whom they spoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Don’t defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.”

  —NORMAN COUSINS

  MY LIFE HAD unraveled so much. I was uncertain about my secular future as well as my Christian identity. Having denied the psychotherapist’s diagnosis of maturing bipolar disorder for so long, I finally acknowledged its accuracy. Then, I reasoned, If I internalize and implement effective strategies, I know the God I discovered in first grade will help me to enhance the quality of my life.

  After being released from Wyman Park’s psychiatric unit, I contacted Elder Hickey and updated him regarding my recent psychiatric hospitalization. I almost begged him to resume the therapeutic process at Abundant Life Counseling Center where the driving principle was People Growing Toward Wholeness. When he agreed to pair his therapeutic acumen with my determination, somewhere in my spirit, I knew I would recover. I still had to convince my mind and my heart.

  Returning for a second round of therapy, I was determined to destroy anything in my psyche that blocked my progress. If I could, I wanted to decrease the frequency and severity of my cycling. I had been episode-free for three years before I returned to this bottom. I had taken my medication as prescribed, had regular blood tests, and endured yearly extended urinalyses. And, of course, I had remained in my box.

  The center now required clients’ medication management to be overseen by the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Smith. I agreed, knowing Elder Hickey’s pastoral care would excel any treatment the clinic had provided. I could say goodbye to the therapist whose tone I despised. Although I was resistant to therapy in 1983, I had learned Jim Hickey possessed the therapeutic capacity to see my potential and reflect confidence back to me. As he used this skill effectively, with my agreement to actively participate in the wellness process, my mental health was sure to improve.

  Every Tuesday for more than two years, unless one of us was on vacation, Jim Hickey and I met, discussing topics I chose. Early on, we had to discuss the self-perceived negative impact I—that is, my illness—had placed on the Cole family.

  Rather than impacting the world, as I had predicted in my senior essay before leaving Park, I worked in the acquisitions department at the JHU library. Not a menial job, but not what I felt called to do. My brother Martin once declared with disdain, “We wasted our money sending you to that school,” speaking of Wesleyan University. I retorted, “I don’t remember receiving any checks with your name on them while I was at school.” Although I had a comeback line, his statement reinforced my opinion that I had morphed from family academic superstar to family failure. And I really hadn’t drained my family financially. I had strained it emotionally.

  I had developed an ugly duckling mindset concerning my role in the Cole family. Though it seems melodramatic to me now, while viewing myself through my periscope of hypersensitivity, I decided I was the defective sibling. Some days, deep within myself, I shouted, Do you think I like being crazy? During the therapeutic process, I learned to accept and love less than perfect me.

  My emotional intelligence quotient needed a boost. Living in my box and wanting to avoid severe mood swings from elation to despair, I had locked myself into an unbalanced and unrealistically happy mood. Sadness, frustration, and anger became taboo emotions. It was important for me to learn how to regulate my feelings and my moods. I had to identify the emotions I had hidden under my salvation cloak of happy, happy joy. The most notable were fear, guilt, shame, and condemnation.

  During my sessions with Elder Hickey I considered real-life scenarios, using a technique similar to theatrical scene study, whereby I forced myself to develop greater self-awareness. I acknowledged how positively my mother’s faith had impacted me. As Lena Younger told her daughter Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun, “In my mother’s house, there is still God.”

  Formalized Catholicism had provided a foundation for victorious living. Now understanding the Old Testament prohibition against praying to graven images, I no longer accessed God through dead saints. I now prayed to God throug
h Jesus. Being a pastoral counselor, Jim Hickey opened and closed each of our sessions with prayer.

  For a short time, he had me join a therapy group. I discontinued the process. I needed to focus my energies on regulating my own emotional health rather than entertaining and being drained by the spirit of depression that enveloped the group.

  In one session, Elder Hickey asked me, “Charita, what do you really want to do?” Without hesitation, I replied, “I’d like to establish a Christian arts collective for youth. Besides studying vocal and instrumental music, they’d learn dance, drama with improvisation, and visual arts.” “Why haven’t you pursued that vision?” he asked. I had been living such a myopic Pentecostal lifestyle for so long, I no longer thought it was possible. Being an Apostolic pastor, Jim Hickey informed me that Pentecostal churches did exist in which members were encouraged to immerse themselves in the arts. “An abundant life includes more than eating, sleeping, going to work, going to church, and going home,” he declared. Since I’d received the Spirit of God in 1979, no preacher in the holiness churches I’d belonged to had embraced this opinion.

  In more recent years, many congregations have updated their views concerning arts accessibility for born-again believers. Perhaps someday I will become involved in theater again. I would love to direct a play.

  I had to explore my feelings about my parents’ marriage. I discovered I was angry with my mother for being too submissive to my dad. Although he provided financially, I felt nobody should endure emotional abuse. Though they were both part of the cycle, my reaction to what I had seen was a personal refusal to take crap from any man. As we explored my feelings, I was able to understand how unreasonable my expectations of my mother had been. Here was a woman, raised by an actively bipolar mother, who managed to keep her own family together. She was not going to abandon her children, nor did she expect us to abandon one another. I released the anger, realizing that Mama loved my siblings and me and made decisions concerning our well-being based on her personal evolution at any given time.