Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

  Howard looks at me over Ruth's head. What?

  Holy shit. Judge Thunder is going to use the escape hatch I gave him as a matter of routine. I hold my breath.

  "I have researched the law, and have reviewed the evidence in this case very carefully. There is no credible proof that the death of this child was causally related to any action or inaction of the defendant's." He faces Ruth. "I am very sorry you had to go through what you did at your workplace, ma'am." He smacks his gavel. "I grant the defense's motion."

  In this humbling moment I learn that not only can I not think like a prosecutor, I am woefully off-base about the mental machinations of a judge. I turn, a dazed laugh bubbling up inside me. Ruth's brow is furrowed. "I don't understand."

  He hasn't declared a mistrial. He's granted a bona fide acquittal.

  "Ruth," I say, grinning. "You are free to go."

  FREEDOM IS THE FRAGILE NECK of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It's the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It's having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.

  I am the same woman I was five minutes ago. I'm rooted to the same chair. My hands are flattened on the same scarred table. My lawyers are both still flanking me. That fluorescent light overhead is still spitting like a cockroach. Nothing has changed, and everything is different.

  In a daze, I walk out of the courtroom. A bumper crop of microphones blooms in front of me. Kennedy instructs everyone that although her client is obviously delighted with the verdict, we will not be making any statements until we give an official press conference tomorrow.

  That right now, her client has to get home to her son.

  There are a few stragglers, hoping for a sound bite, but eventually they drift away. There is a professor being arraigned down the hall for possession of child pornography.

  The world turns, and there's another victim, another bully. It's the arc of someone else's story now.

  I text Edison, who calls me even though he has to leave class to do it, and I listen to the relief braided through his words. I call Adisa at work, and have to hold the phone away from my ear as she screams with joy. I'm interrupted by a text from Christina: a full row of smiling emojis, and then a hamburger and a glass of wine and a question mark.

  Rain check? I type back.

  "Ruth," Kennedy says, when she finds me standing with my phone in my hand, staring into space. "You all right?"

  "I don't know," I reply, completely honest. "It's really over?"

  Howard smiles. "It is really, truly, unequivocally over."

  "Thank you," I say. I embrace him, and then I face Kennedy. "And you..." I shake my head. "I don't even know what to say."

  "Think on it," Kennedy says, hugging me. "You can tell me next week when we have lunch."

  I pull back, meeting her eyes. "I'd like that," I say, and something shifts between us. It's power, I realize, and we are dead even.

  Suddenly I realize that in my astonishment at the verdict, I left my mother's lucky scarf in the courtroom. "I forgot something. I'll meet you downstairs."

  When I reach the double doors, there's a bailiff stationed outside. "Ma'am?"

  "I'm sorry--there was a scarf...? Can I..."

  "Sure." He waves me inside.

  I'm alone in the courtroom. I walk down the aisle of the gallery, past the bar, to the spot where I was sitting. My mother's scarf is curled underneath the desk. I pick it up, feed it like a seam through my hands.

  I look around the empty chamber. One day, Edison might be arguing a case here, instead of sitting next to a lawyer like I have been. One day he might even be on the judge's bench.

  I close my eyes, so that I can keep this minute with me. I listen to the silence.

  It feels like light-years since I was brought into another courtroom down the hall for my arraignment, wearing shackles and a nightgown and not allowed to speak for myself. It feels like forever since I was told what I could not do.

  "Yes," I say softly, because it is the opposite of restraint. Because it breaks chains. Because I can.

  I ball my hands into fists and tilt back my head and let the word rip from my throat. Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.

  --NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

  IN THE EXAMINATION ROOM AT the clinic, I take a rubber glove out of the dispenser and blow it up, tying off the bottom. I take a pen and draw eyes, a beak. "Daddy," my daughter says. "You made me a chicken."

  "Chicken?" I say. "I can't believe you think that's a chicken. That is clearly a rooster."

  She frowns. "What's the difference?"

  Well, I walked right into that one, didn't I? But there's no way I'm going to describe the birds and the bees to my three-year-old while we're sitting waiting for her to get tested for strep. I'll let Deborah do that when she gets home from work.

  Deborah, my wife, is a stockbroker. I took her last name when we got married, hoping to start over as someone new, someone better. She is the one with the nine-to-fiver, while I stay at home with Carys, and fit my speaking gigs around her playdates and her nursery school. I work with the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. I go to high schools and prisons and temples and churches, talking about hate.

  I tell these groups about how I used to beat people up because I was hurting so bad, and either I was going to hurt them, or I was going to hurt myself. I explain that made me feel like I had a purpose. I tell them about the festivals I went to, where musicians sang about white supremacy and children played with racist games and toys. I describe my time in prison, and my work as a webmaster for a hate site. I talk about my first wife. I say that hate ate her from the inside out, but what really happened was more mundane: a bottle of pills, swallowed with a bottle of vodka. She could never handle seeing the world as it really is, and so finally, she found a way to keep her eyes closed forever.

