The Fat Girl Marches on Selma - Part III
In the spring of 1965 when the problems in Selma erupted, my college friend, Audrey Lazlo, and I packed overnight bags and hopped on one of the buses leaving for the beleaguered city. Participating in the march on Selma, albeit mostly from the kitchen of a church in D.C., was one of the great distinctions of my life. Not only because race relations were high on my list of concerns, but also because soon after, Audrey disappeared for a month. We never found out exactly what happened, but this was a time when women lived in a climate of fear and suspicion when it came to women’s healthcare, something women feel in red states now, 60 years later.
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We were deposited in a church – I can’t remember which one – somewhere near the capitol. There we were told to park our things among the pews on the second floor. Audry and I immediately went out to march round and round the capitol grounds. There was a big crowd and the two of us quickly grew tired of keeping pace with so many people. We withdrew into the church, where we found the kitchen (which we made into our headquarters), inspecting the larder and pulling out jars of peanut butter and big white floppy loaves of bread. Audry, whose love of food was obvious, became the head chef for the group, and I was snagged to work under her as sous chef. That meant we cooked up huge vats of spaghetti and spent hours dicing vegetables for salads. As a person who could easily disconnect from what was going on, I became somewhat out of it and began to drift around in a day-dreamy state. The two days we spent in the church turned into a blur. What I do remember is that Audry made an amorous connection with a large black man, slept beside him in the pews, hung out with him whenever she wasn’t in the kitchen. But when we were back on the bus, exhausted after our time in D.C., she didn’t say a word about him.
A month later, she discovered she was pregnant. She told very few people about this. Instead, she shut herself in her room and disappeared from sight. We thought she was in there, although she didn’t answer our knocks on the door, but since the room was so quiet we weren’t sure. We’d call out Audry! Audry! and there’d be nothing in response. Eventually we realized she wasn’t in her room at all, and that she’d quite simply vanished. Even the dorm mother didn’t know where she was. The whole thing was about to turn into a scandal.
Audry was gone for a month. Somehow her parents were able to square this with the university.
The rumor was she’d gone to Puerto Rico for an abortion. But there was another, more worrying rumor, and that was that her doctor father had performed the abortion himself. This would have made sense in pre-Roe times when abortions were so dangerous.
Why not take the easiest and most practical route, lie Audry down on an examination table, give her some drugs, open her up with a speculum and scrape all fetal material from the walls of her uterus? In my mind, that was the way it went, the only safe (if peculiar) solution to a desperate situation. A solution that spells out the weirdness and uncertainty of our own post Roe times when abortion, a health procedure so necessary to so many women, has been outlawed in red states to the detriment of female citizens. Once again, even though we consider ourselves so quintessentially modern and evolved, we find ourselves living in a climate of fear and suspicion where you have to talk in whispers and can’t trust a soul.
Cover Image: We March with Selma