Honey & Fire
She’s soft-spoken and demure. But
in her roles as a pediatrician,
minister, and anti-slavery activist, Gloria
White-Hammond,
M76, doesn’t know how to quit
by Bruce Morgan
First the darkness. In 1983, on a long drive with her husband
from Boston to Philadelphia, Gloria White-Hammond, M76, who
had always been an upbeat, hopeful person, seriously considered
suicide.
She and her husband, Ray, also a physician, had been married
for ten years. Together, they had survived the draining routine
of overlapping residencies—he as a Harvard-trained surgeon,
she as a Tufts pediatrician. They had acquired a house and
two cars; they had begun a family, with two young daughters,
ages one and four. Ray and Gloria should have been happy. But
they were not. As sometimes happens in a marriage, they had
lost touch with each other. They were desperately alone, gritting
their teeth through every day. “By then, I wanted out
of marriage or out of life,” White-Hammond says, glancing
toward the floor of her office at Boston’s South End
Community Health Center.
Lucky for the world, she decided to say yes to life. Over the
past 21 years, this quiet woman with the dangly earrings and
luminous cocoa-brown skin has made herself into a ferocious
tiger for change in the lives of countless afflicted and forgotten
people, from black female teens adrift on the streets of Boston
to throngs of Sudanese enslaved beneath a burning African sun.
White-Hammond is both a physician and a minister, and her practice
extends from heaven to hell and back. There are no boundaries
to her compassion or her care. Faith is her inextinguishable
pilot light.
As evidence, consider that the grim drive to Philadelphia had
posed a crisis in White-Hammond’s life and marriage.
Where did she turn for help? “I went to God,” she
says matter-of-factly, as though the divine kept hours in a
storefront on Main Street.
“He
wouldn’t give me permission to break a contract. Instead,
He gave me the courage to keep a covenant.” She stayed
alive and married for the sake of her daughters, and, gradually,
she and her husband began to reclaim their love. The process
of recovery didn’t stop there. In what has become a typical
pattern for White-Hammond, a woman for whom walls have a way
of becoming open doors and passages, the scope of her involvement
widened to include countless others in pain.
She and Ray decided to broadcast the lessons of their own recovery.
They launched a premarital and marital counseling service through
the auspices of the church that Ray—a pastor as well
as a surgeon—had founded, the Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood
of Boston. There, she says, they
personally advised scores of couples in distress. “We
would listen,” says White-Hammond, reflecting on those
early counseling days. “We would tell them that there
was nothing the Lord can’t address, and that if they
were willing to invest the work, ‘These bones can live
again.’ ”
Gloria and Ray went still further by talking publicly and candidly
about the obstacles to intimacy they had faced and mastered
in their marriage. Veteran Boston newscaster Liz Walker happened
to catch them in an appearance on an evening national magazine
show during this time and came away intrigued. “My own
marriage was going down the tubes, so I was interested in that
topic. Also, African-Americans in a positive role are not that
common on TV, unless you count ‘Cosby’—and
that’s off the air,” laughs Walker, herself an
African-American. Walker and Gloria White-Hammond have since
become close friends.
It was through Walker that White-Hammond first learned of the
modern-day practice of slavery in Sudan, a desolate, impoverished
nation south of Egypt where civil war has been raging for most
of the past 30 years. “If you wanted to rank the murderousness
of things in the world, this would be right up there at number
one or two,” says Charles Jacobs, an ex-journalist who
broke the story of Sudanese slavery in the New
York Times a
decade ago and who now directs the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery
Group. Once aware of the slavery issue, White-Hammond decided
she had to do something about it. Since 2001, while working
part time as a pediatrician and part time as a minister, she
has traveled to Sudan six times (most recently, this summer,
in early July) to help purchase the freedom of some 10,000
slaves.
White-Hammond has never known how to shrug things off. For
some reason, wherever she is, whether in Boston or in Africa,
she can’t leave troubled people alone. She insists on
going the extra distance—the humanitarian and spiritual
lengths that her faith demands of her—in order to heal
them.
