From Beth Macy "I AM A NURSE!" - And other reasons why we should uplift, not pull the rug out from under, America's working class
From Beth Macy “I AM A NURSE!” – And other reasons why we should uplift, not pull the rug out from under, America’s working class. Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her August 6, 2025 post.
When I first met Ebony Lynch-Thomas in 2014, she was about to take the first airplane ride of her life to New York City. She was 39 at the time, a convicted felon, and the most popular nail-tech at the downtown salon where I occasionally splurged on pedicures.
Ebony was whipsmart, fun to be around, and excellent at her job, especially the foot-massage part, and so naturally I wanted to write about her. As an interviewee, she was like a lot of people with many years of recovery under their belts—she was blunt, honest (almost) to a fault, and a born healer. She liked making people feel good.
She had kicked heroin and survived multiple jail stints plus two-and-a-half years at a women’s prison on the other side of the state. The latter included a brief time in solitary confinement, a floor above a death-row murderer who lulled her to sleep at night by singing Al Green
I wrote a front-page story for The Roanoke Times about her success, thanks to Ebony’s persistence and the grace of the nail-salon owner, Laura Bradford Godfrey, who developed the business with the express purpose of hiring felons; and the encouragement of Ebony’s regular client, Nancy Agee, who just happened to run Carilion Clinic, the largest employer in town. Back then, Ebony’s long-term goal was to become a traveling registered nurse, and Agee regularly cheered her on.
I chronicled how Ebony jump-started her life after prison by working two fast food jobs, paying off $3,000 in court fines, and memorizing the Valley Metro bus schedule because that was the only way she could get to work, which was the only way she could pay off her fines, a prerequisite for getting her driver’s license. Two-thirds of drug-involved offenders are re-arrested within three years of their release, in part because they don’t have the social capital or, more often, the capital capital to navigate re-entry.
The salon where Ebony worked was named Polished because it didn’t just apply nail polish; it helped the ex-offenders develop soft skills too. Godfrey brought in leadership experts to teach team-building skills and conflict management. Some employees had been in prison together and had even been written up together—Ebony for making a cigarette lighter out of a Bic razor and batteries, another for warming up food with an iron.
“Ebony is one of those people that everyone wants to know because she’s excited about things,” Katherine Fralin, her leadership teacher, told me. Because of her hard-won recovery, she owns up to her own weaknesses and isn’t afraid to admit fault, another quality Fralin admired.
It was Agee who, as hospital CEO and one of the most powerful women in town, encouraged Ebony to fulfill her dream of becoming a nurse, even as she warned her repeatedly how hard the clinical coursework would be. Agee had started out at the hospital as a teenage candy striper, then became a nurse before rising to be the CEO overseeing a $1.4 billion budget.
A few years after my story ran, Ebony applied for the nursing program at Virginia Western Community College, and I wrote a hearty letter of recommendation for her. But as Agee warned: While the gen-ed requirements for the R.N. program at the college would be easy—Ebony got straight A’s her first year—the second-year courses were rigorous, especially Med-Surg.
“I just couldn’t pass it,” Ebony said of Med-Surg. She withdrew the first time she took it and again the following year. “I felt like a failure after getting all those scholarships,” including federal financial aid, private scholarships, and the college’s own Fralin Futures scholarship, endowed by Katherine’s father, Heywood. It’s meant to remove financial obstacles that prevent students from graduating—covering child-care costs, car repairs, or a medical bill, for example. It often makes the difference between working multiple jobs or just working one job, allowing a student to concentrate on school.
The nation could use a lot more Fralin Futures programs. For my forthcoming book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, I followed the travails of a rural community college student named Silas James who received two tuition scholarships but still found it almost impossible to get to campus because he didn’t have reliable transportation. In the course of his ten-month schooling to become a welder, he went through five clunker cars. And that was after dropping out on his first try to take care of a sick family member.
But one should never underestimate the grit of a first-gen college student—I was one, and I, too, drove cars with emery board-thin brakes for many years.
Ebony had already managed to go from solitary confinement and family estrangement to a healthy marriage, a strong relationship with her daughters, and full-time work. So rather than wallow in the failures of Med-Surg, she readjusted her sights and entered the shorter, licensed professional nursing degree program instead.
