Soul Nurse

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Sally Hughes, R.N., had a nurse’s dream come true at Canton General. Her boss was the brilliant chief surgeon, Dr. Stan Thorne. She was respected for her dedication, talent and poise. And two men loved her—the bitter but handsome Dr. Jim Dawson and Stan himself. But Stan was white. Could Sally, a black girl, even hope to surmount the difficulties their love presented in the small New England town? Perhaps she would find a way … then tragedy struck. Canton’s mayor is mysteriously stabbed, a black person is unjustly accused and Sally faces a desperate choice—one that involves not only her man but the meaning of her life. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s fortunate the doctor also happens to be adept with a knife.” 

“You’re not the least female in that respect. Your punctuality constantly amazes me.”

“It was those who clung most precariously to a rung of the status ladder who refused to make a break with the pat order of things.”

“You need a steady hand for that brain tumor today.”

“Isn’t that the goal of most of the people these days? They want drugs to make everything seem rosy from the cradle to the grave. It’s no longer fashionable to try and change things. You just take drugs so you won’t notice them.”

“Like a scalpel frankness should be used only by skilled hands, otherwise it can work great havoc.”

“Interns devour little girls like you. You be careful with them.”

“Don’t be so bitter. You’re much too pretty.”

“Loud talk brings on more loud talk.”

REVIEW:
A nurse romance novel, which necessarily delves into the life of a woman, is always a little problematic when written by a man. A nurse novel about a Black nurse is especially unfortunate when it’s written by a white man, and I’ll admit I am even more wary when the author in question is one I’ve never liked, here William Daniel Ross writing under one of his many pseudonyms, who has earned only a C+ average across 16 reviews. And perhaps not surprisingly, this book is somewhat problematic—yet not nearly as bad as I had feared it would be, so that’s a win. 

Sally Hughes is a Black scrub nurse working at Canton General Hospital in New Hampshire’s “largest seacoast city,” which at the time when this book was written was Portsmouth. (I have to state that I once lived in Portsmouth, so I have some expertise regarding this setting.) Sally works alongside Dr. Stan Thorpe, who lost his wife to breast cancer three years ago, leaving him with a now-15-year-old daughter Karen, with whom Sally is especially close and sees regularly. Stan also has fond feelings for Sally, and repeatedly pleads with her to marry him, but though she “perhaps even loved” Stan, she is constantly talking herself out of a relationship with him entirely on racial grounds. “What would be the community’s reaction? Would it harm his career?” she worries and considers, “There were things she and Dr. Stan Thorpe would never be able to share, points of view, emotional feelings about remembered days long past, pride of race and color.” She seldom gives any thought about whether being with Stan and Karen makes her happy—which obviously it does, as she spends an enormous amount of time with them. “It was useless to pretend that being with Stan Thorpe and Karne didn’t mean anything to her. Probably she gained a great deal more from it than they did. For just a short time she was allowed to feel part of a family unit.”

There’s another man in her orbit, Dr. Jim Dawson. “It was only natural that they should be attracted to each other,” we are told, but it isn’t until 18 pages later that we learn that Jim is Black, which I guess is supposed to be the reason why their attraction is “natural”—in the same way it’s natural for every white woman to be attracted to every white man? Jim is an exceptionally talented doctor who has built up a good practice in this predominantly white community, a fact that is repeated often with a tinge of surprise. Jim is described as the stereotypical angry Black man barely under control: “Sally was fearful for him. She knew better than most of the others that beneath his calm professional exterior and mocking, sometimes bitter humor there was an explosive temper. Although now it was carefully controlled, the day might come when some insignificant incident might be enough to touch it off.”

Well, you can be sure something happens, but it’s not insignificant. First the mayor is stabbed in his own driveway—saved in the OR by Dr. Stan Thorpe and his right-hand gal Sally—but the mayor has a slimy colleague, Sam Grayson, who is intent on promoting the idea that the perpetrator was a Black man from Boston—he even uses the N-word—though the mayor declares he never saw his assailant, and there’s not even any evidence outside of Sam’s say-so that any Boston Blacks were in town that night.

Then it is announced that a new “cut off” to Interstate 95 is planned—and it will be passing directly through Blair Settlement, a neighborhood of 150 families. (The actual number of Black people living in Portsmouth in 1970 was about 116, or about 0.4% of the total population, so the book’s number is wildly unrealistic, as is the idea that Route 95 would need an additional on-ramp in this fairly rural community.) But the impending destruction of the neighborhood sends Jim into a fury. Sally tries to assuage Jim repeatedly that “it may not be as bad as it seems,” because “she knew it was going to take a great deal of patience and tact to save this man she was so fond of from taking a big leap into trouble and destroying his career.”