EARLY DAYS Her quest began with medicine. When she was
eight or nine years old, Gloria White walked into her town
library, plucked How to Become a Doctor off the shelf, and
took it home to read. Gloria was the third of eight children
born to a stay-at-home mom and a dad who was a sergeant in
the Air Force; the family moved around like it had itching
powder in its socks, with brief stays in Texas, Tennessee,
Maine, New Hampshire, Guam, and finally rural Indiana, where
she graduated from high school.
White’s decision to attend college at Boston University
drew her into a more cosmopolitan environment, a milieu which
(as she confessed to a Boston Globe reporter recently) included
some nice-looking men of color. She married one of them,
a young man she met at church named Ray Hammond, in 1973,
when she was in her first year at Tufts Medical School and
he was a second-year student at Harvard Medical School. Gloria
and Ray seemed destined for a life of high-powered conventional
achievement, but that is not how things panned out. “They
could have been rich suburbanites, and instead they are devoting
their lives to service,” a friend observes.
White-Hammond had long been inclined toward the public health
side of medicine. Dr. Gerald Hass, medical director of the
South End Community Health Center, where she has worked as
a pediatrician for the past 23 years, remembers a somewhat
shyer Gloria White stopping by the clinic to get a taste
of it in the early 1970s, when she was still a BU undergraduate
majoring in biology. “She was lovely, very personable,
and seemed to enjoy the atmosphere and enthusiasm of those
days,” says Hass.
Obviously something clicked. Following her pediatric residency,
White-Hammond signed on full time at the center, which serves
a population that is some 60 percent Latino and 30 percent
African-American. The center, a large, cheerful space (the
clinic’s sixth location in 35 years) where White-Hammond
now sees patients three days a week out of an office the
size of a broom closet, has proven a perfect match. “Her
clinical skills are very, very good; her interpersonal skills
are extraordinary. She combines expertise with gentleness,” notes
Hass. “She relates to her patients as individuals.
She gives them time, and they just love her. In particular,
she is adored by her teenagers.”
This last observation is confirmed during a reporter’s
visit to the clinic on a day when two adolescent girls pop
up from their seats in the waiting area and rush toward White-Hammond
as she passes, throwing their arms around her. “My
girls,” says the doctor softly.
A WHOLE DIFFERENT TRACK Many, perhaps most, physicians
working in a place like the South End clinic would be content
to provide excellent, sympathetic care to their patients
during office hours and call it a day. There was certainly
no lack of challenge in the practice. Her patients were showing
up with what White-Hammond calls “the usual, urban
kind of medical problems—asthma, adolescent gynecology,
plus lots of social issues like academic underperformance
and kids coming from marginal families.”
White-Hammond just couldn’t ignore those gnarly issues
lurking behind the symptoms and the attitudes. “She
was seeing patients in need of intervention, and she wanted
to help these girls find creative outlets to express themselves,” explains
Nickey Mais-Nesbeth, director of Generation Excel, the social-service
arm of Bethel A.M.E. Church. To address the shortfall, White-Hammond
launched a bold program called “Do the Write Thing” 10
years ago. It was designed for inner-city girls between the
ages of eight and 17.
For three hours a week in evenings at the church, White-Hammond
led the conversation. Fourteen-year-old Niquicia Wilson was
there with three other kids that first year (“I heard
about it on the street,” she says), and recalls how
White-Hammond would announce at every meeting, “Let’s
do a weather check. How is the weather in your life?” The
girls would respond figuratively, with some saying, “Oh,
it’s sunny,” and others mumbling, “It’s
a storm today.” White-Hammond listened respectfully
to their answers, taking note of their highs and lows.
The doctor would press and challenge the girls to be more
accountable in their lives, according to Wilson. “She
would say to us, ‘Are you skipping school? Why do you
do things like that?’ ” But the leader’s
involvement didn’t stop there. White-Hammond talked
to the girls’ parents. She gave them weekly writing
assignments—on the seasons, on their best friends,
on what hope meant to them. She got them reading Toni Morrison.
