Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

My head actually aches from holding three incompatible truths in it: 1. Black people are inferior. 2. Brit is half black. 3. I love Brit with all my heart.

Shouldn’t numbers one and two make number three impossible? Or is she the exception to the rule? Was Adele one, too?

I think of me and Twinkie dreaming of the food we craved behind bars.

How many exceptions do there have to be before you start to realize that maybe the truths you’ve been told aren’t actually true?

When I finish my coffee, I wander the halls of the hospital. I read a discarded newspaper in the lobby. I watch the flashing ambulance lights through the glass doors of the ER.

I stumble upon the preemie NICU by accident. Believe me, I don’t want to be anywhere near a birthing pavilion; those scars are still tender for me, even if this is a different hospital. But I stand at the window beside another man. “She’s mine,” he says, pointing to a painfully small infant in a pink blanket. “Her name is Cora.”

I panic a little; what creep hangs out in front of a nursery if he’s not related to one of the babies? So I point to a kid in a blue blanket. There’s a bit of a glare through his incubator, but even from here I can see the brown of his skin. “Davis,” I lie.

My son was as white as I am, at least on the outside. He did not look like this newborn. But even if he had, now I realize I would have loved him. The truth is, if that baby were Davis, it wouldn’t matter that his skin is darker than mine.

It would just matter that he is alive.

I bury my shaking hands in my coat, thinking of Francis, and of Brit. Maybe however much you’ve loved someone, that’s how much you can hate. It’s like a pocket turned inside out.

It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too.

IN THE TIME THAT IT takes for the jury to return a verdict, I sit through forty more arraignments, thirty-eight of which are black men. Micah performs six surgeries. Violet goes to a birthday party. I read an article on the front page of the paper, about a march at Yale by students of color, who want-among other things-to rechristen a residential college currently named for John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice president who supported slavery and secession.

For two days, Ruth and I sit at the courthouse, and wait. Edison goes back to school, knuckling down with renewed enthusiasm-it’s amazing what a little brush with the law can do for a kid who’s flirting with delinquency. Ruth also has-with my blessing, and with me at her side-appeared on Wallace Mercy’s television show, via remote camera. He championed her bravery, and handed her a check to cover some of the money she had lost from being out of work for months-donations from people as close as East End and as far as Johannesburg. Afterward, we read notes that were enclosed with some of the contributions:

I THINK ABOUT YOU AND YOUR BOY.

I DON’T HAVE MUCH, BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU’RE NOT ALONE.

THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE ENOUGH TO STAND UP, WHEN I DIDN’T.

We’ve heard about Brittany Bauer, who is suffering from what the prosecution calls stress and Ruth calls just plain crazy. No one has seen hide nor hair of Turk Bauer or Francis Mitchum.

“How did you know?” Ruth had asked me, immediately after the debacle that occurred when Wallace brought Adele Adams to the courthouse to “accidentally” cross paths with Francis and his daughter.

“I had a hunch,” I told her. “I was looking through the neonatal screening, and I saw something none of us noticed before, because we were so focused on the MCADD: sickle-cell anemia. I remembered what the neonatologist said, about how that particular disease hits the African American community harder than others. And I also remembered Brit saying during her deposition that she never knew her mother.”

“That’s quite a long shot,” Ruth had said.

“Yeah, that’s why I did a little digging. One in twelve African Americans carry the sickle-cell trait. One in ten thousand white people carry it. Suddenly, it looked less like a wild card. So I called Wallace. The rest, that’s on him. He found out the name of the mother from Brit’s birth certificate, and tracked her down.”

Ruth had looked at me. “But it had nothing to do with your case, really.”

“Nope,” I’d admitted. “That one, it was a gift from you to me. I figured there wasn’t anything that could put a finer point on the hypocrisy of it all.”

Now, as we come to the close of the second day with no word from the jury, we’re all going a little stir-crazy. “What are you doing?” I ask Howard, who has been keeping the vigil with us. He’s been typing furiously into his phone. “Hot date?”

“I’ve been looking up the sentencing difference for possession of crack versus cocaine,” he says. “Up until 2010, a person convicted of possession with intent to distribute fifty grams or more of crack got a minimum of ten years in prison. To get the same sentence for cocaine, you had to distribute five thousand grams. Even now, the sentencing disparity ratio’s eighteen to one.”

I shake my head. “Why do you need to know this?”

“I’m thinking about appeal,” he says brightly. “That’s clearly a precedent for prejudice in sentencing, since eighty-four percent of people convicted for crack offenses are black, and black drug offenders are twenty percent more likely to be imprisoned than white drug offenders.”

“Howard,” I say, rubbing my temples. “Turn off your damn phone.”

“This is bad, right?” Ruth says. She rubs her arms, although the radiator is belching and it’s broiling in the room. “If they were going to acquit, it would have been quick, I bet.”

“No news is good news,” I lie.

–

AT THE END of the day, the judge calls the jury back into the courtroom. “Have you arrived at a verdict?”

The forewoman stands. “No, Your Honor. We’re split.”

I know the judge is going to give them an Allen charge, a glorified legal pep talk. He turns to the jury, imperial, to imbue them with resolve. “You know, the State has spent a great deal of money to put this trial on, and nobody knows the facts more than you all do. Talk to each other. Allow yourself to hear another’s point of view. I encourage you to arrive at a verdict, so that we do not have to go through this all over again.”

The jury is dismissed, and I look at Ruth. “You probably have to get back home.”

She looks at her watch. “I have a little time,” she admits.

So we walk downtown, shoulder to shoulder, huddled against the cold to grab a cup of coffee. We slip out of the biting wind into the buzzy chatter of a local shop. “After I realized I couldn’t cut it as a pastry chef I used to dream about opening a coffee place,” I muse. “I wanted to call it Grounds for Dismissal.”

We are the next to order; I ask Ruth how she takes her coffee. “Black,” she says, and suddenly we are both laughing so hard that the barista looks at us as if we are crazy, as if we are speaking a language she can’t understand.

Which, I guess, is not all that far from the truth.

–

THE NEXT MORNING, Judge Thunder summons Odette and me to chambers. “I got a note from the foreman. We have a hung jury. Eleven to one.” He shakes his head. “I’m very sorry, ladies.”

After he dismisses us, I find Howard pacing outside chambers. “Well?”

“Mistrial. They’re deadlocked, eleven to one.”

“Who’s the holdout?” Howard asks, but it’s a rhetorical question; he knows I don’t have that information.

Suddenly, though, we both stop walking and face each other. “Juror number twelve,” we say simultaneously.

“Ten bucks?” Howard asks.