Solo Practice

"I am a product of Affirmative Action. In those days they called it segregation. When I finished high school, no matter how high our GPAs may have been, we could not attend the University of Texas or even the community college. I'm sure many whites were admitted to one of those institutions with lower GPAs than we had."

I sat on the couch opposite my pediatrician as a 40-year-old pediatrician myself and listened. Dr. Bryant Williams is the reason I became a pediatrician. As an adolescent, at a football game once, I thought I should be just like him when I'm older. Then, this night 22 years after that homecoming football game night of inspiration, on the couch opposite my 70-something-year-old pediatrician, I listened and wondered if I'd made the right choice. I thought: I don't think I want to do this when I'm 70-something.

I doubted that I finally wanted to be a pediatrician like him, still working in his office across from my high school where he was the only pediatrician within a radius of a few miles, where he remains the only pediatrician today within a radius of a few miles, where poor black, brown, and white babies go to him like I went to him when I was 5 years old. Went to him because there was nowhere else to go.

Dr. Williams grew up in segregated San Antonio. He still loves Texas even though he's lived in my central California small town since he finished his pediatrics residency. "This reminds me of Texas," he repeats each time we talk about why he settled there, in my neighborhood. It doesn't take much for his dormant nostalgia to resurface. A heat spell. A meal. An incident.

Dr. Williams graduated from Fisk University and worked on the railroad as a Pullman porter during the summer while at Fisk. It was the Canadian Pacific line, I believe. Dr. Williams and his friends enjoyed the 63rd Street beach along Lake Michigan in Chicago when the train stopped. The train returned to the south. He also worked the Pennsylvania Rail Road later, as a medical student at Meharry, as a "pearl diver," or 4th cook/dishwasher. He worked alongside the future renowned cardiologist Dr. D.B. Todd, a friend and classmate for whom the main street at Meharry is now named.

When Dr. Williams graduated from Meharry Medical College, he went west to California to train in pediatrics. He went west with an entirely segregated education from elementary through medical school.

"One night a white pediatric resident from the Emergency Room called me while I was upstairs in the hospital. 'Hey Williams, can you come down and look at this black kid's rash?'

"We were Negroes in those days, so he called me to look at this Negro rash. And I said to him, 'My eyes don't see any better than yours. My skin is black, but my eyes aren't. If you're going to take care of these kids, you'd better learn to see their skin.' I went down to help him; but he had to learn."

A former classmate at Meharry invited Dr. Williams to set up his office in central California, though he'd always planned to return to Texas. He looked at the small town and saw that he could make a life for his family there. So, he joined his classmate and set up his pediatrics office on my side of town, passed his specialty boards, and built his life. I must have been only a year or two old at the time. My mother doesn't remember me being sick as an infant. I don't know if I received any pediatric care before he arrived. I believe my mother took me to the Health Department to get shots.

That must be how we met Dr. Williams. He worked in the Health Department for 10 years as he grew his solo practice. He continued to work at the Health Department long after he had built his practice.

In the...