She talked about the role played by influential black women
throughout history. She took them to plays in Boston.
“She exposed us to culture we’d never seen before,” says Wilson. “She
opened up our minds.” The value of this was beyond measuring. “Back
then, there was so much stuff going on in the streets—hanging out, cutting
school, stuff like that. I was a knucklehead when I was younger,” Wilson
volunteers. “Miss Gloria’s program helped me stop being such a knucklehead.
She didn’t realize what an influence she had on us. She put us on a whole
different track.”
Digging through some ragged notebooks for a sense of who she was back then,
Wilson quotes from her decade-old essay on hope. “Hope is a silver lining
behind a dark cloud . . . Hope is having ambitions to be someone successful
. . . Hope is having a future as long as you believe in yourself.” She
might have added that hope also has a sweet way of being predictive. This spring,
Wilson graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Boston with a degree
in management and marketing.
Wilson’s academic flowering was not an isolated case. Last year, working
in partnership with the city’s Department of Youth Services and the Boston
public schools, “Do the Write Thing” touched the lives of 235 girls.
A stunning one hundred percent of the program’s alumnae to date have
either graduated from high school or earned their GEDs.
PUZZLE AND PARADOX At the same time that she was urging
teenage girls toward the attainment of higher goals from
the basement of the Bethel A.M.E. Church, White-Hammond was
attempting to address her own welling desire to become a
minister and join her husband, Ray, in the pulpit. “I
had struggled with that for a while,” she says, sounding
like someone whose bedrock had been shifting underfoot, almost
imperceptibly, for years.
The option of remaining in the role of the supportive preacher’s
wife did not answer her basic spiritual hunger. “There
was a sense of being ‘called’ to the ministry,” she
explains. “That was a watershed moment for me. It was
not a matter of saying, ‘I’ll take that one’ (pointing
to a spot in the air), but rather a sense of yielding to
the call.”
White-Hammond enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, from which
she graduated with her M.Div. degree in 1997. Currently co-pastor
with her husband of the Bethel A.M.E. Church, she devotes
half her week to her religious obligations and shares the
preaching duties with him. (Ray Hammond is now a full-time
pastor as well as current chair of the philanthropic Boston
Foundation, having abandoned his surgical practice some years
ago.) Donning the ministerial robe and standing tall at the
front of the congregation, seeking to inspire others, has
not been easy, White-Hammond hastens to point out.
She is basically not a public or a demonstrative person.
The kind of shyness that has dogged her since childhood,
when she would cry every year on the first day of school
in anticipation of facing a new crop of classmates and teachers,
has not entirely left her, even as the boldness of her adult
roles drives her irresistibly into the world’s glare.
Rise and preach to hundreds of people? For someone like White-Hammond,
that was really going against the grain. “It’s
easier than it used to be, but I can’t say I don’t
abhor it,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I
never get up in the pulpit without wishing I were sick and
didn’t have to do it.”
Her reluctance is not visible from the pews. Hass, her boss
at the clinic, has attended an occasional service at the
Bethel A.M.E. Church and witnessed a subtle transformation
in his star physician. “She is rather quiet at the
health center,” he observes. “But when she preaches,
it’s as though a spirit moves within her. It’s
almost as though a light shines, and she becomes a vessel
of her faith.”
The effect can be powerful. Newscaster Liz Walker happened
to be sitting in the church one day, minding her own business
in a back row, when she noticed the Rev. White-Hammond moving
steadily toward her down the center aisle. White-Hammond
stopped by Walker’s side and asked, “Are you
ready to accept God’s call?” “I thought, ‘Who
is this woman? Is she crazy?’ ” says Walker,
still seeming to shake her head in disbelief at the experience. “But
she did it in that quiet, soft, Gloria way, and I said yes.” In
addition to her on-air duties, Walker is now a third-year
student at Harvard Divinity School.
