Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

“I don’t remember the name. Something about a duchess with cancer and the vampire who offers to make her immortal. Apparently it’s a genre called sick lit,” my mother says. “It’s for book club.”

“Who chose it?”

“Not me. I don’t pick the books. I pick the wine.”

“The last book I read was Everyone Poops, ” I say, “so I guess I can’t really pass judgment.”

I lean back, tilting my face to the late afternoon sun. My mother pats her lap, and I stretch out on the bench, lying down. She plays with my hair, the way she used to when I was Violet’s age. “You know the hardest thing about being a mom?” I say idly. “That you never get time to be a kid anymore.”

“You never get time, period,” my mother replies. “And before you know it, your little girl is off saving the world.”

“Right now she’s just enjoying stuffing her face,” I say, holding out my hand for more nuts. I slip one between my lips and almost immediately spit it out. “Ugh, God, I hate Brazil nuts.”

“Is that what those are?” my mother says. “They taste like feet. They’re the poor bastard stepchildren of the mixed nuts tin, the ones nobody likes.”

Suddenly I remember being about Violet’s age, and going to my grandmother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner. It was packed with my aunts and uncles and cousins. I loved the sweet potato pie she made, and the doilies on her furniture, which were all different, like snowflakes. But I did my absolute best to avoid Uncle Leon, my grandfather’s brother, who was the relative that was too loud, too drunk, and who always seemed to kiss you on the lips when he was aiming for your cheek. My grandmother used to put a big bowl of nuts out as an appetizer, and Uncle Leon would man the nutcracker, shelling them and passing them to the kids: walnuts and hazelnuts and pecans, cashews and almonds and Brazil nuts. Except he never called them Brazil nuts. He’d hold up a wrinkled, long brown shell. Nigger toes for sale, he’d say. Who wants a nigger toe?

“Do you remember Uncle Leon?” I ask abruptly, sitting up. “What he used to call them?”

My mother sighs. “Yes. Uncle Leon was a bit of a character.”

I hadn’t even known what the N-word meant, back then. I’d laughed, like everyone else. “How come no one ever said something to him? How come you didn’t shut him up?”

She looks at me, exasperated. “It wasn’t like Leon was ever gonna change.”

“Not if he had an audience,” I point out. I nod toward the sandbox, where Violet is shoulder to shoulder with a little black girl, chipping away at the packed sand with a stick. “What if she repeated what Leon used to say, because she doesn’t know better? How do you think that would go over?”

“Back then, North Carolina wasn’t like it is here,” my mother says.

“Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if people like you had stopped making excuses.”

I feel bad as soon as the words leave my mouth, because I know I’m berating my mother when I really want to beat up on myself. Legally I still know that the soundest course for Ruth is to avoid any discussion of race, but morally, I’m having a hard time reconciling that. What if the reason I have been so quick to dismiss the racial elements of Ruth’s case is not because our legal system can’t bear that load, but because I was born into a family where black jokes were as much of the holiday tradition as my grandmother’s bone china and sausage stuffing? My own mother, for God’s sake, grew up with someone like Ruth’s mom in the house-cooking, cleaning, walking her to school, taking her to playgrounds like this one.

My mother is quiet for so long that I know I’ve offended her. “In 1954, when I was nine years old, a court ruled that five black children could come to my school. I remember one boy in my class who said they had horns, hidden in their fuzzy hair. And my teacher, who warned us that they might try to steal our lunch money.” She turns to me. “The night before they came to school, my daddy held a meeting. Uncle Leon was there. People talked about how white children would be bullied, and how there’d be classroom control issues, because those kids didn’t know how to behave. Uncle Leon was so mad his face was red and sweaty. He said he didn’t want his daughter to be a guinea pig. They were planning to picket outside the school the next day, even though they knew there would be police there, making sure the kids could get inside. My daddy swore he would never sell Judge Hawthorne another car again.”

She starts collecting the nuts and the apples, packing them up. “Beattie, our maid, she was there that night too. Serving lemonade and cakes she’d made that afternoon. In the middle of the meeting I got bored, and went into the kitchen, and found her crying. I’d never seen Beattie cry before. She said that her little boy was one of those five who’d be bused in.” My mother shakes her head. “I didn’t even know she had a little boy. Beattie had been with my family since before I could walk or talk, and I didn’t ever consider she might belong with someone other than us.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Those children came to school. The police walked them inside. Other kids called them horrible names. One boy got spit on. I remember him walking by me, the saliva running down into his white collar, and I wondered if he was Beattie’s son.” She shrugs. “Eventually there were more of them. They kept to themselves, eating together at lunch and playing together at recess. And we kept to ourselves. I can’t say it was much of a desegregation, really.”

My mother nods toward Violet and her little friend, sprinkling grass over their mud pies. “This has been going on so much longer than either of us, Kennedy. From where you stepped in, in your life, it looks like we’ve got miles to go. But me?” She smiles in the direction of the girls. “I look at that, and I guess I’m amazed at how far we’ve come.”

–

AFTER CHRISTMAS AND New Year’s, I find myself doing the work of two public defenders, literally, because Ed is vacationing with his family in Cozumel. I’m in court representing one of Ed’s clients, who violated a restraining order, so I decide to check the docket to see which judge has been assigned to Ruth’s case. One typical pastime for lawyers is storing away the details of the personal lives of judges-who they marry, if they’re wealthy, if they go to church every weekend or just on high-water-mark holidays, if they’re dumber than a bag of hammers, if they like musical theater, if they go out drinking with attorneys when they are off the clock. We store away these facts and rumors like squirrels put away nuts for winter, so that when we see who is assigned to our case, we can pull out the minutiae and figure out if we have a fighting chance of winning.

When I see who it is, my heart sinks.

Judge Thunder lives up to his name. He’s a hanging judge, and he prejudges cases, and if you get convicted, you’re going away for a long, long time. I know this not from hearsay, however, but from personal experience.

Before I was a public defender, when I was clerking for a federal judge, one of my colleagues became tangled up in an ethical issue involving a conflict of interest from his previous job at a law firm. I was part of the team that represented him, and after years of building the case, we went to trial in front of Judge Thunder. He hated any kind of media circus, and the fact that a federal judge’s clerk was caught in an ethical violation had turned our trial into just that. Even though we had an airtight case, Thunder wanted to set a precedent for other attorneys, and my colleague was convicted and sentenced to six years. If that wasn’t shocking enough, the judge turned to all of us who had been on the defense team. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Mr. Dennehy has fooled you all,” Judge Thunder scolded. “But he hasn’t fooled this court.” For me, it was the last straw. I had been burning the candle at both ends, working for about a week without sleep. I was sick as a dog, on cold medication and heavy doses of prednisone, exhausted and demoralized after losing the case-so perhaps I was not as gracious or lucid as I could have been in that moment.