Small Great Things

Ruth returns home to find Edison is out. She gets a visit from Adisa. She asks Adisa to take care of Edison, thinking that she has lost the case and will soon be in jail, and Adisa gives her their mother’s lucky scarf, saying she needs it. When Edison returns late that night, he is on edge and deflects Ruth’s attempt at conversation, saying, “I have nothing to say to you” (419). Ruth interprets this as him being “disgusted by what he saw in [Ruth] today” (419), and falls into fitful sleep. Then, she wakes to a pounding at her door. The police arrest Edison, saying he’s been charged with a “Class C felony hate crime” (420). Ruth is shocked into inaction as they cuff her son and lead him out of the apartment, but then she picks up her phone and calls Kennedy, who answers “as if she’s been expecting [Ruth]” (420).

Kennedy goes to the police department and learns that Edison has been identified as the person who vandalized his mother’s hospital by spray painting a swastika and writing “Die Nigger.” He tells Kennedy he “wanted to get Turk Bauer in trouble” (422). Kennedy spends some of her own money to get a magistrate there, and within an hour has Edison released. As she drives him home, he tells her that he “sat through the whole trial; [racism] barely came up,” and asks if Kennedy really thinks “Turk Bauer is the only person in that courtroom who’s a racist” (423). When they arrive, Kennedy tells Ruth she’ll handle Edison’s case.

Kennedy arrives home in the wee hours and goes through Davis Bauer’s lab test results again, and finds there’s more on the back. She sees other abnormal results mentioning “sickle-cell,” thinks back to something the medical expert had said, and calls Wallace Mercy, asking for his help.

Again at the courthouse, Ruth tells Kennedy, “Just because you’re representing Edison doesn’t mean anything has changed,” and then tells Judge Thunder, “I would like to get rid of my lawyer” (426). The judge advises her not to, and calls a recess so Ruth and Kennedy can talk things over. Kennedy asks for one last chance, telling her “I think you’ll like hearing what I have to say” for the closing argument, and Ruth agrees (427). Kennedy then talks to the jury bluntly about race, both “the headwinds of racism, the ways that people of color are discriminated against,” and the “tailwinds of racism, the ways that those of us who aren’t people of color have benefited just because we’re white” (429). Despite the jury’s obvious discomfort, Kennedy continues by saying:

When I started working this case, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t see myself as a racist. Now I realize I am. Not because I hate people of different races but because—intentionally or unintentionally—I’ve gotten a boost from the color of my skin, just like Ruth Jefferson suffered a setback because of hers (430).

Kennedy then acknowledges that these are uncomfortable topics to discuss. She ends her statement by saying, “Ruth Jefferson just wanted the chance to do her job. To take care of that infant like she was trained to do. [...] Suddenly, [...] that type of arbitrary discrimination doesn’t seem so silly, does it?” (431).

As Kennedy finishes speaking, Ruth thinks, “For the jurors to hear it, really hear it, it had to be said by one of their own” (432). Kennedy thanks her under her breath as she sits. They see Judge Thunder glaring at them. Odette begins her closing argument, making an allusion to discrimination she faced while working at McDonald’s in high school and sometimes having people go to the other line, where a white coworker could wait on them, but she shrugged it off and “did [her] job,” whereas Ruth did not, instead taking “her anger out on that poor child” (433). Odette acknowledges Turk’s beliefs are “extreme” and he is “filled with hate,” but continues by saying that the jurors “must admit that Ruth, too, is filled with hate” (433). She ends her statement by saying that Ruth stopped trying to help Davis because “[s]he put her own interests in front of the patient’s […] which is exactly what a medical professional should never do” (434). After this, the judge gives the jury their instructions and sends them off to deliberate, at which point Kennedy tells Ruth, “Now [...] we wait” (435).

As Ruth and Kennedy exit the courthouse, hounded by the press, they see “a human blockade” with “Wallace [Mercy] and a woman in the middle” (436). At first, Ruth fears they are heading straight toward her, but instead they beeline for Brittany Bauer, and the black woman with Mercy tells Brittany, “Oh, Lord. Look how beautiful you are” (436). Brittany pushes her away, but the black woman says, “We met twenty-six years ago, when I gave birth to her” (436), revealing herself to be Brittany Bauer’s mother. Brittany calls the woman a liar and turns to her father, Francis, for confirmation, but he “is ashen” and simply says, “Hello, Adele” to the woman, confirming that the black woman is indeed Brit’s mom (437). Ruth, along with nearly everyone else, is shocked, but sees that Kennedy had known it was coming.