White-Hammond hovers as a puzzle and a paradox. “Honey
and fire,” one friend says when asked to describe her
essence. “That’s what I think of when I think
about her.” She is both the meekest person in the room
and the most galvanizing. She dreads public roles, yet transcends
them magnetically and unforgettably. She has absorbed a lifetime’s
worth of horror, but she never stops smiling, laughing, and
distributing kindness like lollipops or flowers.
In person, watch out, my friend! Her brand of intimacy is
hypnotic. She works on you at a deep, instinctive level,
so that no matter what your conscious mind might be saying
(“No, I’m sorry, I really can’t go to Africa
with you next week”), your soul overrides this in a
flash and becomes eager to follow her without hesitation
down any road she might select.
SLAVES UNDER THE TREES Traveling from Boston to Sudan,
in northern Africa, isn’t like grabbing a Jet Blue
flight to Miami. You can’t get there in a single hop.
Instead, you must first fly to an airport in Europe, and
proceed from there to Nairobi, and from there to Lokichoggio,
and then from there to Sudan. The journey takes an exhausting
day and a half, and once safely landed, you are somewhere
you’d rather not be. “You do it in doses,” says
White-Hammond of her time in Sudan. “It’s hard
getting over there, and it’s hard while you’re
there.” On this latter point, Walker, who has made
the trip twice with her friend, is more explicit. “It’s
brutal when you’re there. It’s just hell,” she
says.
Once informed of the slavery trade, White-Hammond was determined
to see it for herself. She admits she was hopelessly, dangerously
naïve. “I was so ignorant of what I was getting
into that I didn’t have the sense to have trepidation
until three days before we left,” she reports. “I
figured we’d at least find a Motel 6 somewhere.”
Instead, during that first trip in July 2001, she and her
small party (including her husband, Walker, and a handful
of others) stepped into the middle of what the United Nations
has termed “the worst humanitarian crisis” in
the world. Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments
have ruled Sudan’s politics since the nation, about
one-fourth the size of the United States, won independence
from Britain in 1956. Nearly perpetual civil wars rooted
in northern economic, political, and social domination of
non-Muslim, non-Arab southern Sudanese —and a series
of attendant famines—have brought two million deaths
and the displacement of four million people to the region.
Ethnic cleansing and slavery are facts of life here, like
grief and the buzzing flies.
Travelers to Sudan are hanging by a thread. Walker describes
reaching a village where a truck was supposed to be waiting
to carry her group to the next village, 10 miles distant. “If
you know anything about Africa,” she comments, “you
know that the truck may or may not be there.” That
day, no truck appeared. White-Hammond took charge, saying, “We’ve
got to get there—let’s go,” and set out
across the trackless, rugged country in 102-degree heat. “She
just trekked straight ahead with the first group of African
women, who were used to it,” Walker marvels. “When
we got to the next village, she was already there, waiting.
This was an example of that steely determination that she
has.”
Doctor, minister, activist: When she’s in Africa, White-Hammond
can deploy any and all of her three roles, depending on where
the need is most acute. Steven Rothstein, president of the
Boston-area Perkins School for the Blind (and son of Alan
Rothstein, A52, M56), who accompanied White-Hammond on her
third trip in the summer of 2002, can attest to her flexibility. “In
a single day in Sudan, I saw her giving medical advice about
a starving baby, leading a large group of people in a spiritual
song, and talking with leaders in the community about the
local political situation,” he says.
Purchasing freedom is not like buying a can of peas. Sudanese
slaves are mostly women and children who have been abducted
violently from their homes by slave-traders and taken north.
Under the auspices of Christian Solidarity International,
an organization based in Zurich that funds the effort, anti-slavery
activists have devised an elaborate system of intermediaries
for identifying and transporting masses of slaves to an agreed-upon
neutral site for the buy-back process. The experience can
be surreal. “You go around a bend and see 500 people
standing under a set of trees, because it’s so hot,” recalls
Rothstein. Large numbers of slaves have been raped. Some
are mutilated, and many bear physical scars on their bodies.
