By Alexandra Spensley
October 1962
Storms were no longer good for the hospital. One doctor or another would always mistake the lightning for nuclear flashes, and duck and cover the way we’d been taught at medical school: facedown, prone on the floor like a dead animal, white coat scrunched over the strips of exposed skin at the back of the neck. As soon as one person went down, we all did. We’d lie against the wall, hunched absurdly, while the patients began to yell for somebody to come and help us, hey, aren’t you people supposed to be keeping us alive. They yelled until their coughing overwhelmed their words. And we’d lie against the wall until, slowly, we began to realize that the noise outside was not the droning of bombs but a soft, thrumming downpour, a harmless rhythm of rain.
We would straighten up, avoid the patients’ eyes, and mutter excuses about how you can never be too careful. Not when Castro had five hundred kilotons of pure destruction pointed at us from eighty miles away. Not when everybody else in America, glued around their televisions at night, thanked God that they weren’t in Florida, and everybody in the world, glued around their televisions at night, thanked God that they weren’t in America.
We’d pick up the needles and start sanitizing them again, tilting boys’ heads back, checking their throats and the sclera of their eyes. We’d laugh a little too brightly, talk a little too loudly. And we’d try to ignore that the razor-thin shield of a medical coat would do absolutely nothing against the inexorable rush of a nuclear missile moving at one-eighth the speed of light. As long as we kept ducking and covering, we thought, everything would be okay.
January 1963
I knew Gloria had a good soul when I saw her, even with her sloping backside, fat dripping off her arms like excess candle wax and her snowman-coal eyes, deep-set and beady. Nobody else talked to me at that nursing school except for her, and a few of the other black girls, but none of the white ones ever did. The cafeteria looked like a checkerboard before the game’s started: black here, white there, white here, black there.
Gloria first taught me how to duck and cover. She even showed me that stupid Bert the Turtle film on an old slide projector in one of the unused classrooms. We practiced hitting the floor, although for Gloria it was more like a lumber, slow and unsteady.
“Bombs away!” she’d shout, every time, and we giggled as if this were funny.
We were sent to the same hospital. It was a TB hospital, supposedly because the warmer climate would help the patients’ lungs. None of them were allowed to leave until they were declared safe from the disease, and sometimes if one of them got out the police would have to track them down and bring them back. It was like prison. They weren’t allowed to see their families.
The white men were on the top floor, then the white women, then the colored women. The bottom floor, where Gloria and I worked, was for colored men. It was dull work. The patients had been in bed for so long that their legs had wasted with their lungs, tongues atrophying in time to their muscles. There were bedpans, meals, vitals checks, more meals, more bedpans. And at lunch, at the cafeteria checkerboard, the black nurses ate on one side of a big wall and the whites on the other.
When I was a girl, my mother and my sisters and I cooked huge meals for people in huge houses. We’d bake triple-tiered cakes and roast chicken in grease pans until burns scarred a map up and down our forearms. Then, because I was the youngest, it was, Go, Addy, get out there, and I’d carry the plates up and down the table, past nice white ladies with goldenrod-blonde hair and faces smooth as the insides of clamshells.
Those ladies were always so very courteous. They were so gracious, so damn polite that I always wanted to rip their pretty hair out right from its very roots.
April 1963
When people died at the TB place it was almost always quiet. There’d be a routine cough, a short rasp, and Bobby or Billy or Ben would keel over with internal bleeding. A silent killer. Or they’d go in their sleep, their breathing thinning out further and further like elevated air until their lungs stopped working altogether.
April is a blood season. My mother told me this and I watched it come true. There was a man, a boy really, seventeen and a few days. We’d celebrated with bland cake from the kitchens and blackout bingo played on top of his covers. There was a boy and a bed. Yellowed eyes and night. Sleeping.
And then he shot up like a nuke, blood everywhere. Out of his nose, his mouth, his ears, his eyes wide, pupils dilated in terror. I danced around him, unsure, and screamed for help but nobody came. Nobody came and I watched the boy bleed out in front of me like a pierced balloon. Nobody came and the boy choked, the floors received wetness.
Meanwhile, an ocean to the left, ten thousand other boys staggered in time to the one before me. I’d seen them moaning from the pages of magazines, limbs ragged and torn, corpses burnt out like old lanterns, walls dripping with viscera. I had watched America burn.
I had watched his eyes.
They were wide, yes, and flickering as if looking for a way out. I told him there was nothing I could do, but the blood blocked his ears and he shook his head and grasped his head and died sitting up. By the time Gloria came in, I was already scrubbing the floors.
