Post #22 of 40
Giving Up Expecting People to Believe Me
After the rainy graduation reception, Tom and I packed our suitcases and left the dorms we had inhabited for the few days leading up to Thomas’s delayed graduation ceremony. Thomas had earned his degree from Reed College in 2020, but the actual ceremony took place in 2022.
After a complicated COVID testing process for our Alaskan cruise to celebrate our 35th anniversary, our Lyft driver dropped Tom and me at a small boutique hotel in downtown Portland. The lobby wall was adorned with black and white photos, mostly of political figures from the 1970s. The exception was the photo of a testosterone-filled Ali with beads of sweat flying. Tom and I admired the photos from afar.
Once inside the elevator, I pulled the keycards from the tiny envelope. “There’s even a black and white photo on the keycard - a couple standing by an elevator,” I said.
“I think that’s John Mitchell,” Tom said.
“The only photo I remember of Martha Mitchell was of her on a phone - a pastel phone, I think, and maybe she was in bed talking on the phone? I remember magazines at my grandparents’ bookstore showing her as a talker, a gossip.”
“I don’t remember that part,” he said.
The hotel served complimentary beer and seltzer shortly after our check-in, so after propping up our feet and touching base with family, we took the elevator back down to the lobby. I looked carefully at the keycard photo again. It was nagging at me. What was the memory I was trying to pull up?
We ordered a local IPA and a seltzer at the hotel desk, and then Tom commented on the photos in the lobby and asked the hotel clerk who the man on the keycard was.
“John Mitchell, right?” Tom asked.
“Yes, the owner of the hotel knows the photographer of that picture and all the others you see around here.”
“I remember John Mitchell,” Tom said.
“I couldn’t identify him,” I admitted and told them of my memory of photos with Martha Mitchell on the phone.“That’s my only memory of her,” I said and then paused. Something was coming back to me. “Wait. I do remember something about her. We were flying to Dallas, and we always stopped in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to refuel. My dad was a pilot,” I explained to the clerk. “One time when we stopped, Martha Mitchell’s body was at the airport for her funeral, and we were delayed. There was a big airplane or maybe security guards, maybe secret service? We had stopped at that airport on past trips, and there was nothing special about it — except for the smell of the paper mill. I don’t remember any of the other stops in Pine Bluff, but I remember that one.”
Tom and the hotel manager stared at me.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Look on your phone. Was Martha Mitchell buried in Pine Bluff, Arkansas? Did she grow up there?”
Tom pulled out his phone, juggling his IPA and his confusion over this implausible story I was just now telling him after 35 years of marriage.
“Yes, she was buried in Pine Bluff. Born there, had a funeral there. You’re right!”
I still felt the need to prove myself.
“Okay, now look and see when she died. I bet it was in November because we usually went to see Uncle in Dallas at Thanksgiving.”
“Nope, May 1976.”
I paused just for a second or two. It wasn’t adding up yet. We didn’t usually fly to Dallas in the spring or summer. And, then I remembered.
“Oh, that was when Daddy flew us to Mexico. We stopped in Dallas first to see Uncle, and then we flew on to Mexico. That must have been when it was.”
I know Tom believed me, but the hotel manager had his doubts, especially as my story shifted from a Thanksgiving trip to see Uncle to an international trip with Daddy as the pilot.
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When we finished the cruise, I decided to dig a little deeper into Martha Mitchell’s life. My timing was perfect since Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell, had recently dropped. After I watched Gaslit, I watched a Netflix documentary called The Martha Mitchell Effect. More than the name of a documentary, the Martha Mitchell effect occurs when medical professionals do not believe a patient’s truth resulting in a misdiagnosis. In her time, people did not believe Martha Mitchell. They thought she was a crazy southern woman.
I read recent newspaper articles and old ones about Martha. I looked for interviews of her on Youtube. I found a video with Martha as a panelist on the old show, “To Tell the Truth.” The stars on the show tried to pick the panelist who was, indeed, telling the truth. In this episode, Martha was the only one to choose correctly. Every time I think about that, it makes me smile.
Almost everyone thought this Southern woman with the fancy sunglasses and fur coats was delusional when she shared that she’d been held against her will, basically as a prisoner, to keep her from hearing about or talking about Watergate.
Martha told the truth about a lot of things including her husband and Watergate. Her motives may have been questionable at times, but she told the truth.
Eventually, two people seemed to believe her - two female reporters.
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In the 1990s, a preschool teacher asked my sister to roll down her window in the carpool line to tell her that Carolyn was having a hard time telling the truth during share-time. When Janet asked the teacher what had happened, the teacher said that Carolyn had insisted that her grandfather had flown her in his airplane to have breakfast on Saturday morning. Janet told the teacher that Carolyn had, indeed, ridden in Granddaddy’s airplane to a small airport in Tennessee, where she had eaten breakfast in an airplane hangar.
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Why is it that some people are more likely to be believed than others? Sometimes a credibility issue exists based on past lies, but sometimes it’s because the specific stories seem too outlandish for the actual truth teller. And, is it too far to suggest that women and children and people of color are less likely to be believed?
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For all the truth tellers out there, here’s to you.
Here’s to those who are least likely to be believed and to those whose lives have been adversely affected because people in power did not believe them.
Here’s to the truth tellers with pure intentions. And, to the ones with questionable intentions…well, here’s to you, too.
Since I can’t control others, I am giving up expecting others to believe me, but I won’t stop my truth telling. I invite you to join me.