The going rate of freedom is $33 per slave. After some haggling,
an exchange of papers, and a painstaking check of identities
to ensure that slaves are not being recycled by the slave
traders, family members are able to retrieve their loved
ones and take them home. On her third trip to Sudan in 2002,
over the course of two days, White-Hammond and those in her
party negotiated the liberation of 1,100 slaves. This is
healing writ large.
But liberation was not the end of their involvement. Concerned
that slaves were facing bleak conditions once freed, White-Hammond,
her friend Walker, and a few other women organized a group
called “My Sister’s Keeper,” designed to
help the women of southern Sudan prosper. The group has raised
$5,000 to buy two grinding mills for the villages of Panliet
and Akon, so the women can grind maize and sorghum at a faster
rate than was possible using the prior method of grinding
by hand. The money the women earn funds a literacy program
in one village and a school for 100 girls in the other.
Don’t shrink back Fighting slavery in Africa remains
grueling, monstrous work. It’s not for the faint of
heart. On her second trip to Sudan, undertaken in early 2002,
White-Hammond happened to be the sole woman in the group. “I
was way out of my element,” she says now. “It
was very scary. The weather was horrible. Bugs were everywhere.
It was wet. It was hot. It was dirty. We were sleeping on
the ground. I couldn’t bathe—and all these things
were very unlike me. I like showers; I like clean toilets.
I hate camping.” Bear in mind that this personal discomfort
was occurring in a Sudanese war zone.
The risk to foreign visitors is real. A companion on one
of White-Hammond’s trips recalls the pilot of their
small plane taking evasive maneuvers to improve their chances
of escaping detection by the militia roaming and plundering
the countryside. White-Hammond has arrived in villages that
have been bombed the day before, where rubble is proof of
the madness she has traveled 9,000 miles to penetrate.
“I’m afraid but also clear,” she says of
her anti-slavery mission. “You do it because you’re
called on and because you must, not because it’s comfortable.
A passage I rely on very, very much comes from [the book of]
Hebrews, and refers to a period when the early Christians were
getting ready for hard times. “ ‘You’ve seen
hard times,’ it says. ‘Do not throw away your confidence.
It will be richly rewarded. If you shrink back, God will not
be pleased with you. We do not come from people who shrank
back.’ ”
As she descended toward Sudan on the last leg of her second
trip, White-Hammond found herself filled with dread. She
was peering out the airplane window, and she was crying. “I
hated it,” she says of the challenge that loomed in
front of her. “I was so out on a limb. That Scripture
came to me then, with the reminder that I don’t come
from people who shrank back. Compared to what my ancestors
endured and to what most of the world endures every day,
this was nothing.”
The reference to her ancestors is a poignant reminder of
the irony of White-Hammond’s role in Africa. In the
early 21st century, by tapping her reserves of faith, she
is helping to secure the release of people who are in many
ways her brothers and sisters. Their present is her past,
their agony under the lash her own not-so-distant history.
White-Hammond has immersed herself in American slave narratives,
whose mysteries she is struggling to plumb. She recently
came across the story of a male slave who had been blinded
by his master with a hot poker for the sin of trying to read.
According to White-Hammond, the man bore not a trace of anger
at his fate. Rather, he simply related the facts of his life
for the sake of his descendants and concluded by telling
them, “That’s why I want you to keep going.” History
flows in a deep, ever-moving stream, White-Hammond seems
to say. We each have our place in it.
“I used to wonder, ‘What were my ancestors thinking?’ ” she
told a reporter from the Providence Journal last year. “Now
I think I know,” she replied in answer to her own question. “I
think they were thinking about people like me. They were thinking
that if they could hold on, maybe there would be somebody like
me who would have degrees from wonderful institutions of learning,
who would have titles and live in a nice house and see her
responsibility to do everything she could to see that such
things don’t happen again.” In effect, history
has dragged White-Hammond, kicking and screaming, to fulfill
that obligation.
Bruce Morgan is editor of Tufts Medicine magazine. He may
be reached at bruce.morgan@tufts.edu.
Reprinted from Tufts Medicine, Summer 2004
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