Small Great Things (15 page)

“Walt Disney was a genius,” Mr. Hallowell mused. He sat down on the couch and patted the seat beside him, and I scrambled over. A cartoon duck with glasses and a thick accent was sticking his hand in animated cans of paint and dumping the contents on the floor.
You mix them all together and they spell muddy…and then you got black,
the cartoon duck said, stirring the paint with his flippered foot so that it turned ebony
. That's exactly the way things were in the very beginning of time. Black. Man was completely in the dark about color. Why? Because he was stupid.

Mr. Hallowell was close enough now for me to smell his breath—sour, like that of my uncle Isaiah, who'd missed Christmas last year because Mama said he had gone somewhere to dry out. “Christina and Louis and you and your sister, you don't know any different. For you it's always looked like this.” He stood up suddenly and turned to me so that the projector shadowed his face, a dance of bright silhouettes. “The following program is brought to you in Living Color on NBC!” he boomed, spreading his arms so wide that the liquid in his glass sloshed over the side and onto the carpet. “What do you think, Ruth?” he asked.

I thought that I wanted him to move, so I could see what the duck was going to do next.

Mr. Hallowell's voice softened. “I used to say that before every program,” he told me. “Until color TV was so common, no one needed reminding that it was a miracle. But before that—
before
that—I was the voice of the future. Me. Sam Hallowell.
The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!
”

I didn't tell him to move over, so that I could see the cartoon. I sat with my hands in my lap, because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn't because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.

Late that night after my mama had brought us back home and tucked us into our beds, I had a nightmare. I opened my eyes and everything was cast in shades of gray, like the man on the movie screen before he pinked up and the background exploded with color. I saw myself running through the brownstone, pulling at locked doors, until Mr. Hallowell's study opened. The film we had watched was ticking through the projector, but the picture was black and white now, too. I started screaming, and my mama rushed in and Rachel and Ms. Mina and Christina and even Mr. Hallowell, but when I told them my eyes weren't working and that all the color in the world had vanished, they laughed at me.
Ruth,
they said,
this is the way it always has been. Always will be.

B
Y THE TIME
my train gets back to New Haven, Edison is already home and bent over the kitchen table doing his schoolwork. “Hey, baby,” I say, dropping a kiss on the crown of his head as I walk in, and giving him an extra squeeze. “That's from Grandma Lou.”

“Aren't you supposed to be at work?”

“I had a half hour before my shift starts, and I decided I'd rather spend it with you than in traffic.”

His eyes flicker toward me. “You're gonna be late.”

“You're worth it,” I tell him. I grab an apple from a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table—I always keep something healthy there, because Edison will eat whatever's not nailed down—and take a bite, reaching for some of the papers spread out in front of my son. “Henry O. Flipper,” I read. “Sounds like a leprechaun.”

“He was the first African American graduate from West Point. Everyone in AP History has to teach a class profiling an American hero, and I'm trying to figure out what my lesson's going to be.”

“Who else is in the running?”

Edison looks up. “Bill Pickett—a Black cowboy and rodeo star. And Christian Fleetwood, a Black Civil War soldier who won the Medal of Honor.”

I glance at the grainy photos of each man. “I don't know any of these people.”

“Yeah, that's the point,” Edison says. “We get Rosa Parks and Dr. King and that's about it. You ever hear of a brotha named Lewis Latimer? He drew telephone parts for Alexander Graham Bell's patent applications, and worked as a draftsman and patent expert for Thomas Edison. But you didn't name me after him because you didn't know he existed. The only time people who look like us are making history, it's a footnote.”

He says this without bitterness, the way he would announce that we are out of ketchup or that his socks turned pink in the wash—as if it is something he's not thrilled about, but can't get worked up over, because it's unlikely to change the outcome at this particular moment. I find myself thinking about Mrs. Braunstein and Virginia again. It feels like a splinter my mind keeps getting caught on, and Edison just pressed deep on it again. Have I really never noticed these things before? Or have I been very studiously keeping my eyes shut tight?

Edison glances at his watch. “Mama,” he says, “you're gonna be
really
late.”

He's right. I tell him what he can heat up for dinner, what time he should go to bed, what time my shift is over. Then I hurry to my car and drive to the hospital. I take as many shortcuts as I can, but I'm still ten minutes late. I take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and by the time I reach the birthing pavilion I am out of breath and sweating. Marie is standing at the nurses' desk, as if she's waiting on me. “I'm sorry,” I say immediately. “I was in New York with my mother, and then stuck in traffic, and—”

“Ruth…I can't let you work tonight.”

I am dumbfounded. Corinne is late more than 50 percent of the time, but I have a single transgression and I get punished for it?

“It won't happen again,” I say.

“I can't let you work,” Marie repeats, and I realize that she hasn't met my gaze, not once. “I've been informed by HR that your license is being suspended.”

Suddenly, I am made of stone. “What?”

“I'm so sorry,” she whispers. “Security will escort you out of the building after you clear out your locker.”

“Wait,” I say, noticing the two goons who are hovering behind the nurses' desk. “You're kidding me. Why is my license being suspended? And how am I supposed to work if it is?”

Marie draws in her breath and turns to the security guards. They step forward. “Ma'am?” one of them says, and he gestures toward the break room, as if after twenty years I might not know the way.

T
HE LITTLE CARDBOARD
box I carry out to the car has a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Advil, a cardigan sweater, and a collection of photos of Edison. That's all I kept in my locker at work. It sits in the backseat and keeps drawing my attention in the rearview mirror, surprising me, like a passenger I wasn't expecting.

