The patients I’ve worked at hospital this semester have been so sweet. I couldn’t have asked for a better or kinder or more understanding group of people as they were to me, the bumbling student nurse. And that includes the family members who have stood at the bedside watching me bumble. I’ve been blessed.

One small segment of them stood out, however. Several of my patients have elderly black men, and I really couldn’t help but notice that they were the gentlest, most cooperative and polite of the bunch. Perhaps I’m seeing this through glasses colored by my southern heritage, but each time one of those men bowed his head to me to allow my care — literally or figuratively — I wondered if their near passivity was a remnant of their own historical role in the south. The history of slaves.

Maybe I’m crazy. Their ancestors likely might never have been slaves in the antebellum south, but with my mind formed by Hollywood movies like Gone with the Wind, I wondered if I was seeing in the eyes of my patients’ that “Yes sir” that meant so much more than a polite reply. It meant ownership, and the voice that it came from kept his eyes on the ground. And maybe it was simply their personalities.

Wherever it came from, I was endured by their spirit. I tried to respect them in the littlest detail. That is my duty as a nurse regardless of sentiment or personal feeling. But this was something more. I wished so much that if I was seeing correctly that I could be part of the healing that my home state needs between its two distinctly different populations.

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