  I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

  I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.

  In my talk, I describe the long road to leaving. It started with a visit in the middle of the night--hooded, faceless individuals sent from others in power who broke down our door and beat us. Francis was thrown down a flight of stairs: me, I had three broken ribs. It was our bon voyage party, I suppose. I shut down Lonewolf.org the next day. Then there were the divorce papers I was having drawn up when Brit killed herself.

  Even now, I make mistakes. I still feel the need to slam into something or someone from time to time, but now I do it on the rink in an ice hockey league. I'm probably more cautious than I should be around black dudes. But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

  Many of the groups I meet with do not believe that I could possibly have changed so dramatically. That's when I tell them about my wife. Deborah knows everything about me, my past. She has managed to forgive me. And if she can forgive me, how could I not try to forgive myself?

  I do penance. Three to four times a week, I relive my mistakes in front of an audience. I feel them hate me. I think I deserve it.

  "Daddy," Carys says, "my throat hurts."

  "I know, baby," I tell her. I pull her onto my lap just as the door opens.

  The nurse comes in scanning Carys's intake form at this walk-in clinic. "H
ello," she says. "My name is Ruth Walker."

  She looks up, a smile on her face.

  "Walker," I repeat, as she shakes my hand.

  "Yes, as in the Walker Clinic. I own the place...but I also work here." She grins. "Don't worry. I'm a much better nurse-practitioner than I am a bookkeeper."

  She doesn't recognize me. At least I don't think she does.

  To be fair, it's Deborah's last name on the form on the clipboard. Plus, I look very different now. I've had all but one of my tattoos removed. My hair has grown out and is conservatively trimmed. I've lost about thirty pounds of muscle and brawn, ever since I've taken up running. And maybe whatever's inside me now is casting a different reflection, too, on the outside.

  She turns to Carys. "So something doesn't feel good, huh? Can I take a look?"

  She lets Carys sit on my lap as she runs gentle hands over my daughter's swollen glands and takes her temperature and teases her into opening her mouth by staging a singing contest that Carys, of course, wins. I let my gaze wander around the room, noticing things I hadn't seen before--the diploma on the wall with the name Ruth Jefferson written in calligraphy. The framed photo of a handsome black guy wearing a graduation cap and gown on the Yale campus.

  She snaps off her gloves, drawing my attention. I notice that she is wearing a small diamond ring and wedding band on her left hand.

  "I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's strep," she tells me. "Is Carys allergic to any medications?"

  I shake my head. I can't find my voice.

  "I can take a swab of her throat, do a rapid strep culture, and based on those results, start a course of antibiotics," she says. She tugs on Carys's braid. "You," she promises, "are going to feel excellent in no time at all."

  Excusing herself, she walks toward the door to get whatever she needs to do the test. "Ruth," I call out, just as she puts her hand on the knob.

  She turns. For a moment, her eyes narrow the tiniest bit, and I wonder. I wonder. But she doesn't ask if we have met before; she doesn't acknowledge our history. She just waits for me to say whatever it is I feel the need to say.

  "Thank you," I tell her.

  She nods, and slips out of the room. Carys twists on my lap. "It still hurts, Daddy."

  "The nurse is going to make it better."

  Satisfied with this, Carys points to the knuckles of my left hand, the only tattoo that remains on my body. "That's my name?" she asks.

  "Kind of," I answer. "Your name means the same thing, in a language called Welsh."

  She is just starting to learn her letters. So she points to each knuckle in turn: "L," she reads. "O. V. E."

  "That's right," I say proudly. We wait for Ruth to come back to us. I hold my daughter's hand, or maybe she holds mine, like we are at an intersection, and it's my job to take her safely to the other side.

  About four years into my writing career, I wanted to write a book about racism in the United States. I was drawn by a real-life event in New York City, when a Black undercover police officer was shot in the back, multiple times, by white colleagues--in spite of the fact that the undercover cop had been wearing what was called "the color of the day"--a wristband meant to allow officers to identify those who were in hiding. I started the novel, foundered, and quit. I couldn't do justice to the topic, somehow. I didn't know what it was like to grow up Black in this country, and I was having trouble creating a fictional character that rang true.

  Flash forward twenty years. Once again, I desperately wanted to write about racism. I was uncomfortably aware that when white authors talked about racism in fiction, it was usually historical. And again, what right did I have to write about an experience I had not lived? However, if I'd written only what I knew, my career would have been short and boring. I grew up white and class-privileged. For years I had done my homework and my research, using extensive personal interviews to channel the voices of people I was not: men, teenagers, suicidal people, abused wives, rape victims. What led me to write those stories was my outrage and my desire to give those narratives airtime, so that those who hadn't experienced them became more aware. Why was writing about a person of color any different?

