Joycelyn Elders: From Sharecropper's Daughter to Surgeon General of the United States of America.

• Author: Dash, Leon

Up From

Arkansas

Jocelyn Elders, M.D. grew up in a 1930s Arkansas African- American sharecropper family so desperately poor that few would expect such a child - whose skin color legally marginalized her - to surmount the formidable barriers in front of her. It would have been a major achievement if Elders had just survived, worked as the store clerk she originally aspired to be, married, raised a family, and lived a God-loving decent life.

Elders did a lot more than that, however, and not just for herself. Her most significant accomplishment was her victorious battle to expand health care for Arkansas's poor while state director of health services in the late 1980s. Then President Clinton appointed her Surgeon General of the United States, the first African American to hold the post. As the nation's top doctor, Elders's plain-spoken manner stirred up one storm too many for the Clinton administration during her 15 months in the office. First, Elders suggested studying what impact the legalization of drugs might have on crime. Then she said that masturbation is a "part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught" The latter statement was too much for Clinton, still reeling from the Republican Party victory in the mid-term congressional races, so he fired Elders in December 1994. Now a pediatric professor at the University of Arkansas, Elders has not spoken with Clinton since.

Elders says she harbors no anger toward Clinton. She accepts what happened to her in Washington as the fate that awaits all who occupy high-profile political positions and are impolitic enough to say what they genuinely feel and believe. She never claims to be more than a physician who saw the worst of rural poverty and racism and put it all behind her to become a committed health care advocate for the many neglected children of our nation.

All of this can be learned from Elders's easily read autobiography. She credits her strong-willed mother for all of her success. Haller Jones, to whom the book is dedicated, passed on to Elders four bits of wisdom that could serve well any child in any American circumstance today.

"If you want to get out of the fields, get something in your head.

"Recognize the truth and speak out against wrongdoing.

"Don't use up your future trying to recapture the past.

"Do your best; that's good enough."

Elders's account of how she rose out of the rural hamlet of Schaal, population 98 ("ninety-nine when I'm home"), provides a textbook...