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  • Working as the "Only"
  • Lisa Proctor, MSN, RN, ACNP

"Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable." Toni Morrison, Nobel lecture 1993

Working as the "Only"

For a teenager in the 1970s, nursing seemed like a job for women who lacked other choices. Looking at life as a vast plain of possibility, I planned on something that would be grand. The reality of adult life interrupted my exalted plans. Eighteen and desperate for employment, I took a job as a Personal Care Attendant at a center for the well elderly. What I learned there began to define who I was. The depth of conversation with clients, meshing care and interaction, drew me in. Confidence taught me that I could provide for people who were scared of the decline of aging. I narrowed my possibilities into a nursing career that I would invest my identity in.

One autumn day a Black father and White mother brought their latte-hued baby home. They carried a bundle cocooned in a creamy white and yellow newborn set embroidered with tiny flowers on the stiff polyester fabric of the 1950s. That day I met the world. I was Black in a city pulsing with skin colors. Out in the streets, my ears echoed with the chatter of vocalizations sometimes familiar, at other times including words made of unfamiliar lilts and dips. Behind the apartment doors of my building lived a conglomeration of language and culture. I grew in this world. A Black girl in the city.

My love of nature drove me to places less crowded, where green and open space allowed for unencumbered thought. The long summer days and the crisp snowy winters were expected with this move.

But the jolting change was in how this world was peopled. Northern rural life was nearly exclusively White.

The close-by small city housed Brown people in small Brown neighborhoods. So I was surprised that, in the late 1970s, I was the only Black student in my community college nursing school class. My limited experience with city hospitals was a reflection of the city, and this rural hospital provided an image of its small city and the surrounding area. The first presented a cacophony of culture to the second's homogeneous whole.

Hospitalization is an experience that chooses rather than is chosen. People have much of their identity stripped from them in the gown, the white sheets, the unending questions, all of which result in depersonalization. Being hospitalized is dependency, whether for a pneumonia that requires a little oxygen and antibiotics, or has progressed to mechanical ventilation and intensive care. Relationships with nurses tend to be that of reliance at a most vulnerable time. Intimate tasks now require help. Knowing who these helping people are brings some level of normalcy.

To be human is to categorize. Thoughts and people filed in boxes calm us and order our world. At twenty, I did not yet know this. I would come to understand this later, but never sit comfortably with the way it pulled me into people's ordering of their reality. It was the question.

"What are you?"

That question followed me around the hospital and jumped out at me from patients. At first, I struggled. I had not been around people who had never met anyone Black and who were unaware that skin hue could blend all of the tans and browns in the crayon box.

In the beginning there was an explanation, a story which included the Black and White parents and the small latte-colored baby. It was a riveting story for the listener. But it was too personal, too long, and invited too much conversation—the kind of conversation that I had reserved for friends. [End Page 256] Among strangers, it felt as if my shirt buttons had popped open to reveal a glimpse of my bra. One woman said, "Just like in the movie 'Imitation of Life'."

The disturbing character Peola (1934 version) jumped from the movie into my mind. I recalled the meat of her. The privilege...

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