Black Medicine The morning after her hundredth birthday party my mother perches on a chair in her room at the nursing home, and talks as she always has, without interruption. When the Nigerian male nurse comes to the door to offer her lunch, she sends him away. Her recollection takes her back to the nineteen twenties while outside the building midsummer heat shimmers over a green expanse where voices are calling and figures dressed in white stand still and then move. To take in that grassy vista one has to enter a code into a keypad at the door—my mother’s…