August 1963
I have a dream, we heard on the radio. At the top floor, where I’d gone to get gauze pads and water, the white men made the white girls turn the volume off. I ran down four flights as quickly as I could, almost tripping over my skirt, and back in the black wing I saw that Gloria had wheeled everyone’s beds next to the radio. The reception wasn’t very good below ground, but all the TB boys were sitting up, eyes wide, shirts dirty, listening to the speakers hum and buzz like a city in the aftermath of bombs.
We had a dream. The week before, Gloria’s brother had died in Vietnam. He’d been bitten by a snake while waiting for a Vietnamese prostitute, outside a cheap whorehouse. The Americans didn’t care. Gloria hadn’t cried. And nobody benefited, not even the snake.
Everyone had the same dream. It was, more or less, to get home.
September 1963
On my days off, I’d walk, walk fast, trying to take in everything and forget everything simultaneously. Florida was black men selling oranges on the side of the road, leather-skinned lizards, hot, drowsy rain. Bye Bye Birdie posters downtown, next to the two water fountains and the two bathrooms and the two white men who watched me walk hungrily.
A boy died coughing on his own blood. I burnt my arms when they were submerged in cooking grease. Gloria’s brother died in Vietnam. Waiting for a whore. Everyone waiting. TB boys were waiting to be cured. Martin Luther King Jr. was waiting for his dream. I was waiting for America to stop slapping me and my sisters across the face, waiting for the blonde ladies to get up and make their own damn food.
And always we thought of the bombs. Duck and cover. Protect exposed skin. Leave the TB patients, squirming in their beds. They were weak anyway, and only the strong survive. Only the Americans survive. Unless a snake catches them, waiting in line. Or they’re black. Or both.
November 1963
I’d been leaning across the bed when the man in it grabbed my wrist tight in his own. His lips rattled when he whispered, laced in dried phlegm and blood.
“It’s true?” he asked, urgently. “That nice boy from Boston got shot today?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I fought the urge to wipe his lips. It might be degrading. We weren’t allowed to degrade.
He pointed up; he’d been listening. I left him and went with Gloria up the four flights to the top. The white boys sure as hell had their radio up this time.
“—Kennedy shot in the head in Dallas,
Johnson sworn in on plane—”
We reeled. Behind the door, the white nurses were sobbing. Talking about Jackie and the blood on her stockings, Jackie reaching back in the motorcade to grab fistfuls of her husband’s head. A thousand different forms of bombs.
February 1964
Things were changing. Birmingham, Atlanta, Tennessee. People riding buses and sitting in restaurants. We unveiled our own missiles, and we opened warfare against the checkerboard. We were ready to start the game.
One day, some representatives from the NAACP came to talk with the hospital administrator.
The next day, after we’d dropped our nukes, the destruction came.
We were to start moving people. Some of the black boys would be moved to the top floor, some of the white boys to the bottom; the TB girls, too. The hospital fought itself. It was a swarm of curses, dropped blood, lost clothes, empty bags, moved suitcases. Nobody wanted to change, and Gloria and I had to drag the men, heft their beds and carry them up the narrow stairs. This was the dream, but nobody was enjoying it. Instead, there were coughing fits and complaints. Chaos lengthened. The men would have fought each other, if they hadn’t already wasted away to nearly nothing.
I spent the morning praying for lunch to come, back aching with the weight of the cots. But when Gloria and I walked into the cafeteria, we saw that the concrete wall had been partway torn down. There was a gaping hole in the middle of it, and we could see straight through to the white side, nearly identical to our own.
That day, we ate in silence. After us black girls had picked our way over the remnants of the wall and taken our seats at the end of the whites’ table, nobody spoke. There was only the quiet crinkling of hospital food packages, the soft ringing of silverware. Things were happening too quickly. I felt myself wrapped in America’s false hug, wondering what would have to give. We weren’t there, really. We were only waiting.
Later, after all the beds had been moved at last and the men lay grumbling in their covers, we had a duck-and-cover drill in our new positions. Every nurse and every doctor dived against the wall, trying to make themselves small, smaller, smallest until they could not be hurt anymore. And we lined up black, then white, white, then black. A nuke is colorblind. The color of your skin doesn’t matter when you’re one button away from death.
The next day, the lunchroom looked like a checkerboard again. We sat on one side of the wall, and the whites sat on the other, and we all pretended not to see each other through the angry tear in the concrete.
Alexandra Spensley attends Avon Lake High School in Ohio. Her writing has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and she enjoys reading and running.