During her third college try, she worked full-time as a case manager for a local treatment center that serves men with substance use disorders. Even though she aced her coursework and clinicals, her felony record meant that it took her two years of hearings and other state nursing board administrative hurdles for her to take her LPN licensing exam.
On June 24, she passed that test on her first try.
I was on vacation when her all-caps email landed in my inbox: “I AM A NURSE!” she wrote.
When we met for lunch last week, Ebony was full of praise for her college mentors and teachers, including her nursing adviser, her profoundly patient math professor, and her chemistry tutor (“he looked like Shaggy from Scooby Do”), and even me. “I take that article you wrote about me to show the guys in treatment that there’s hope for them, too,” she said.
“Our clients all have Medicaid,” which covers their 90-day residential treatment regimens, including medication and therapies.
Asked what she thought about the upcoming cuts to Medicaid—Trump’s legislation will slash $1 trillion in Medicaid spending over ten years while literally giving that same amount to the richest 1 percent and ballooning the deficit by $3.4 trillion—Ebony said, “I’ll be pissed.” There were years in her own journey when she relied on Medicaid for health care as well as SNAP, or government food assistance, for groceries (a program that’s also on the chopping block to the tune of cutting benefits for millions of Americans).
The psychologist Cheri Hartman, another treatment hero of mine, pointed to Virginia’s 2019 expansion of Medicaid as making the biggest difference in helping addicted men—who die at a rate two to three times higher than women—access evidence-based care. “These cuts are going to take us back 30 years!” Hartman warned.
But Ebony will keep showing up regardless, full of good cheer, persistence and pluck. When I asked why she went into nursing, she reminded me that even in jail she helped women feel good about themselves, applying coffee for their eyelash makeup and Kool-Aid for their blush.
And now? “I like to help people get back what they lost in addiction,” she said. “I just like taking care of people.”
Yes, Chef!
To support the work of students like Ebony, Virginia Western is sponsoring my Roanoke book launch at Roanoke’s Charter Hall on Oct. 16. Tickets, which include a copy of PAPER GIRL and some awesome apps prepared by our local version of Carmy from The Bear—the great chef John Schopp—will support the college’s Great Expectations program, which serves former foster care youth attending Virginia Western, some of them while raising siblings, as Silas is now doing. (Up until recently, Roanoke shockingly had both the highest rate and largest number of kids living in foster care in Virginia; now it has the second-highest.)
The October 7 publication date of Paper Girl is now just two months away, which fills me with equal parts anxiety and elation. I’m so grateful to Publishers Weekly, which yesterday bestowed upon it a rare, starred review, writing of the book: “Timely, clear-eyed, and empathetic, [Macy’s] insights provide a welcome salve for a festering social wound. It’s a sobering journey into America’s splintered heartland.”
I’ll post my book tour dates on this newsletter soon. In the meantime, if you’d like a chance to win an early copy of Paper Girl from Penguin Press, you can enter here.
Recommended reading
• For your nonfiction TBR: I can’t say enough good things about journalist Shoshana Walter’s Rehab: An American Scandal. Amazon named it one of August’s top ten books, saying it picks up where Dopesick left off: “More than two-thirds of America’s families have struggled with addiction, and there is no magic cure—but this book lays out a clear and helpful path for anyone who has hit rock bottom, and the people who love them.”
As someone who still gets weekly pleas from loved ones desperate to save the addicted folks they know, I found Walters’s book, which I endorsed after reading an early copy, to be a riveting read and a potential lifesaver.
• Lastly, if you live in an urban bubble like me—and so many other Americans—it’s worth checking out The Daily Yonder website for critical insights into rural America. Last week, the Yonder posted a stunning essay by the Shenandoah Valley factory worker, farmer and dad, Andrew Tait, titled “Living in the Shadow of the American Dream.” He writes:
“We’ve stayed unmarried—not because we don’t love each other, but because getting married would kick my partner and our daughters off the Medicaid that keeps them healthy.
“My employer offers insurance, sure—but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage. I can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked out.
“I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people like us are left out in the cold.”
I hope to interview Tait for a future newsletter, but for now I can’t stop thinking about his all-too-typical family. When Americans take care of one another, we’re all stronger.