Dr. Maria came to Charleston from El Salvador. She practiced medicine at the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic on Johns Island. She was short and brown skinned with black bobbed hair and earthy eyes. She was a good soccer player and didn’t look much like s doctor, even with her white coat on.
She was brilliant and kind, and that made her the best doctor for many, many miles around the clinic.
She lived on Johns Island and took her meals each day across the street from the clinic at the Worker’s Cafe.
Hilcias, his mamí and his abuelo were migrant workers. They were from El Salvador, too. Hilcias had deep eyes and wore the same pair of tattered over-alls every day.
Mr. Smith, who was a wiry, clean man, said Hilcias was the smartest boy he had ever seen.
Dr. Maria noticed that his hair was cut in a crooked line across his forehead. She also noticed that his face was always serene. Of the many patients she saw at the clinic every day throughout the planting, growing and harvesting season, Hilcias was her favorite.
Hilcias liked Dr. Maria very much. He liked that her skin was the same color as his skin. He liked her patched jeans and her holey Converse Chuck Taylor tennis shoes. He liked her brown eyes and the way they looked deep inside of him when she was examining him and trying to help him.
Johns Island, along with Wadmalaw and James Island, make up the barrier islands around Charleston. There are two main roads on the island, Maybank Highway and Bohicket Road. The island is between the Charleston Harbor and the Stono and Folly Rivers. It used to be covered in farmland, but now there are a few residential communities around the old farms. It has a small-town, rural feel.
The Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic is an old cottage painted pea green and it faces the Maybank Highway.
The two lane Maybank Highway runs past the Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic, just a stones throw from it’s front door. At the back of the clinic, there is a thicket of trees and 100 acres the Smith’s use to grow produce. From the clinic’s back door you can look out across the land at the peach trees and gardens. It is very beautiful in the spring and summer, the soil brown and rich and colorful with the fruits and vegetables growing on it. Looking out, Dr. Maria could see the migrant workers moving across the plants and trees, picking tomatoes and peaches.
All the time now, Dr. Maria was thinking about Hilcias’ condition. He worked beside his family during the day and played with the other migrant children in the evening, never speaking a single word. At night he read by the light of an old bulb hanging from a cord running into the dilapidated bus that served as his family’s home behind the Smith’s house. In the fall he and his family would pack all of their belongings and board a migrant bus and head back down to Florida for winter work.
Dr. Maria was studying Hilcias’ condition for the whole spring and summer before he left.
She wanted to help him, to give him the gift of spoken words, but she was afraid to borrow too many books and journals from her colleagues or ask too many questions about him to them.
“Why are you spending so much time and effort on one migrant kid,” they would ask. “There are too many other patients to see.”
- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2020
