by Tina Coffin

In the summer of 1995 when Little Rock Friends Meeting had bought its meeting house, passers-by on Markham Street would sometimes see a woman in the yard by the fence vigorously swinging a pick ax. It was Rosalind Abernathy breaking up the rocky ground to prepare beds for a flower garden. This would have been a strenuous activity for someone 20 years younger. Ros was at that time over 60 years of age. As a result almost every Sunday the mantle in the meeting room is graced by lovely bouquets of flowers, raised, picked and arranged by Ros. She not only comes early on Sunday to do the work, but goes over several times a week during the hot part of the summer to water the plants. When Ros has to go out of town, it takes several Friends to take over her task!

This gardener has been in the business "of caring for" for a long time, in her professional life, for her family, the Society of Friends, the city, the country, and, especially, individual people. For example, during the 27 years I have known Ros she has taken older friends to the theatre, to concerts and to meeting; she has taken teenagers who were not her children to Friends General Conference Gatherings and Yearly Meeting sessions, and she has visited isolated Friends around the state whenever she happened to be in the area. Her dedication to patients is exemplary. One day Ros called to reschedule the interview I was going to do with her that evening. "I need to review the charts of the patients I am going to see in clinic tomorrow," she said. In my experience, doctors read charts as they enter the room where a patient is waiting. How lucky these young patients of her’s are. She modestly claims she only does this for her own convenience.

Rosalind Abernathy was born in Greenville, S.C., the only child of a physician father and a mother who was a research scientist. Her father, David, had contracted tuberculosis when he was working as a medical researcher after med school, and his wife Susan was a graduate student at Barnard College. David entered a sanatorium in upstate New York. He recovered and went to work as a physician-researcher at a similar nearby institution, the New York State TB Sanatorium. When Susan became pregnant they decided she should go home to Greenville to deliver the baby. The sanatorium was in a rural part of the state and there were no obstetricians on staff. After the birth they returned to New York where they lived until Ros was 5.

The family moved to Durham, NC when David became professor of bacteriology and associate professor of medicine at the new Duke University School of Medicine. Susan did research in nutrition. It was unusual for women in those days to work outside the home, and Ros would sometimes hear disapproving remarks from friends’ mothers.

Her parents had been raised in the Baptist Church, but were no longer involved. Once in a while Ros would go to Sunday school with some of her friends, but she never attended church services. A Quaker lawyer her parents had befriended while living up north, came to visit one day when Ros was in her teens and suggested she attend Westtown, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania.

She entered Westtown as an 11^th grader, a year younger than other students, since she had finished 7^th and 8^th grade in one year. The school suggested she repeat 10^th grade, but Ros wouldn’t hear of it.

So at Westtown School Ros, for the first time in her life, experienced Quaker meetings for worship, which were held twice a week. "What was your reaction to this unusual, silent form of worship?" I asked. "It was fine with me. You can always think of something, you know. I had never gone to church, been in Sunday school a couple of times, but I never attended services; so Quaker meeting didn’t strike me as strange."

In the meantime, back in Durham, her parents together with several other faculty members had started a Quaker Meeting. For the rest of their lives in Durham, David and Susan were faithful members of that meeting eventually donating land to build a meeting house there.

Ros was a senior at Westtown when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the first of several historic events that had an impact on her personal life. (Without the war that followed, she probably would not have met her husband.) In the fall of 1942 Ros entered Duke University as an undergraduate chemistry major

By taking courses during the summer Ros was able to graduate in less than 3 years. Her first summer she attended Barnard College in New York City. A few of her high school friends happened to be in the city too and together they enjoyed what the city had to offer. "For only $0.55 you could sit in the gallery and see a play!" Ros loved it and this love of the theatre has stayed with her all of her life.

During her sophomore year the dean suggested Ros apply to medical school. She hadn’t thought of it, but liked the suggestion and put in an application. She was accepted. Of the 70 students in the medical school class at Duke that she entered, 10 of them were women. There had never been that many. Eight of them graduated together, and Ros is the only one still working.

