Small Great Things(15)

Sometime later that day, when I came in to check on my two patients, I found them asleep. The father stood over the bassinet, staring at his child as if he didn’t quite understand how this had happened. It was a look I saw often on the faces of fathers, for whom pregnancy wasn’t real until this very moment. A mother has nine months to get used to sharing the space where her heart is; for a father it comes on sudden, like a storm that changes the landscape forever. “What a beautiful boy you have,” I said, and he swallowed. There are just some feelings, I’ve learned, for which we never invented the right words. I hesitated, then asked what had been on my mind since the delivery. “If it’s not rude of me to ask, would you tell me what you whispered to your son?”

“The adhan,” the father explained. “God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” He looked up at me and smiled. “In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer.”

It seemed absolutely fitting, given the miracle that every baby is.

The difference between the Muslim father’s request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.

Between love and hate.

—

IT’S A BUSY afternoon, so I don’t have time to talk to Corinne about the new patient she’s inherited until we are both pulling on our coats and walking to the elevator. “What was that all about?” Corinne asks.

“Marie took me off the case because I’m Black,” I tell her.

Corinne wrinkles her nose. “That doesn’t sound like Marie.”

I turn to her, my hands stilling on the lapels of my coat. “So I’m a liar?”

Corinne puts her hand on my arm. “Of course not. I’m just sure there’s something else going on.”

It’s wrong to take out my frustration on Corinne, who has to deal with that awful family now. It’s wrong for me to be angry at her, when I’m really angry at Marie. Corinne, she’s always been my partner in crime, not my adversary. But I feel like I could talk till I’m blue in the face and she wouldn’t really understand what this feels like.

Maybe I should talk till I’m blue in the face. Maybe then I’d be acceptable to the Bauers.

“Whatever,” I say. “That baby means nothing to me.”

Corinne tilts her head. “You want to grab a glass of wine before we head home?”

I let my shoulders relax. “I can’t. Edison’s waiting.”

The elevator dings, and the doors open. It’s packed, because it’s end of shift. Staring back at me is a sea of blank white faces.

Normally I don’t even think about that. But suddenly, it’s all I can see.

I’m tired of being the only Black nurse on the birthing pavilion.

I’m tired of pretending that doesn’t matter.

I’m tired.

“You know what,” I say to Corinne. “I think I’m going to just take the stairs.”

—

WHEN I WAS five, I couldn’t blend. Although I’d been reading since age three—the result of my mother’s diligent schooling each night when she came home from work—if I came across the word tree I pronounced it “ree.” Even my last name, Brooks, became “rooks.” Mama went to a bookstore and got a book on consonant blends and tutored me for a year. Then she had me tested for a gifted program, and instead of going to school in Harlem—where we lived—my sister and I rode the bus with her for an hour and a half every morning to a public school on the Upper West Side with a mostly Jewish student population. She’d drop me off at my classroom door, and then she’d take the subway to work at the Hallowells’.

My sister, Rachel, was not the student I was, though, and the bus trip was draining for all of us. So for second grade, we moved back to our old school in Harlem. I spent a year being dulled at all my bright edges, which devastated Mama. When she told her boss, Ms. Mina got me an interview at Dalton. It was the private school her daughter, Christina, attended, and they were looking for diversity. I received a full scholarship, stayed at the top of my class, received prizes at every assembly, and worked like mad to reward my mama’s faith in me. While Rachel made friends with kids in our neighborhood, I knew no one. I didn’t really fit in at Dalton, and I definitely didn’t fit in in Harlem. As it turned out, I was a straight-A student who still couldn’t blend.

There were a few students who invited me to their houses—girls who said things like “You don’t talk like you’re Black!” or “I don’t think of you that way!” Of course, none of those girls ever came to visit me in Harlem. There was always a conflicting dance class, a family commitment, too much homework. Sometimes I imagined them, with their silky blond hair and braces, walking past the check casher on the corner of the street where I lived. It was like picturing a polar bear in the tropics, and I never let myself think on it long enough to wonder if that was how they saw me, at Dalton.

When I got into Cornell, and many others from my school didn’t, I couldn’t help but hear the whispers. It’s because she’s Black. Never mind that I had a 3.87 average, that I’d done well on my SATs. Never mind that I could not afford to go to Cornell, and would instead be taking the full ride offered me by SUNY Plattsburgh. “Baby,” my mama said, “it’s not easy for a Black girl to want. You have to show them you’re not a Black girl. You’re Ruth Brooks.” She would squeeze my hand. “You are going to get everything good that’s coming to you—not because you beg for it, and not because of what color you are. Because you deserve it.”