Jim is having none of it, and repeatedly insults Sally, telling her, “I can do without your well-integrated caution,” and calling her a “turncoat,” a “would-be Delilah” who has “lost her identity.” He’s bringing in a big-time organizer from a Black Power group to speak at a meeting he’s calling to protest the plans, and Sally is afraid the move will end in violence, and that general opposition to the project—currently pretty high, according to hospital gossip—will evaporate. Soon Jim is getting hate calls in his office, and he’s decided to leave the area for a big city. “People here only want me around when they’re too sick to think of anything but their own white skin. Well, I won’t be at their beck and call. I’m leaving,” he announces, forgetting that all doctors are “called” by their patients when they’re ill. He wants Sally to come with him, but she’s not sure: “I’d be afraid of being tainted by your twisted thinking, by your stupid hates. Emotional illness is sometimes like physical sickness—it can be catching,” she tells him.

Not only is Jim just endlessly mean to Sally, he never overtly proposes to her, never speaks of any feeling for her other than disgust at her position, only asking her to “go with me” when he leaves town. Stan, on the other hand, speaks often and freely of his love for Sally. “You’ve made life bearable for me again,” he tells her. “I’d still be lost without you. Any time I lose you I’ll suffer. I’m in love with you. We’re ideally suited. I’ll keep on asking you to marry me until you say yes.” When she tells him, “It would be a nightmare. I’m positive it would,” he answers, “If you’re trying to say we are not suited because of race or color, that’s sheer nonsense. I’m in love with you.”

The big town meeting comes to pass, but Sally does not attend, choosing instead to spend the evening at Stan and Karen’s house. The meeting turns out to be a complete bust when the organizer—himself a racist; he tells Sally, “I’m not sure I know any decent white people”—“started ranting about everything under the sun,” Jim tells Sally. “He rambled and raged so that he left the Blair Settlement crowd bewildered.” In the end Jim had stepped up and explained that he was hoping to send a petition to the governor, but by that time the fiery rhetoric had lost some of the crowd. Ultimately the neighborhood is saved—but only for the most banal of reasons, budget. “They’ve made a lot of other cuts in their highway budget but that’s the main one,” we are told. Sally continues to insist that bigotry “doesn’t represent the feelings of most Canton people,” but Jim can’t believe that and is determined to leave town. He also has lost interest in Sally, it seems: “Jim Dawson had stopped proposing to her some time ago. He’d even suggested she marry Stan.”

There’s a lot to think about with this book. Is Sally’s preferred method of just talking to people the best way to save the neighborhood? She explains to a friendly fellow nurse, a white woman who has pointed out that the Black families would have been financially compensated for their loss, that it’s hard for Black people to buy homes because they might not be welcome or may not be able to afford a different home, and the nurse “looked embarrassed. ‘I see now it’s not a simple problem of selling homes and buying other ones. I didn’t really understand what it was all about,’” she says, showing that white people in town are reasonable, if ignorant of the realities of Black lives.

On the other hand, the other extreme of the Black organizer being too radical for a small-town New Hampshire crowd is too pat and seems like a cop out—one has to ask if it was the author’s racially motivated fear that inspired this plot turn. Dodging a real discussion of Jim and Sally’s preferred tactics (though Sally’s is tacitly endorsed as she wins over her work colleagues and roommates with conversation) is lazy, and the medium path of Martin Luther King’s peaceful marches is never entertained, nor is the obvious outreach to the general public through the press or general meetings or a door-to-door campaign. I did appreciate that in her daily life Sally repeatedly and calmly faces down racism with smart retorts, but in the end, her strength isn’t enough to keep me from feeling that this white male Canadian author demonstrates a clear bias writing about a female Black American and her struggles for racial equality. I saw this when the characters’ attempts at strong advocacy were made such a complete failure, and when the people who actually saved the neighborhood were not its residents but faceless bureaucrats without feeling for the problem or the potentially dehoused locals. Even Sally’s totally bewildering final decision about her love life is suspect, and I have zero hope that she will ultimately be happy by choosing the then-culturally accepted path instead of following her heart and going with the right (white) man. I’m going to suggest, though, that it doesn’t mean this book isn’t worth reading. Overall the writing and characters (aside from reactionary Jim) are good, and it’s always important to be able to spot the flaws in writing and thinking, especially when it comes to prejudice. As bigotry becomes more subtle (granted less so recently), it takes more skill to see it, and this book offers opportunity to hone your skills.