This Ain't Chicago by Zandria F. Robinson

Author:Zandria F. Robinson [Robinson, Zandria F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology
ISBN: 9781469614236
Google: Sl5iAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18640633
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Passing the Test on White Folks

Whether race is a specter or reality, some black folks ain’t “stud’n’ ’em white folks,” regardless of the circumstances. For a few days I followed Ms. Mae, a seventy-six-year-old woman who does in-home nursing care and also works in a nursing home part-time, going with her from home to home as well as to her job at the nursing home, tucked away in a formerly white and now predominantly black and Latino neighborhood behind a long-empty lot of a former used car dealership. Ms. Mae is extraordinarily spry, telling me that she eats only what she grows—she has a sprawling vegetable garden in her rolling backyard in southwest Memphis—or what someone catches for her. She told me about a number of racial skirmishes, which she said are just part of black life in the “New Old South.” She said that she’s a good person, so no matter what clients do, she is going to do her job. She has been engaged in nursing care since she was in her early twenties, working for whites and blacks over the years.

Although her daughters, fifty-four and forty, both lawyers living in Atlanta, have encouraged her to leave the profession over the years, she insisted that she enjoys the work, although she does not always enjoy the clients. I asked her to estimate how many clients she has had over the years that she would call “racist.”

Oh, I done had plenty of racist ones, so I don’t really think about it. That’s who they are, bless they heart. But this new one [patient], she takes the cake with her meanness. She’s ninety-four, and she’s a feisty heifer, she can get around pretty good, but she’s got Old Timer’s [Alzheimer’s] and needs constant watching ’lessen she’ll be down the street. But whether or not she’s having an Old Timer’s episode or she normal, I’m always some kind of black Sal, some kind of nigger, colored, whatever she want to say. And she don’t want me to touch her. When I need to bathe her, she be just a-hollering. I smile at her and say, “Come on Ms. Jamison,” and sometimes I calls her out her name, too. Not a mean name, no, never a mean name. But I call her Ms. Scarlett or Ms. Mary or something. She say, “Don’t you touch me with your filthy black hands!” and shake a finger at me like this here [shaking her index finger at me], and I told her that I was gon’ care for her like I’m being paid to do whether she like it or not. I told her she wasn’t gon’ be neglected on my watch, no matter what she said.

Mae is determined to simply do her job and come home and insisted that she likes to care for people and that this is what she is called to do. She invited me to come with her to meet Ms. Jamison as she worked her shift from 2:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.