This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 26, 2019

The terrain darkened as I drove the rural back roads of Georgia, red clay lining the sandy soil, deep-green kudzu choking trees and climbing telephone poles; the highway transformed into bumpy roads wearing worn-out street signs. It was summer 1985, and I was driving to see Mamie, a part-time nanny who’d helped raise me as a child. I barely knew about her own life back then, only that she lived across town, a single mom with a teenage son. I hadn’t seen her for decades.

I was now a 30-something TV reporter in Atlanta. I’d just finished a report about the “sandwich generation” — adults squeezed between caring for their children and their elderly parents — when my mom called. Mamie, she said, had moved to Georgia to care for her ailing mother.

Little did I know then that Mamie’s mother was one of 37 million Americans without health care. The idea of universal coverage wouldn’t surface until a decade later — a Clinton effort that tanked. It took another two decades before Obama signed his signature Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — into law.

Mamie was family. So, on a hot, humid Sunday, I drove west, vintage jazz on the radio. I turned off the interstate and stopped at a dilapidated roadside store. The torn screen door banged shut behind me, as ceiling fans blew a wisp of warm, muggy, air. I grabbed a bottle of cold water and asked folks standing online for directions.

After an awkward silence, a middle-aged white woman in a baggy T-shirt and faded jeans spoke up: “Y’all must be going to the black side of town.” She waved in the general direction.

As I walked out, my naiveté hit me hard. I’d grown accustomed to Atlanta politics, where most power brokers were African American: the police chief; City Council members, including civil rights legend and future Congressman John Lewis; and Mayor Andrew Young. But in the outskirts, the racial split of old emerged.

I started the car’s tired engine and drove down a dusty road flanked by sagging homes, overgrown weeds, and a spray of pines.