`I Beat Breast Cancer'

Ebony, Oct, 2001 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

I'M a survivor." There are no sweeter words to those who triumph over this disease. Everyone in the Black community knows someone who has died from it, but few talk about the great group who survive and even thrive after beating breast cancer at its own game.

Celebrities like Richard Roundtree and Diahann Carroll, breast cancer activist Beverly Rogers and Geraldine Briekhouse Barber, mother of identical twin football stars Ronde and Tiki Barber, are four who have lived to tell the tale, as Black tradition states, of how they got over. Their story is a story of courage and conviction, of renewed passion for life, and a newfound mission to encourage African-Americans to pursue early detection measures at all cost. If they want to live.

"Having cancer doesn't automatically equal death," says five-year survivor Geraldine Brickhouse Barber, 48, a budget administrator for the county of Roanoke, Va. "A truck will probably hit me before I die from cancel, but you've got to fight it every step of the way." Barber knows a thing or two about fighting. Her father, Army Maj. Willie T. Brickhouse Jr., died in Vietnam in 1967, just before her 15th birthday. After an early divorce, she single-handedly raised identical twin boys, Ronde and Tiki Barber, by working three jobs. Her sons grew up to play professional football in the National Football League. Tiki plays for the New York Giants, and Ronde plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Barber, who later earned a master's degree in business administration, says she's not an extraordinary woman and that she simply "did what she had to do and played the hand that was dealt me." Others would disagree. She discovered a lump during a monthly self-exam, but it was the combination of her insistence and her physician's persistence that saved her life. "Nothing showed up on my mammogram, but after my physician pulled out all my screens, over time you could see it developing," she says. "It turned out I had developing malignancies in both breasts."

After undergoing a 9-to-10-hour double mastectomy with immediate reconstruction, she elected to go home the next day--to the horror of her physicians. "It killed my spirit to be lying in the hospital with friends looking at me all teary-eyed," she says. "I felt so much better after I got home, although one of my doctors called me at home to say how much he disagreed with my decision."

Despite a punishing six-month schedule of chemotherapy, she didn't miss one of her sons' football games. When she was first diagnosed, her sons were beginning their senior year at the University of Virginia. "My first thought was, `How can I screw up my kids' last year in college?'" she says. She even postponed the mastectomy for two days so that she could attend their first game. She flat-out forbade their coming to the hospital for the surgery, and arranged a "telephone chain" of her friends to notify her sons when she was out of surgery and recovery. "I wanted to be awake when I saw them," she says now. The news "took the wind out of their sails," she says, but her sons were "absolutely wonderful." Sometimes they acted as comforter, sometimes as coach, she says. "They knew when I was scheduled for treatments, and they would call me sometimes and be comforting and touchy-feely, or at other times they would be like coaches and tell me to get off my butt and stop feeling sorry for myself."

Now very active in her local chapter of the American Cancer Society, she says it took two years after her diagnosis and treatment to speak out. She says we have a cultural reaction to not "tell everybody everything," and a fear of the reactions of people in the community. "I remember saying something to one of the ladies at church and she looked at me like I had died right there in front of her," she says. "That whole reaction made me not want to say anything. It's still such a big secret in our community."

Actor Richard Roundtree kept his diagnosis a secret at first, for a bottom-line reason--he was afraid he would not work again if anyone knew he had breast cancer. "I was scared to death," he says now. "I felt it would be a detriment to my career, so I didn't mention it." He spent months "out-and-out lying" on his film physical applications. "Because you have to go through a physical for each movie, I denied that I had cancer on all my applications." He even took film physicals wearing an undershirt, he says, to cover his surgical scars. Now with his career in full swing, he no longer has to lie.

The man who defined Black machismo in the movie Shaft was in the shower when he discovered the lump that would change his life. His role as the powerful and virile Shaft didn't prepare him for the emotional wallop he received when the doctor told him he had breast cancer.

"I was shocked," he said. "I thought he was possibly questioning my manhood," he says laughing now. But it wasn't a joking matter eight years ago. "I had never heard of a man getting breast cancer, but now I know it's not gender specific."