Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

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. “Hello,” 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.