Small Great Things

Turk talks to a lawyer about suing Ruth, but the lawyer says that Turk and Brit can’t really do anything until after the criminal trial is over. Then Turk thinks back to when he was first starting to work with Francis, Brit’s father, creating a new stage in the White Power Movement through their website, LONEWOLF, and how he would make up excuses to see Francis so that he could also see Brit. At first, he resisted the match because of her father being something like royalty, but eventually he agreed to take her wilding. In the present, Turk and Brit both wallow in their misery, with Brit taking sedatives and leftover Oxy and Turk drinking too much. Eventually, Francis snaps Turk out of it, handing him his computer and telling him to “[g]et even” (158).Turk creates a blog post, revealing his true identity instead of remaining anonymous, and telling the story of Davis. By the following morning, “thirteen thousand people know Davis’s name” (159).

Turk next recounts his first “date” with Brit, when they go wilding together. She tells him her mother ran away with a black man, and then they attack a gay couple at a hot dog stand, reveling in the feeling of “caus[ing] pain, for a few seconds, instead of feeling it” (162). Then, in the present, Turk narrates his perspective of the arraignment. He spits at Ruth. Outside the courtroom, he calls his father-in-law to get Brit to watch Channel 4, and he talks to the reporters.

Then he narrates how Francis asked him to marry Brit and how he proposed to her using food puns. The chapter ends in the present, with Turk coming home and finding Brit enthralled by the television. She turns to look at him, “bright and beautiful and [Turk’s] again,” and tells him, “Baby, you’re a star” (169).

Picking up after the arraignment, Ruth is again put in handcuffs and taken to prison until her son and sister can fill out the necessary paperwork to get her out on bail, which Kennedy tells her will probably be a couple of days, and which other prisoners tell her could be as much as a week or two. She thinks back to when she found out she got into Yale Nursing School, and the fuss that her mother and their church community made, saying that Ruth was “destined to do small great things” (173). She recounts the continued, small forms of racism she faced, despite her academic strides. As she is processed at the prison, she reflects on the degrading process of being stripped and searched, and wonders if “this guard’s job is the absolute opposite of [hers]” (176).

Ruth is taken to her cell, and messed with briefly by her cellmate. She wonders if Turk has ever been to prison, and “[i]f this means we, too, have something in common” (180). She talks to a counselor about visitation, and finds it could take up to ten days to be approved, and that Adisa would probably not be approved anyway, because she has a record, so Ruth gives up. She then thinks of another moment from her childhood: a sleepover with Christina Hallowell, after they have begun to drift apart, when “[i]t was harder to pretend it didn’t matter my mama worked for hers” (182). At some point, the girls get hungry, and Christina asks Ruth to go ask for food. In the kitchen, Ruth’s mom asks her why she was the one sent, and then asks why Ruth is at the sleepover anyway. Ruth tells her it’s because she didn’t “have anywhere else to go” (185). Later that night, Ruth is taken from her cell and given back her things and released; Edison and Adisa are there to collect her.

After Ruth’s arraignment, Kennedy finds she cannot stop thinking about her, so she “know[s] [she’s] in trouble” (188). She asks her husband what he would do if she went to prison, and he makes it a joke. In the morning, she tells him she’s planning to try to convince her boss to give her Ruth’s case, which would be her first felony trial, and a murder case. At the office, she’s able to convince her boss to give her the case if she has a co-chair, but she says she can handle it without. She then goes out to the prison to meet with Ruth, not realizing she has been released.

A couple of days later, Ruth comes to Kennedy’s office. They go to a Panera to discuss the case. Kennedy tries to put her at ease, saying “I just want you to feel comfortable. Frankly, I don’t even see color. I mean, the only race that matters is the human one, right?” (195). They go through Ruth’s educational background and the fact that she needs to be there for Edison. Then, Ruth brings up the racial issues, with Turk being a white supremacist, and herself being barred from treating Davis because of the color of her skin. Kennedy maintains that “To the State, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or blue or green” (195). Ruth maintains her case has everything to do with race, and Kennedy reflects privately that this is true, adding a “But” (196). To herself, she thinks that “it’s sure suicide in a courtroom to bring up race,” and instead, you need the jury “to go home still pretending that the world we live in is an equal one” (196). She tells Ruth that she believes her, but that “this is not the time or place to address it” (197), and that Ruth can file a civil suit later if she wins the criminal case. Finally, she convinces Ruth that she knows what she’s doing.