Turk’s perspective of the scene outside the courthouse follows, in which he’s telling “a right-wing radio personality that [they’ve] have only begun to fight” and then sees Brit’s biological mother tell “a blatant lie: that Brittany Bauer, the princess of the White Power Movement, is actually half black” (438), after which Francis all but confirms it. Brittany then flees the scene. Turk and Francis drive off together, trying to find her, and Francis tells him the truth: that he and Adele had been together, that he’d loved her, but eventually he accused her of cheating on him, not knowing for sure, and she’d left. He had kept Brittany, and “had to do something with all that hurt” (440). After that, he’d met Tom Metzger, a white nationalist, and told him “Adele had left me for a nigger. I guess I never mentioned that she was one too” (441). After that, it became “so much easier to hate them, than [for Francis] to hate [him]self” (441). Turk pushes aside his own feelings and focuses on finding Brit, thinking at last of where she might be.

They find her that night in the cemetery where Davis is buried, and as Turk grabs her, he realizes her arms are bloody, and she is saying, “I can’t find it [...] I keep trying to get [her blood] out” (442). Turk picks her up as she passes out, and they rush her to the hospital. While waiting there, Turk’s mind roils: “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” (443). He finds himself outside of the infant care ward, looking down at the babies, and ends up telling a new father that one of the children is his, to avoid difficult explanations of why he’s there. Then he realizes he indicated a child with “brown skin,” and realizes that if it were Davis, he wouldn’t care about that, and that “[i]t would just matter that he is alive” (443). He thinks to himself, “Maybe however much you’ve loved someone, that’s how much you can hate. [...] It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too” (443).

Kennedy and Ruth, meanwhile, have been waiting, and the novel picks up after two days have passed. Ruth has been on Wallace Mercy’s show and received donations and notes of encouragement. Now, waiting in the courthouse, Ruth asks Kennedy how she knew about Brittany’s mother. Kennedy replies that she “had a hunch” after researching and finding that “one in twelve African Americans carry the sickle-cell trait. One in ten thousand white people carry it” (445). Then Wallace Mercy did the rest. As they continue to wait, both Ruth and Kennedy think it’s a bad sign that it’s taking so long for the jury to come back from deliberation.

Finally, the judge calls Odette and Kennedy to his chambers and tells them it’s a hung jury, “Eleven to one” (447). Kennedy and Howard think they would have had an acquittal except for the “teacher who couldn’t admit to having any implicit racism” on the jury, whom they assume is the one holdout. They discuss what this means with Ruth and say it could be there will be a new trial, or Odette could drop it as a lost cause, but they’ll just have to wait and see. Once they get into the courtroom, though, the judge surprises everyone and grants Kennedy’s earlier motion for an acquittal, meaning Ruth has won and is free to go.

Having just found out she has won, Ruth is ecstatic, thinking that “[f]reedom is the fragile neck of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It’s the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It’s having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility” (449). She exits the courtroom with Kennedy, who tells the waiting press that Ruth is happy with the verdict and there will be a press conference the next day. Then they move onto another case down the hall: “It’s the arc of someone else’s story now” (450). She and Kennedy make a plan to have lunch later, and Ruth realizes “something shifts between us. It’s power, I realize, and we are dead even” (450). Ruth realizes she forgot her mother’s scarf in the courtroom and goes back for it, ending the chapter by repeating aloud, “Yes” (451).

The final chapter takes place six years after the main events of the novel, and features Turk taking his 3-year-old daughter, Carys, into a clinic for strep throat. He reveals that he has remarried and taken his new wife’s last name, and that he now stays home with Carys most days and works with the Anti-Defamation League, giving talks about his former life as a white supremacist: “I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows 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” (456). He also discusses his leaving the Movement; being beaten, along with Francis, after Brit’s lineage is revealed; and revealing that Brit committed suicide as Turk was filing for divorce.

Back in the present moment, the nurse comes in to see Carys, and introduces herself as Ruth Walker, but Turk recognizes her as the former Ruth Jefferson. Ruth says she owns the clinic, and doesn’t seem to recognize him, or at least isn’t letting on that she does. She examines Carys and Turk thanks her as Ruth leaves to run the test for strep. Carys points to “the only tattoo that remains on [Turk’s] body,” which is on Turk’s knuckles and reads “L. O. V. E.”. He waits with Carys for Ruth to return, “like we are at an intersection, and it’s my job to take her to the other side” (458).