Gallery of the Dead

Twenty-One

‘You’re all done, Mr. Davis,’ the petite nurse said as she pulled the needle from Timothy Davis’s right arm. Despite being thirty years old, that was the first time Timothy had given blood. The whole process had been surprisingly painless and stress-free, though he did blink awkwardly a couple of times as he first set eyes on the needle.

‘Oh, please don’t let the size of the needle scare you, Mr. Davis,’ the nurse had said, offering him one of the most comforting smiles he had ever seen. Her nametag read Rose Atkins.

Timothy Davis had used a home kit to find out his blood type and, before registering online less than three weeks ago, he’d read all about blood donation. The explanation he’d found said that the reason sixteen-to seventeen-gauge needles were used was that they minimized the damage that could sometimes occur to red blood cells as they traveled through the needle. The explanation didn’t make them look any less scary, though.

‘No, ma’am,’ Timothy had replied in a whispering voice. ‘The needle doesn’t scare me none.’

‘Ma’am?’ The nurse’s light-blue eyes had shined with doubt as her smile turned questioning. ‘Please tell me that I don’t really look that old.’

‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ Timothy replied, his tone sincerely apologetic. ‘Please take no offense. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just the way I talk.’

Timothy Davis really just couldn’t help the way he addressed others, for that was how his parents had brought him up.

Despite now living in Arizona, Timothy had been born in the city of Madison, Alabama, to an African American father and an Asian-Indian-American mother. His parents were dirt poor and both of them had had to work two jobs each just to feed and clothe Timothy and his two younger sisters, Iris and Betsy. In school, Timothy had been a way-above-average student, maintaining a 3.8 GPA throughout his high-school years, but for a poor African American kid living in Madison, being above average still wasn’t good enough.

No matter what the press might want people to believe, or what the world might think, race inequality was still alive and well in the USA, especially in Alabama, which ranked at number four in the list of most racist states in America, something that Timothy, his sisters and his parents knew only too well. Timothy had inherited almost all of his father’s physical traits, with the exception of his hazel eyes. His eyes had definitely come from his mother’s side of the family.

‘Always be polite, son,’ his father had told him when Timothy was still a young kid. ‘Always be polite. Don’t matter who you grow up to be, rich or poor, big or small, always treat others with respect, you hear? Black folks, white folks, yellow folks, it don’t matter none, but especially white folks. Don’t give them a reason to hate you even more, son, you hear? Women is always “ma’am”, men is always “sir”. Don’t be weak, son, but don’t be arrogant either. In this life, folks will try to put you down, oh, yes, sir, they will. They’ll try and they’ll try hard too, so you do your best, you hear? Always do your best. And when they tell you that your best ain’t enough, because they will tell you that, you do better, you understand, Tim? You do better, son.’

His father’s words didn’t fall on deaf ears, because Timothy Davis always tried his best at everything he did, and when he became the first ever person in his family to graduate from high school, his father begged him to leave Alabama.

‘Don’t you stay around this godforsaken land, son. You deserve better, you hear? You deserve much better than Alabama and the Deep South. You’re a man now. You’ve paid your dues here and ain’t nobody gonna tell you you owe nobody nothing... cause you don’t. Oh, no, sir, you don’t. Your ma ain’t here no more, but she’s watching from up there and she’s as proud of you as I am, son. She wants you to know that it’s time for you to go on to better things, you hear? Go far away from this land. You have a chance that none of us ever had, so you listen to your pa and you listen good. You go and you find a college far away from here. Some place where white folks and black folks don’t hate each other none, or at least not like they do here, son. Some place where the color of your skin won’t stop you from being whoever you want to be.’

Timothy did listen to his father’s words; he only applied to colleges inside what was considered to be the least racist state in the whole of the USA — California. After being accepted by all five universities he had applied to, Timothy chose to join the College of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California in Berkeley. It was there, during his second semester, that he met Ronda, the girl who was to become his wife five years later.

‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ the nurse asked, cleaning away the small blob of blood that had surfaced on Timothy’s arm once she had extracted the needle.

‘No, ma’am. Not bad at all. I thought that it would hurt some, but I was wrong.’

The nurse smiled one more time. She actually found it cute the way he called her ma’am, specially dressed in his strong Alabama accent, but there was a certain sadness about him, a dark gloom inside his eyes that was hard not to notice.

‘Is everything all right, Mr. Davis?’ she asked, as she applied a plaster onto Timothy’s arm before pressure-bandaging it.

‘Oh, yes, ma’am, everything is just fine.’

Timothy Davis had always been a terrible liar and it didn’t take an expert to see through him, but despite her concern, Nurse Atkins didn’t see it as her place to push it any further.

‘You should keep the bandage on for about half an hour,’ she advised. ‘And the plaster for about six, OK?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll do just that.’

‘For the rest of today,’ she continued, as she helped Timothy to his feet. ‘You might feel a little tired, maybe even a little weak, so no heavy lifting or strenuous work of any kind, you hear?’

Timothy nodded. ‘Absolutely, ma’am.’

Nurse Atkins guided him into a short corridor and to the next room along — the ‘snacks deck’, as everyone who worked at the blood bank liked to call it.

‘Please help yourself to as many cookies and as much juice as you like. It will help bring your blood-sugar level back up. Are you vegetarian, by any chance?’

‘Oh, no, ma’am.’

‘OK, so once you get home try to stick to food that’s full of iron like red meat, fish, chicken, or even cereal with dried fruit, preferably raisins. Get some rest, drink plenty of hydrating fluids and by tomorrow you’ll be as good as new.’

‘Thank you so much for all your help, ma’am. I really appreciate it.’

As Nurse Atkins walked away, Timothy Davis felt a comforting kind of warmth spread through his body. A single act of kindness, that was all it took. His blood could now help save a life. Maybe even more than one.