When we sat down with white nurses in the Delta, she got angry.
“There’s a lot of distrust,” Dr. Henderson-Camara said about health services in the area, leaning forward. “We don’t trust people who don’t look like us. Having grown up in a very segregated community, I know this for a fact. When you walk out that door they will laugh and say ‘I just told her that so she’ll stop asking me questions.’ But if you live in that community and sister Edna tells you something, you say, ‘Now, Edna,’ and she will say, ‘Okay, you got me.’ I have lived on a plantation and I have lived in the projects and people do not trust people who do not look like them. We are animals, dogs don’t trust strange dogs, and human beings are the same.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem here,” replied one white nurse we met. “I may be way smoozed.”
“I think you’re smoozed.”
“Do you?”
“I know you’re smoozed.”
“You think that people … are you saying … You’re saying that basically from a racial perspective…”
“If you’re not from the community—”
“But we are!”
“You are an outsider.”
“I don’t know, I have never been kicked out of a home.”
“Oh, you don’t get kicked out, you’ll just be told a bunch of lies.”
I remembered the first patient I had gone to see with Claudia Cox. He was fifty-six but looked about seventy and lived in a stale, small house with two limp dogs tied to a tree in the front yard. He was having seizures, and besides not having Medicaid and not having any refills on his prescription, the man was clutching a coffee cup in the afternoon and looked to be drunk. When Cox asked him in her smooth, warm Claudia Cox way if he had been drinking, he said no. The entire time he didn’t look me in the eye—he actually didn’t look at me, not once. Cox saw the man at the clinic the next day. This time when she asked him whether he’d been drinking, he said, “Aw, baby, you know…”
When I told Dr. Henderson-Camara about the drunk man, she nodded. “Well, a man of his generation wouldn’t be looking at you out of respect.”
“Because I am a younger woman,” I said.
She waited patiently.
“Oh, sorry. Because I am white.”
“And also because he is self-conscious,” she said. “What happens sometimes during these encounters with health care professionals is that they are so self-conscious they can barely even hear.”
I thought about my reporting trips in Turkey, in Egypt, in Greece, in Afghanistan, in America—my ten years abroad. I wondered how often it was that anyone told white Americans the truth.
The Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim visited the United States in the 1990s. Ibrahim had viewed America as an overweening and destructive empire, but according to the scholar Mara Naaman, when he arrived at the source of world power, he was struck by the poverty and suffering he saw. Perhaps he had imagined a place of frivolous, wealthy people enjoying the fruits of their reign over the rest of the world. Surely, he could not hold all of these poor, marginalized people responsible for the suffering of his own Egyptian people. In his novel Amrikanli, he attempts to resolve the fact that this empire had not only exploited other nations, it had exploited its own people.
Perceiving the terrible connection between racism at home and imperialism abroad, Ibrahim saw that perhaps if the empire did decline, it would, as Baldwin had predicted long ago, first decline from within. After my time in Mississippi, I left America knowing for sure that the promise of the country had not failed with the financial crisis or September 11; it failed long ago. It failed itself, its own people, and its own ideals, in places like the Delta, in Athens and Cairo and Kabul and Tehran and Soma, in places Americans like myself had long ignored, long denied, all in preservation of that innocence that sets us apart from most everyone on earth. We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance—our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.
“But, ma’am, I have a question for you,” Ahmet, the Turkish miner who survived the Soma mine fire, had asked me. “Why didn’t you come before the fire? Why didn’t you think of us before?”
What I had wanted to say—but did not have the courage to say—were the reasons, Ahmet, I had not thought of so many things.
EPILOGUE
You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
—JAMES BALDWIN
ON THE EVENING OF JULY 15, 2016, I was working at home when a friend from New York messaged to say she saw on Twitter that there was a military coup happening in Turkey. I immediately looked out the window, but for what, I do not know. “It’s either a military coup or a massive antiterrorist operation,” my Turkish friend, Asl?, said on the telephone. Army soldiers had taken over the main bridges in Istanbul, the ones that join Europe and Asia, the closeness of which I had, on my first day in Turkey nine years earlier, seen as hopeful.
Somehow I knew to go downstairs to the tekel, the only shop still open, to stock up on bottles of water, cans of beer, the remains of the Doritos and ketchup-flavored Ruffles, and to get cash out of the ATM. The hipsters of my neighborhood stuffed cans of Efes in their pockets; the shop owner asked everyone whether they were sure they didn’t need three packs of cigarettes. On the sidewalks, many people stood still, scrolling through their phones. Some had their heads cast back, searching the sky.