  Because race is different. Racism is different. It's fraught, and it's hard to discuss, and so as a result we often don't.

  Then I read a news story about an African American nurse in Flint, Michigan. She had worked in labor and delivery for over twenty years, and then one day a baby's dad asked to see her supervisor. He requested that this nurse, and those who looked like her, not touch his infant. He turned out to be a white supremacist. The supervisor put the patient request in the file, and a bunch of African American personnel sued for discrimination and won. But it got me thinking, and I began to weave a story.

  I knew that I wanted to write from the point of view of a Black nurse, a skinhead father, and a public defender--a woman who, like me, and like many of my readers, was a well-intentioned white lady who would never consider herself to be a racist. Suddenly I knew that I could, and would, finish this novel. Unlike my first, aborted foray, I wasn't writing it to tell people of color what their own lives were like. I was writing to my own community--white people--who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he's a racist...but who can't recognize racism in themselves.

  Truth be told, I might as well have been describing myself not so long ago. I am often told by readers how much they've learned from my books--but when I write a novel, I learn a lot as well. This time, though, I was learning about myself. I was exploring my past, my upbringing, my biases, and I was discovering that I was not as blameless and progressive as I had imagined.

  Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It's also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It's hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they've enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.

  I began my research by sitting down with women of color. Although I knew that peppering people of color with questions is not the best way to educate oneself, I hoped to invite these women into a process, and in return they gave me a gift: they shared their experiences of what it really feels like to be Black. I remain so grateful to these women--not just for tolerating my ignorance but for being willing to teach me. Then I had the pleasure of talking to Beverly Daniel Tatum, former president of Spelman College and a renowned racial educator. I read books by Dr. Tatum, Debby Irving, Michelle Alexander, and David Shipler. I enrolled in a social justice workshop called Undoing Racism, and left in tears every night, as I began to peel back the veneer of who I thought I was from who I truly am.

  Then I met with two former skinheads, to develop a vocabulary of hate for my white supremacist character. My daughter, Sammy, was the one who found Tim Zaal--a former skinhead who had Skyped with her class in high school. Years ago, Tim beat up and left a gay man for dead. After getting out of the movement, he started to work at the Simon Wiesenthal Center talking about hate crimes and realized one day that the man he had nearly killed worked there, too. There were apologies and forgiveness, and now they are friends who talk about their unique experience to groups every week. He also is happily married now, to a Jewish woman. Frankie Meeink, another former skinhead, works with the Anti-Defamation League. Although he once recruited for hate crews in Philly, he now runs Harmony Through Hockey--a program to promote racial diversity among kids.

  These men taught me that white power groups believe in the separation of the races and think they are soldiers in a racial holy war. They explained how rec
ruiters for hate groups would target kids who were bullied, marginalized, or who came from abusive homes. They'd distribute antiwhite flyers in a white neighborhood and see who responded by saying that the whites were under attack. Then they'd approach those folks and say, You're not alone. The point was to redirect the recruit's rage into racism. Violence became a release, a mandate. They also taught me that now, most skinhead groups are not crews seeking out violence but rather individuals who are networking underground. Nowadays, white supremacists dress like ordinary folks. They blend in, which is a whole different kind of terror.

  When it came time to title this book, I found myself struggling again. Many of you who are longtime fans of mine know this was not the original name of the novel. Small Great Things is a reference to a quote often attributed to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way." But as a white woman, did I have the right to paraphrase these sentiments? Many in the African American community are sensitive to white people using Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words to reflect their own experience, and with good reason. However, I also knew that both Ruth and Kennedy have moments in this novel where they do a small thing that has great and lasting repercussions for others. Plus, for many whites who are just beginning to travel the path of racial self-awareness, Dr. King's words are often the first step of the journey. His eloquence about a subject most of us feel inadequate putting into words is inspiring and humbling. Moreover, although individual changes cannot completely eradicate racism--there are systems and institutions that need to be overhauled as well--it is through small acts that racism is both perpetuated and partially dismantled. For all of these reasons--and because I hope it will encourage people to learn more about Dr. King--I chose this title.

  Of all my novels, this book will stand out for me because of the sea change it inspired in the way I think about myself, and because it made me aware of the distance I have yet to go when it comes to racial awareness. In America, we like to think that the reason we have had success is that we worked hard or we were smart. Admitting that racism has played a part in our success means admitting that the American dream isn't quite so accessible to all. A social justice educator named Peggy McIntosh has pointed out some of these advantages: having access to jobs and housing, for example. Walking into a random hair salon and finding someone who can cut your hair. Buying dolls, toys, and children's books that feature people of your race. Getting a promotion without someone suspecting that it was due to your skin color. Asking to speak to someone in charge, and being directed to someone of your race.