Take My Hand(2)

As we dispersed, Mrs. Seager pointed a finger at me. “Civil.”

“Yes, Mrs. Seager?”

She pointed to my fingernails with a frown, then retreated to her office. I held up a hand. They did need a clipping. I hid my hands in my pockets.

The three of us new hires squeezed into the break room and removed our purses from the shelf. One of the nurses nudged me gently with an elbow. She’d introduced herself earlier in the week as Alicia Downs. She was about my age, born and raised in a small town up near Huntsville. I’d known girls like her at Tuskegee, pie-faced country girls whose wide-eyed innocence contrasted my more citified self.

“I don’t think it’s real,” she said.

“What?”

She pointed to her own head. “That red helmet she call hair. It ain’t moved an inch in five days.”

“Look like a spaceship,” I whispered. Alicia covered her mouth with a hand, and I caught a glimpse of something. She’d been putting on an act all week in front of Mrs. Seager. Alicia might have been country, but she was far from timid.

“I bet if you poked a finger in it, you’d draw back a nub,” she said.

The other nurse glanced at us, and I rearranged my face. Val Brinson was older than me and Alicia by at least a decade.

“You crazy, Alicia Downs,” I told her as we walked outside. “She might have heard you.”

“You look at your file yet?”

I took a yellow envelope from my bag. I had been assigned one off-site case: two young girls. Nothing in the case jumped out at me other than wondering what on earth an eleven-year-old would need with birth control. According to the file, she and her sister had received their first shot three months ago and were due for the next one.

“You got anybody interesting?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her that was a dumb question. This wasn’t a talent search. Alicia had been trained as a nurse at Good Samaritan in Selma. She was pretty in a plain way, and there was a ready smile beneath her features. At one point, Mrs. Seager had asked, What do you find so funny, Miss Downs? and Alicia had answered, Nothing, ma’am. I just felt a sneeze coming on. Then her face had gone dull and blank. Mrs. Seager glared at her for a moment before continuing with her instructions on how to properly clean a bathroom toilet in a medical facility.

“Not really.” I didn’t know how much I was allowed to reveal about my cases. Mrs. Seager hadn’t said much of anything about privacy. “Two school-age girls on birth control shots.”

“Well, I’ve got a woman with six kids.”

“Six?”

“You heard right.”

“Well, you better make it over there quick before it’s seven.”

“You got that right. Well, I’ll be seeing you.” Alicia waved to me and I waved back.

I’ll be honest and tell you there was a time I was uppity. I’m not going to lie about that. My daddy raised me with a certain kind of pride. We lived on Centennial Hill, down the road from Alabama State, and all my life I’d been surrounded by educated people. Our arrogance was a shield against the kind of disdain that did not have the capacity to even conceive of Black intellect. We discussed Fanon and Baldwin at dinner, debated Du Bois and Washington, spoke admiringly of Angela Davis. When somebody Black like Sammy Davis Jr. came on TV, it was cause for a family gathering.

But from the very first day I met Alicia, she ignored my airs and opened up to me. As I watched her walk away, I knew we would be fast friends.

I’d parked a block and a half away on Holcombe Street to hide my car. Daddy had given me a brand-new Dodge Colt as a graduation gift, and I was shy about anyone at the clinic seeing it. Most of the nurses took the bus. Mrs. Seager had assigned me two sisters way out in the sticks because she knew I had a reliable set of wheels.

“Civil?”

Oh Lord, what did she want now? I turned to face Mrs. Seager.

“Might I have a word?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She went back inside the building and let the screen door slam shut behind her. A gust of warm air swirled around me. I could swear that woman surged fire when she spoke. There had been scary professors at Tuskegee, so she wasn’t the first dragon I’d met. Professor Boyd had told us if we were so much as two minutes late, he would mark down our grades. Professor McKinney divided the class between women and men and dared us to even think about glancing over to the other side. That kind of meanness I could handle. The thing that bothered me about Mrs. Seager was that I always had the sense I could mess up without knowing how.

Inside the building, the reception desk was empty. I positioned my cap and smoothed the front of my dress before knocking on her door. She had taken the trouble to not only go back into her office but to close the door behind her.

“Come in,” she called.

The clinic had formerly been a three-bedroom house. She’d converted the smallest bedroom into her office. The other two were examination rooms. The old kitchen was now a break room for staff, the living and dining spaces served as a reception and waiting area. From the back of the building we could hear the roar of the new highway behind us.

Bookshelves lined one side of Mrs. Seager’s office, file cabinets the other. On the wall behind her desk hung at least a dozen community awards. Salvation Army “Others” Award. Junior League Lifetime Member. The surfaces were clutter-free. On top of the desk sat a cup of pencils, the sharpened points turned up. She cradled a file in her hands.