One of her classmates was a young man called Robert Abernathy. He had ended up in medical school at Duke in a somewhat round-about way. He had joined the army while an undergraduate at Davidson College and was sent to MIT to take courses in engineering. The program closed down after 6 months and the army-students were given the option to apply for pre-med. Robert was one of two who were accepted, and, after doing pre-med work at Yale eventually ended up at Duke. This young fellow student was the lab partner of one of Ros’s classmates. Having a boyfriend herself, she kept telling Ros to pay attention to him. Then one summer, when Ros was an exchange student at Guy’s hospital in London, she received the most wonderful letters from this somewhat quiet man. With beaming eyes Ros told me that that "clinched" the relationship. They were married the summer both graduated from medical school.

The sanatorium where her father had been a patient and later a physician had, for a number of years, invited students from Duke medical school to come and learn about tuberculosis. That summer the young couple went up. "It was our honeymoon; they provided room and board!" said Ros. The honeymoon was followed by internships and residencies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Robert in internal medicine, Ros in pediatrics. They had no car and lived close to the university. The medical library was a long walk across campus, and the two transplanted southerners thought it was the pits to have to trudge that far through the snow. On Sundays they attended Quaker meeting.

After 2 years, Bob had to leave to serve in the Korean War. (He worked for a short time in a MASH unit very similar to the one from the TV series). Ros was expecting their first child. Just as her mother had returned to her hometown to give birth, so Ros went back to her parents in Durham where baby Robbie was born. It would be a year before Bob would see his son. The grandparents were thrilled to have a little boy at home. Ros hired a woman to help take care of the child while she finished her pediatric residency at Duke, and trained an additional 3 months with a pediatric allergist. Robert returned after 21 months, and after an additional 3 months at Fort Bragg, Ros and Bob were finally able to pick up their professional lives again.

They went back to Minneapolis for Robert to finish his residency, and to do research. After 4 years he was awarded a Ph.D. In the meantime, Ros worked as a school physician, had two more children - David and Susie - and did medical research. In 1957 Dr Ebert of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences offered Robert an appointment in the department of internal medicine. He would work in infectious diseases and teach microbiology. After making sure there would be professional opportunities for Ros, the two young doctors and their three children camped their way down to Arkansas. They arrived the week governor Faubus called out the National Guard. "We had expected to come to an enlightened place," said Ros, "both the Charleston and Hoxie school districts in rural Arkansas had peacefully integrated their schools in 1954."

The Friends Meeting that they started attending had been actively arranging interracial outings in the years before the school integration crisis. Now they wondered what else they could do for the community. They appealed to the American Friends Service Committee, which sent Thelma Babbitt, a community organizer from Vermont. Thelma talked with Little Rock community leaders, both black and white, and with the help of the Meeting, she organized interracial gatherings for adults and camps for teenagers at Camp Aldersgate.

Ros, who had joined the pediatric clinic at UAMS, became a member of the Women’s Emergency Committee, the organization that worked to keep the schools open during the integration crisis. In ‘58 another child, Tommie, was born. "I couldn’t do much," said Ros, "I had a large family of young children and was working as a pediatrician." But she was involved enough to become friends with Vivion Brewer, the president of the W.E.Committee. Vivion and her husband Joe started to attend Friends Meeting. When John and I arrived in Little Rock in1980, we would meet at the Brewer’s house on Bearskin Lake near Scott about once a year. After both of them died, their house was still available to Friends for retreats. In 1992 for instance Friends held a retreat there to help them discern if they were called to buy a meeting house.

To write the history of Rosalind Abernathy during her years in Little Rock means, to some extent, writing the history of the Friends Meeting, because for so many years, Ros WAS the meeting.

In the late nineteen fifties and early sixties Friends met for a while at Pulaski Heights Christian Church. There were two large families each with 5 children, the Reagans and the Abernathys. Ros and Bob’s youngest child Doug was born in ’62. In addition to the 10 children there were a dozen or so adults. The meeting had been in existence since 1952, and it seemed a good time to become a monthly meeting. A request was made to FWCC to oversee the process, since there was as yet no yearly meeting in this part of the country. FWCC asked a Friend from Houston to visit the Little Rock Meeting, and it was then decided to become a preparative meeting under the care of Dallas Friends Meeting instead. During those years the Little Rock Meeting also opened a savings account for a "meeting house fund." The future seemed bright.

