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poverty. I saw social housing in the Netherlands, free university education in Germany, free medical care in England. I wondered.
Now, in 1983, I leave Rappahannock County at 5 a.m. every Saturday morning, drive deep into Washington, D.C. to a job among the most fragile of society’s rejects, the mentally ill. I work surrounded by multinational, poly-racial skin tones and in the rare moments when I pass a mirror, I’ve caught myself musing about why I’m so pale and I laugh because I forget and then I smile, somewhat ruefully, and think, maybe my forgetting is what Martin Luther King’s dream meant. Maybe, after 20 years, his dream is coming into sharper focus.
(Lanise Waites lives in Washington, Virginia. A registered nurse, she has worked at Fauquier Hospital, Rappahannock Medical Center and Prima Vera, a treatment center for alcoholics in Rixeyville. She is currently charge nurse at the psychiatric unit of the Washington, D.C., Hospital Center on the weekend shift.)
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