Author of STEEP
Excerpt - Steep, A Black Neurosurgeon’s Journey
From Chapter 1, Stealth
I lifted the phone on its first ring and ordered the usual studies. It perched about 18 inches from my left ear and seldom brought good news after midnight. My new patient had run his motorcycle into a tree. He’d been unhelmeted and was now deeply unconscious. The ER told me the ambulance would reach them in about 15 minutes.
I swung my legs left and stood. Neurosurgery was my day job, a practice humming with variety. I also covered Topeka’s hospitals and the surrounding region every other night and every other weekend. These calls weren’t infrequent. My beeper, wallet, and keys were in their usual places by the bathroom sink, my clothes draped on the door’s hook. The drive to the ER took five minutes. No need to speed—the roads were empty.
He and I arrived together. Unnumbered fragments of gravel, glass, and dirt were embedded in his face and arms. A cervical collar placed in the field protected his spinal cord. Bleeding from the scalp had slowed but his blond mane was matted with clot. He didn’t move or resist the presence of the plastic tube in his windpipe. The smells were routine for that hour in that little, brilliantly lit cubicle—alcohol seasoned liberally with blood and vomit. A urine drug screen would reveal he’d made serious efforts to alter his mind.
I moved toward the gurney as the nurse began shearing off his T-shirt. She stopped just short of his collar, recoiled, hissed. I glanced up to see the tattoo covering his chest. The block letters proclaimed: “WHITE POWER.”
Dr. Craig Yorke, c. 1980s.
Our family lacked power in 1950. Our tribe did not hold the high ground. Mom and Dad’s struggle was hardly unique, and combat had begun long before I could name the enemy. Could it have been the smiling baker next door, who had chosen that afternoon to repaint his shop? Probably not. Or the battalion of roaches who migrated from his bakery later that night in search of better air, migrated through my nursery and into my crib, only to be driven back into the dark by my parents’ frenzy? And what devil had tempted me a few days later to crawl behind our refrigerator to enjoy bread intended for rats? I recall the desperate sprint to Boston City Hospital only as family lore but recoil at the smell of Ipecac to this day.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it.
– James Baldwin
These memories live. And they do not age. Baldwin’s words greet every visitor at the entrance to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. As I sit with my own past, I confront the control he describes and am reminded that my imperfect memory mixes literal with psychological truth, curating the experience and bending the chronology. Blame fades and time runs. I’ll say here what cannot be fully conveyed at Thanksgiving dinners. What somehow doesn’t come up on family vacations. Will chronicle the price and the value of success. Will get close to what hurts.
Begin with my folks, Dorothy and Craig, Sr. Mom and Dad loom large in this telling because I arrived as they prepared to adopt after seven years of childless marriage, also because I was sickly, struggling with asthma and a clubbed right foot. And crucially, because they had neither money nor fertile time for a second child, making of me one miraculous, fragile, solitary, and heavily-scrutinized kid.
Craig Yorke, Jr., c. 1955, age 7.
Craig Yorke's parents - Dorothy and Craig Sr., c 1940s.
Dad was born in 1912 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the oldest of three boys. His family had lived in that old whaling town for three generations and enjoyed some local prominence. His grandfather’s family had more than once welcomed Frederick Douglass as a house guest. His parents, Everett and Carrie, defied middle class mores by divorcing in 1917 and rejected adulthood by insisting that neither would accept custody of their boys. They were placed at St. Mary’s Home, a local Catholic orphanage when my dad was five, his brothers three and two. Everett and Carrie would visit from shouting distance on the occasional Sunday, waving to their sons through the Home’s wrought iron fence. Dad was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis and transferred to Sasquatcham Sanitarium, joining other TB patients and soldiers recovering from chlorine gas exposure in the trenches of France. He found himself alone and suddenly an adult in Boston at age 12, taking on more than his share of rough edges. He first learned at 14 that he had two brothers, and legally changed his last name at about age 20 to voice his opinion of his parents, declaring himself without family, no longer York, but Yorke.
Their desertion shaped him. He looked for explanations, but the answers shifted over time and failed to satisfy. His own dad’s boundless self-regard had birthed a combative and suspicious kid. He embodied every reflex of the streets but was fanatically determined to chase legitimate success.