Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

I lean against a steel gurney, cradling him in my arms. I hold him the way I would have, if I’d been allowed to. I whisper his name and pray for his soul. I welcome him into this broken world and, in the same breath, say goodbye.

On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. “You’re destined to do small great things,” she told me. “Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

“You are not an impostor,” Sam Hallowell told me. “You are not there because of luck, or because you happened to be in the right place at the right moment, or because someone like me had connections. You are there because you are you, and that is a remarkable accomplishment in itself.”

We met an Aboriginal man, who showed us the Emu in the Sky, the constellation near the Southern Cross that is not a dot-to-dot puzzle, like our constellations, but the spaces in between the dots—nebulas swirling against the Milky Way to form the long neck and dangling legs of the great bird. I couldn’t find it, at first. And then, once I did, it was all I could see.

Once you can see it, you can’t go back.

And then what will I do? How am I supposed to encourage my son to be better than most people expect him to be? How can I say, with a straight face, you can be anything you want in this world—when I struggled and studied and excelled and still wound up on trial for something I did not do?

“Which means if this kid had been born on a Monday instead, he would have had a fighting chance.”

This made me bawl. Not for the baby, but for Ruth.

I think I know now why it is called the Kangaroo Suite. It’s because even when you no longer have a child, you carry him forever.

I look at my mom. “Do you think the world is biased toward righties?” “Um, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.” “That’s because,” I point out, “you’re a righty. But think about it. Can openers, scissors, even desks at college that fold out from the side—they’re all meant for right-handed people.”

What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn’t fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit?

I turn toward the jury. “What if, ladies and gentlemen, today I told you that anyone here who was born on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday was free to leave right now? Also, they’d be given the most central parking spots in the city, and the biggest houses. They would get job interviews before others who were born later in the week, and they’d be taken first at the doctor’s office, no matter how many patients were waiting in line. If you were born from Thursday to Sunday, you might try to catch up—but because you were straggling behind, the press would always point to how inefficient you are. And if you complained, you’d be dismissed for playing the birth-day card.” I shrug. “Seems silly, right? But what if on top of these arbitrary systems that inhibited your chances for success, everyone kept telling you that things were actually pretty equal?”

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?

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.

I expect pushback from this book. I will have people of color challenging me for choosing a topic that doesn’t belong to me. I will have white people challenging me for calling them out on their racism. Believe me, I didn’t write this novel because I thought it would be fun or easy.