In the late sixties they started to meet at the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist student center on the UALR campus. This was during the Vietnam War and some students attended for a while, but none stayed after they realized how slow the Quaker decision making process was. This was the era of "we want it now!" One day, Friends were told to leave the Wesley Foundation. It had become known that the meeting was considering starting a draft counseling program. They were no longer welcome in the building. A new place needed to be found and they eventually ended up at St Francis house.

Around that time several families and individuals moved out of town. Finally the meeting became so small that Bob and Ros were the only ones left. They would meet at St Francis House, just the two of them. Marianne Lockard remembered her first time ever in a Quaker meeting in the mid seventies. "I found two people plumping up pillows in a room at St Francis House, and then we had a silent worship."

It was a difficult time. I asked Ros if she ever asked herself if it was worth it to keep meeting going; didn’t she just want to give it up? "No, I felt I needed to keep it going. I don’t give up very easily – just as with my patients; I keep working on them. If I give up on somebody, it’s really the end of the line." But Ros and Bob did decide to move the meeting to their home.

By the late seventies, meeting started to grow again. Ros’s parents David and Susan Smith, long since retired, had moved to a retirement facility in town. They both attended meeting, and after David died in 1980, Ros would bring Susan. In 1982 the meeting moved to Winfield United Methodist Church downtown, where they met till 1995 when the meeting house was bought. After Susan had died in 1983, meeting received money from her estate for its meeting house fund, which increased substantially and has since been called the Susan Smith Memorial Fund.

Around 1980 Ros’s youngest son left home, and after that Robert no longer attended meeting on a regular weekly basis. He still is the gracious host for the Christmas potluck at their house.

In the late seventies the Arkansas state legislature passed a law which recognized a wedding under the care of a Quaker Meeting to be legal. One of the first couples married in a Quaker meeting in Little Rock was Mike and Marilyn Erwin. A few years later Ros and Bob’s oldest son Robbie was married in a Quaker ceremony held at Pinnacle Mountain State Park.

During all these years Ros was able to work as a pediatrician. She had joined the department of pediatrics at UAMS in 1957 and is still on the faculty. One of their sons, David, followed in his parents' footsteps. He graduated from Duke medical school and did his residency at UAMS in Little Rock. As a result there were three Dr Abernathys on campus for a while in the 1980s.

In 1976 Ros became the pediatric consultant for the state tuberculosis program and started doing allergy clinics in Health Units around the state. In 1993 Ros moved her office to the Health Department, which was headed by her former student Joycelyn Elders. She continued her TB work and did more allergy clinics. Ros would travel to the state’s health units in Blytheville, Wynne, Monticello, Dermott, Helena or Texarkana for the clinics. And she still saw patients at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. In 1995 Medicaid changed to managed care, and the health department closed down virtually all its pediatric clinics: no more well-baby clinics or school-based clinics. Children were only seen for immunizations up until the age of 5. These decisions were not applauded by this dedicated pediatrician. Within the health department she moved from Child-health to the TB office. She has been there ever since. In 1998 she started an allergy clinic in Lake Village as a satellite of Children’s Hospital. She still goes there once a month. And while she hopes someone is willing to take over the TB work she is doing, she doesn’t plan to quit the allergy work.

At the end of the interview I asked Ros about her commitment to the meeting:"You have such an extraordinary commitment to the meeting; what is it in Quakerism that made you so faithful?"

Ros: "It is the only religious organization I ever belonged to. I never tried anything else, even as a child after I attended Sunday school. I appreciate the beliefs, pacifism – although I don’t know how far I would go with that –, equality, treating your fellow men appropriately, the liberal attitudes; and I appreciate the silent worship."

And answering a question about being able to be both a professional and the mother of a large family: "You can’t do it without a cooperative father, and Bob was!

About growing older: "Thank goodness, I have had excellent heath. I have had depressions on and off for a number of years, but never missed a day of work because of it. I was one of these people who thought you had to do everything and do it right. You can get yourself in a corner. Twenty years ago I decided I didn’t need to be perfect, and I have had no problems ever since. Of course, anxiety may not have been the only cause; my mother also suffered from depression.

"I feel very privileged to have had this long association with friends in and out of Quakerism, to have been in the choral society since the 1950s. I have loved the theatre, music and camping."

Tina: "Could you describe yourself in one word?"

Ros: "Persistent"

Tina Coffin is a member of Little Rock Friends Meeting and the editor of The Carillon.