Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I always thought Mr. Hallowell looked like a movie star, and Mama used to say he practically was one. As he turned around, pinning me with his gaze, I tried to come up with an excuse for why I had breached this forbidden territory but was distracted by the grainy picture, on the screen, of Tinker Bell lighting animated fireworks over a castle.

“This is all you’ve ever known,” he said, and I realized that his speech was funny, that the words blurred into each other. He lifted a glass to his mouth and I heard the ice cubes clink. “You have no idea what it was like to see the world change in front of your eyes.”

On the screen, a man I didn’t recognize was speaking. “Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” he said, as a black-and-white wall of photos behind him bloomed into all the shades of the rainbow.

“Walt Disney was a genius,” Mr. Hallowell mused. He sat down on the couch and patted the seat beside him, and I scrambled over. A cartoon duck with glasses and a thick accent was sticking his hand in animated cans of paint and dumping the contents on the floor. You mix them all together and they spell muddy…and then you got black, the cartoon duck said, stirring the paint with his flippered foot so that it turned ebony . That’s exactly the way things were in the very beginning of time. Black. Man was completely in the dark about color. Why? Because he was stupid.

Mr. Hallowell was close enough now for me to smell his breath-sour, like that of my uncle Isaiah, who’d missed Christmas last year because Mama said he had gone somewhere to dry out. “Christina and Louis and you and your sister, you don’t know any different. For you it’s always looked like this.” He stood up suddenly and turned to me so that the projector shadowed his face, a dance of bright silhouettes. “The following program is brought to you in Living Color on NBC!” he boomed, spreading his arms so wide that the liquid in his glass sloshed over the side and onto the carpet. “What do you think, Ruth?” he asked.

I thought that I wanted him to move, so I could see what the duck was going to do next.

Mr. Hallowell’s voice softened. “I used to say that before every program,” he told me. “Until color TV was so common, no one needed reminding that it was a miracle. But before that- before that-I was the voice of the future. Me. Sam Hallowell. The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC! ”

I didn’t tell him to move over, so that I could see the cartoon. I sat with my hands in my lap, because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn’t because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.

Late that night after my mama had brought us back home and tucked us into our beds, I had a nightmare. I opened my eyes and everything was cast in shades of gray, like the man on the movie screen before he pinked up and the background exploded with color. I saw myself running through the brownstone, pulling at locked doors, until Mr. Hallowell’s study opened. The film we had watched was ticking through the projector, but the picture was black and white now, too. I started screaming, and my mama rushed in and Rachel and Ms. Mina and Christina and even Mr. Hallowell, but when I told them my eyes weren’t working and that all the color in the world had vanished, they laughed at me. Ruth, they said, this is the way it always has been. Always will be.

–

BY THE TIME my train gets back to New Haven, Edison is already home and bent over the kitchen table doing his schoolwork. “Hey, baby,” I say, dropping a kiss on the crown of his head as I walk in, and giving him an extra squeeze. “That’s from Grandma Lou.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I had a half hour before my shift starts, and I decided I’d rather spend it with you than in traffic.”

His eyes flicker toward me. “You’re gonna be late.”

“You’re worth it,” I tell him. I grab an apple from a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table-I always keep something healthy there, because Edison will eat whatever’s not nailed down-and take a bite, reaching for some of the papers spread out in front of my son. “Henry O. Flipper,” I read. “Sounds like a leprechaun.”

“He was the first African American graduate from West Point. Everyone in AP History has to teach a class profiling an American hero, and I’m trying to figure out what my lesson’s going to be.”

“Who else is in the running?”

Edison looks up. “Bill Pickett-a Black cowboy and rodeo star. And Christian Fleetwood, a Black Civil War soldier who won the Medal of Honor.”

I glance at the grainy photos of each man. “I don’t know any of these people.”

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Edison says. “We get Rosa Parks and Dr. King and that’s about it. You ever hear of a brotha named Lewis Latimer? He drew telephone parts for Alexander Graham Bell’s patent applications, and worked as a draftsman and patent expert for Thomas Edison. But you didn’t name me after him because you didn’t know he existed. The only time people who look like us are making history, it’s a footnote.”

He says this without bitterness, the way he would announce that we are out of ketchup or that his socks turned pink in the wash-as if it is something he’s not thrilled about, but can’t get worked up over, because it’s unlikely to change the outcome at this particular moment. I find myself thinking about Mrs. Braunstein and Virginia again. It feels like a splinter my mind keeps getting caught on, and Edison just pressed deep on it again. Have I really never noticed these things before? Or have I been very studiously keeping my eyes shut tight?

Edison glances at his watch. “Mama,” he says, “you’re gonna be really late.”

He’s right. I tell him what he can heat up for dinner, what time he should go to bed, what time my shift is over. Then I hurry to my car and drive to the hospital. I take as many shortcuts as I can, but I’m still ten minutes late. I take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and by the time I reach the birthing pavilion I am out of breath and sweating. Marie is standing at the nurses’ desk, as if she’s waiting on me. “I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I was in New York with my mother, and then stuck in traffic, and-”

“Ruth…I can’t let you work tonight.”

I am dumbfounded. Corinne is late more than 50 percent of the time, but I have a single transgression and I get punished for it?

“It won’t happen again,” I say.

“I can’t let you work,” Marie repeats, and I realize that she hasn’t met my gaze, not once. “I’ve been informed by HR that your license is being suspended.”

Suddenly, I am made of stone. “What?”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Security will escort you out of the building after you clear out your locker.”

“Wait,” I say, noticing the two goons who are hovering behind the nurses’ desk. “You’re kidding me. Why is my license being suspended? And how am I supposed to work if it is?”

Marie draws in her breath and turns to the security guards. They step forward. “Ma’am?” one of them says, and he gestures toward the break room, as if after twenty years I might not know the way.

–

THE LITTLE CARDBOARD box I carry out to the car has a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Advil, a cardigan sweater, and a collection of photos of Edison. That’s all I kept in my locker at work. It sits in the backseat and keeps drawing my attention in the rearview mirror, surprising me, like a passenger I wasn’t expecting.

I have not even pulled out of the parking lot before I call the union lawyer. It’s 5:00 P.M., and the chances of him being at his desk are slim, so when he answers the phone I burst into tears. I tell him about Turk Bauer and the baby and he calms me down and says he will do some digging and call me back.