Small Great Things(157)
She turns to Carys. “So something doesn’t feel good, huh? Can I take a look?”
She lets Carys sit on my lap as she runs gentle hands over my daughter’s swollen glands and takes her temperature and teases her into opening her mouth by staging a singing contest that Carys, of course, wins. I let my gaze wander around the room, noticing things I hadn’t seen before—the diploma on the wall with the name Ruth Jefferson written in calligraphy. The framed photo of a handsome black guy wearing a graduation cap and gown on the Yale campus.
She snaps off her gloves, drawing my attention. I notice that she is wearing a small diamond ring and wedding band on her left hand.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s strep,” she tells me. “Is Carys allergic to any medications?”
I shake my head. I can’t find my voice.
“I can take a swab of her throat, do a rapid strep culture, and based on those results, start a course of antibiotics,” she says. She tugs on Carys’s braid. “You,” she promises, “are going to feel excellent in no time at all.”
Excusing herself, she walks toward the door to get whatever she needs to do the test. “Ruth,” I call out, just as she puts her hand on the knob.
She turns. For a moment, her eyes narrow the tiniest bit, and I wonder. I wonder. But she doesn’t ask if we have met before; she doesn’t acknowledge our history. She just waits for me to say whatever it is I feel the need to say.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
She nods, and slips out of the room. Carys twists on my lap. “It still hurts, Daddy.”
“The nurse is going to make it better.”
Satisfied with this, Carys points to the knuckles of my left hand, the only tattoo that remains on my body. “That’s my name?” she asks.
“Kind of,” I answer. “Your name means the same thing, in a language called Welsh.”
She is just starting to learn her letters. So she points to each knuckle in turn: “L,” she reads. “O. V. E.”
“That’s right,” I say proudly. We wait for Ruth to come back to us. I hold my daughter’s hand, or maybe she holds mine, like we are at an intersection, and it’s my job to take her safely to the other side.
About four years into my writing career, I wanted to write a book about racism in the United States. I was drawn by a real-life event in New York City, when a Black undercover police officer was shot in the back, multiple times, by white colleagues—in spite of the fact that the undercover cop had been wearing what was called “the color of the day”—a wristband meant to allow officers to identify those who were in hiding. I started the novel, foundered, and quit. I couldn’t do justice to the topic, somehow. I didn’t know what it was like to grow up Black in this country, and I was having trouble creating a fictional character that rang true.
Flash forward twenty years. Once again, I desperately wanted to write about racism. I was uncomfortably aware that when white authors talked about racism in fiction, it was usually historical. And again, what right did I have to write about an experience I had not lived? 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?
Because race is different. Racism is different. It’s fraught, and it’s hard to discuss, and so as a result we often don’t.
Then I read a news story about an African American nurse in Flint, Michigan. She had worked in labor and delivery for over twenty years, and then one day a baby’s dad asked to see her supervisor. He requested that this nurse, and those who looked like her, not touch his infant. He turned out to be a white supremacist. The supervisor put the patient request in the file, and a bunch of African American personnel sued for discrimination and won. But it got me thinking, and I began to weave a story.
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.
Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.