A COUPLE OF years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother’s liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather’s house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother’s trial. Why she had them, I don’t know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them—every page.
Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn’t lived through every minute of it. I couldn’t tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I’d intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant’s—but my brother’s. It was Tanner’s car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant’s fault.
I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.
But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn’t been driving that night, my brother wouldn’t be dead.
IN TWENTY YEARS, I’VE BEEN fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.
After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. “What was that about?” Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses’ station.
“Just a real winner of a dad,” I deadpan.
Corinne winces. “Worse than Vasectomy Guy?”
Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed. I told him he should call the doctor, she said.
But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I’m guessing he is not too fond of people of color. “Worse than that.”
“Well.” Corinne shrugs. “Marie’s good at talking people off the ledge. I’m sure she can fix whatever the problem is.”
Not unless she can make me white, I think. “I’m going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?”
“If you bring me Twizzlers,” Corinne says.
In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer’s arm. I don’t have a problem with white people. I live in a white community; I have white friends; I send my son to a predominantly white school. I treat them the way I want to be treated—based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.
But then again, the white people I work with and eat lunch with and who teach my son are not overtly prejudiced.
I grab Twizzlers for Corinne and a cup of coffee for myself. I carry my cup to the condiment island, where there’s milk, sugar, Splenda. There’s an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap.
“Oh, that pitcher can be tricky,” I say. “Can I help?”
She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream.
I’m sure she doesn’t even realize she moved her purse when I got closer.
But I did.
Shake it off, Ruth, I tell myself. I’m not the kind of person who sees the bad in everyone; that’s my sister, Adisa. I get on the elevator and head back to my floor. When I arrive, I toss Corinne her Twizzlers and walk toward Brittany Bauer’s door. Her chart and little Davis’s chart sit outside; I grab the baby’s to make sure that the pediatrician will be flagged about the potential heart murmur. But when I open the folder, there’s a hot-pink Post-it on the paperwork.
NO AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONNEL
TO CARE FOR THIS PATIENT.
My face floods with heat. Marie is not at the charge nurse’s desk; I start to methodically search through the ward until I find her talking to one of the pediatricians in the nursery. “Marie,” I say, pasting a smile on my face. “Do you have a minute?”
She follows me back toward the nurses’ station, but I really don’t want to have this conversation in public. Instead, I duck into the break room. “Are you kidding me?”
She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Ruth, it’s nothing. Think of it the way you’d think of a family’s religious preferences dictating patient care.”
“You can’t possibly be equating this with a religious preference.”
“It’s just a formality. The father is a hothead; this just seemed the smoothest way to get him to calm down before he did something extreme.”
“This isn’t extreme?” I ask.
“Look,” Marie says. “If anything, I’m doing you a favor. So you don’t have to deal with that guy anymore. Honestly, this isn’t about you, Ruth.”
“Really,” I say flatly. “How many other African American personnel are on this ward?”
We both know the answer to that. A big, fat zero.
I look her square in the eye. “You don’t want me to touch that baby?” I say. “Fine. Done.”
Then I slam the door behind me so hard that it rattles.