I have not even pulled out of the parking lot before I call the union lawyer. It's 5:00
P.M.
, and the chances of him being at his desk are slim, so when he answers the phone I burst into tears. I tell him about Turk Bauer and the baby and he calms me down and says he will do some digging and call me back.

I should go home. I should make sure Edison is all right. But that will spark a conversation about why I'm not at work, and I'm not sure I can cope with that right now. If the union lawyer does his job, maybe I can even be reinstated before I'm supposed to work tomorrow night.

Then my phone rings. “Ruth?” Corinne says. “What the
fuck
is going on?”

I lean back against the driver's seat, closing my eyes. “I don't know,” I admit.

“Hang on,” she says, and I hear muffled noises. “I'm in the goddamned supply closet for privacy. I called you as soon as I heard.”

“Heard what? I don't know anything, except that my license is apparently being suspended.”

“Well, that bitchy hospital lawyer said something to Marie about professional misconduct—”

“Carla Luongo?”

“Who's she?”

“The bitchy hospital lawyer. She threw me under the bus,” I say, bitter. Carla and I had each gotten a glimpse of the other's cards, and I'd thought that was enough for us to implicitly agree we both had aces. I just never expected her to play her hand so quickly. “That racist father must have threatened a lawsuit, and she sacrificed me to save the hospital.”

There's a pause. It's so small that maybe if I wasn't listening for it, I might not have heard it. And then Corinne—my colleague, my friend—says, “I'm sure it wasn't intentional.”

At Dalton, there was one table at lunch where all the Black kids sat, except me. Once, another scholarship student of color invited me to join them for lunch. I said thanks, but I usually spent that time tutoring a white friend who didn't understand trig. This was not the truth. The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they'd sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they
didn't
chafed hard.

The other truth was that if I sat with the other kids of color, I couldn't pretend I was different from them. When Mr. Adamson, my history teacher, started talking about Martin Luther King and kept looking at me, my white friends shrugged it off:
He didn't mean it that way
. At the Black table, if one student talked about Mr. Adamson staring at her during that same lesson, another African American student would validate the experience:
That totally happened to me, too.

I so badly wanted to blend in in high school that I surrounded myself with people who could convince me that if I felt like I was being singled out because of the color of my skin, I was making things up, overthinking, being ridiculous.

There was no Black table in the cafeteria at the hospital. There were a handful of janitors of color, and one or two doctors, and me.

I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right to tell me if Carla Luongo's actions were intentional or accidental. But instead I tell her I have to go, and I hang up while she is still responding. Then I drive out of the hospital where I've been hiding for two decades, underneath the highway that pulses with New York–bound traffic, like an artery. I pass a small tent city of homeless vets and a drug deal going down and park outside the projects where my sister lives. She answers the door with a toddler on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face that suggests she has been expecting me for years.

“
W
HY ARE YOU
surprised?” Adisa asks. “What did you think was going to happen, moving into Whiteville?”

“East End,” I correct, and she just gives me a look.

We are sitting at her kitchen table. Given the sheer number of children she lives with, the apartment is remarkably clean. Pages from coloring books are taped to the wall, and there is a macaroni casserole in the oven. In the kitchen, Adisa's oldest, Tyana, is feeding the baby at her high chair. Two of the boys are playing Nintendo in the living room. Her other child is MIA.

“I hate to say I told you so…”

“No, you don't,” I mutter. “You've been
waiting
to tell me that forever.”

She shrugs, agreeing. “You're the one who kept saying,
Adisa, you don't know what you talking about. My skin color isn't even a factor.
And go figure, you're
not
just like one of them, are you?”

“You know, if I wanted to be a punching bag, I could have just stayed at the hospital.” I bury my face in my hands. “What am I supposed to tell Edison?”

“The truth?” Adisa suggests. “There's no shame in it. It's not like you did anything wrong. It's better he learn earlier than his mama that he can run with the white crowd but it don't make him any less Black.”

When Edison was younger, Adisa used to babysit him after school if I pulled an afternoon shift, until he begged to stay home alone. His cousins ribbed him for not being able to understand their slang, and when he did start to master it, his white friends in school looked at him like he had grown a second head. Even I was having trouble understanding my nephews, elbowing each other on the couch and laughing until Tyana whacked them both with a dish towel so that she could put the baby to sleep. (
Oh, we out chea,
I heard one of the boys say, and it took me a few minutes to realize that translated to
We're out here,
and that Tabari was teasing his brother for thinking he was all that because he won a round of the game.) Edison might not have fit in with the white kids in his school, but that at least he could blame on his skin. He didn't fit in with his cousins, either, and
they
looked like him.

Adisa folds her arms. “You need to find a lawyer and sue that damn hospital right back.”

“That costs money,” I groan. “I just want this all to go away.”

My heart starts to hammer. I can't lose our home. I can't take my savings—all of which is Edison's college fund—and liquidate it just so that we can eat and pay the mortgage and buy gas. I can't ruin my son's opportunities just because mine blew up in my face.

Adisa must see that I'm on the verge of a total breakdown because she reaches for my hand. “Ruth,” she says softly. “Your friends may have turned on you. But you know what the good thing is about having a sister? It's forever.”

She locks her eyes on mine—hers are so dark that you can barely see the edge between iris and pupil. But they're steady, and she doesn't let go of me, and slowly, slowly, I let myself breathe.

W
HEN
I
RETURN
to my house at seven o'clock, Edison comes running to the front door. “What are you doing home?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”