Small Great Things

Speaking of what to read during a snowstorm, that's kind of how Jodi Picoult's novel, Small Great Things made its way onto my reading list.

Picoult's novel was the monthly selection for the book group of my sister's husband's sister. Got that? In the middle of February, my sister Di and her husband Tom were headed up to Minnesota (from Missouri) to visit Tom's sister Linda, the one reading Small Great Things for her book group, that was scheduled to meet the weekend of my sister's visit. Di had read the novel in preparation for accompanying Linda to the book meeting as a guest, but Mother Nature intervened with much more snow than expected, and the book club was cancelled.

When Di group told me and our older sister Peg about the cancellation, Peg and I were immediately inspired to read the novel for solidarity. It's not often that we are all reading the same thing at the same time, and Small Great Things provided the perfect opportunity. Peg found a nice hardback on sale, and I got a used bargain paperback, and before we knew it we were halfway through. I took it to San Francisco to read on the plane and could hardly put it down!

No sooner had I finished, than my daughter - in - law Cathleen said, "I need a book to read, do you have any ideas for me?" "As a matter of fact, yes I do!" And I passed on my opy of Small Great Things, making Cathleen an honorary member of our virtual Book Club!

Di recommended this book at the perfect time because for weeks afterward, it seemed to keep coming up one way or another in our thoughts and in our conversation. For example:

1. Not long after finishing the novel, I went with Gerry to his allergy appointment, and the nurse doing the pinprick testing told us that she used to be a Labor & Delivery nurse, but after fifteen years she transferred over to allergy. She said -- without my having said anything about Small Great Things -- "Labor & delivery could be very stressful with a lot of sadness. I needed a break from that." So I told her that I just finished a book in which the main character Ruth was a L & D nurse who said the same thing!

Later that day, Gerry was telling me about a family he knew when he was growing up in England that had one British parent and one Indian parent, and the four children had varying degrees of skin pigmentation from dark to light. Gerry said, "It would be an interesting sociological study to see how this impacted them, growing up in England."

I said, "Hey -- guess what? That's another theme in the novel that Di, Peg, and I just read. The two African American sisters, Ruth and Rachel are treated / perceived differently because one has darker skin than the other."

2. Around the same time, in a family group text, my sons were swapping articles back and forth on the merits of Affirmative Action and related programs for helping historically disadvantaged groups get a level playing field in the economy. Conveniently, I was able to chime in with all the new perspectives that I gained from Small Great Things: you can't just change the law and fix the problem in one generation; it requires generations of consciousness raising.

3. I happened to come across this good talk from Trevor Noah that reminds me of some of the later discussions in Small Great Things.

4. In the novel, Jodi Picoult uses the metaphor of perpetually catching the babies being thrown out of the window (449), but I have always heard it as the parable of pulling the babies out of the river -- and wrote about it as such, not so long ago. Here's my version; and here's hers:

“'I feel like I've been standing underneath an open window, just as a baby gets tossed out. I grab the baby, right, because who wouldn't? But then another baby gets tossed out, so I pass the baby to someone else, and I make the catch. This keeps happening. And before you know it there are a whole bunch of people who are getting really good at passing along babies, just like I'm good at catching them, but no one ever asks who the f--k is throwing the babies out the window in the first place.'

'Um . . . what baby are we talking about?

'It's not a baby, it's a metaphor,' I say irritated. 'I've been doing my job, but who cares, if the system keeps on creating situations where my job is necessary? Shouldn't we focus on the big picture, instad of just catching whatever falls out the window at any given moment?'" (449)

5. For more connections, Peg pointed us in the direction of a television series that we'd all been watching together -- For The People. In "You Belong Here" (Season 2, Episode 6, 11 April 2019), there is "another case of a universe coincidence, when the black lawyer finds out he was chosen to prosecute because he's black, a topic that this show seems to touch on quite often."

I knew the episode she meant and had definitely been reminded of Small Great Things when Leonard (the young black male lawyer in For the People) is being lectured by an older black lawyer about being chosen because he's black -- and also about being unable to understand his position of privilege (helpful parents, quality education, decent job, good health, and so forth) -- precisely becaue he has all those privileges. Yes, he has felt racial discrimination, but still he has a lot of other privileges that other blacks (and other whites) lack.

Leonard replies that he has worked for everything he has. And the older lawyer says, "Well, not exactly -- yes you worked hard, but some of it you were given, some of it was good luck." It was perfect timing to compare this conversation to the novel, where it is the young white female lawyer (named Kennedy) who has to learn this lesson from her black elders and peers.

Kennedy uses her new appreciation of the difference between equality and equity in her closing argument:

"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?'

" . . . 'We are supposed to pretend [race] is merely the icing on the cake of whatever charge has been brought to the table -- not the substance of it. We are supposed to be the legal guardians of a postracial society. But you know the word ignorance has an even more important word at its heart: ignore.
And I don't think it's right to ignore the truth any longer.'" (462 - 64)

6. In closing, here's one last example from For the People, not specifically about Small Great Things but about our shared certainty that the connections just keep on coming! A week earlier, the episode entitled "One Big Happy Family" (Season 2, Episode 6, 11 April 2019) -- about a corrupt judge sending teens to a for - profit juvenile detention center -- had fit right into our discussion of dominoe - effect coincidences.

The ah - ha moment takes place when some of the research team roll in a moveable blackboard that shows the entire path of connections leading from the judge to the owner of the detention center. They are missing one piece of the puzzle, but all of a sudden one of the young lawyers (can never remember all their names) holds up her phone because she remembers seeing a pic of another judge standing side by side with a relative of someone in the scam. Well -- something like that! I've probably totally scrambled it up, but you get the idea: Only connect!