Free Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

true. The house was perfect just as it was. I didn’t care if the drapes had been picked out by someone else or if the wallpaper in the guest bedroom was a little faded. He joked that I wasn’t a normal woman. At least I hoped he was joking.
    “The Jordans live in that house over there.” She pointed to the end of the road where a tiny unpainted building stood out in the open. I’d thought it was some sort of outbuilding, but now I could see laundry hanging from lines strung between the house and a couple of small trees. A little building stood a ways behind it and I guessed it was an outhouse.
    “No indoor plumbing?” I asked.
    She looked at me kindly, the way you’d look at a child who had so much to learn about life. “Not many of your clients will have indoor plumbing,” she said. “Some don’t even have electricity. Mrs. Jordan has four boys and a girl. She sent the girl, Sheena, to a family up North about five years ago, so now it’s just the boys.”
    “Six people lived in that tiny house?” I asked. Maybe it would look bigger when we got up close to it. Right now, it looked smaller than the dining room in my new house.
    “Right, but Lita won’t be having any more, thank goodness. I was able to get her into the Eugenics Program after she gave birth to the last one, though it wasn’t easy.” She looked at me. “You probably don’t know what that is, do you,” she said.
    The only time I’d heard the word “eugenics,” it had to do with Nazi Germany, and I couldn’t imagine that’s what she was talking about.
    “Not really,” I said. “It makes me think of Hitler.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She laughed. “Get that out of your mind right now. We have a Eugenics Board we can petition to get certain of our clients sterilized. It’s been a godsend to many of them and Lita Jordan’s a good example, but it was rough going, getting the board to okay her petition.”
    “Was this something she wanted?”
    “Heavens, yes. She was tired of having babies—I think she thought she was finished and then another one came along and surprised her a few years ago. She heard about the program from a friend at her church and pleaded with me to be sterilized.”
    “Then why was it hard to get them to okay it?”
    “She didn’t meet the qualifications. She needed to meet one of three criteria. Mental retardation, for one. She’d have to score low enough on the IQ test to be considered feebleminded. Do you know anything about IQ testing? What that score would be?”
    I tried to remember the little I’d learned about intelligence tests in my psychology classes. “Seventy?” I said.
    “That’s right. You have to score below seventy to be considered feebleminded. And she scored one fifteen. A hundred and fifteen! Most of the poor folks out here barely test in the normal range, but that woman could run this farm. She graduated from the colored high school in Ridley, which is no small feat given the environment she grew up in.”
    “Oh, she’s colored.” I’d been picturing a white family. I had to alter the mental image I’d had in my mind of Lita Jordan and her children.
    “Yes, colored. And definitely promiscuous. Five kids and no father in the home? Promiscuous she is, but on its own, that’s not enough reason for her to be sterilized, although there are some social workers who’ve managed to make that case.” She looked out the window away from the Jordans’ house and appeared momentarily lost in thought.
    “So,” I prodded, “mental retardation is a yes. Promiscuity’s a no.”
    “Well, if the case can be made that a promiscuous woman is unable to manage the children she has, then the board would consider it, but Lita Jordan’s children have never been in trouble and Davison Gardiner says she’s a sterling example of motherhood. So my hands were tied there. Mental illness and epilepsy are the other two reasons the board will agree to a sterilization, by the way, and she was