Small Great Things Read online

  I have worked so hard to keep Edison from feeling this line being drawn, it never occurred to me that when it happened--which, I guess, was inevitable--it would burn even more, because he had never seen it coming.

  I reach for my son's hand and squeeze it. "You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain," I say. "Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose."

  Edison looks at me in horror. "You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?"

  "What I'm trying to say is that if Whitney sees how special you are, she'll want to be with you. And if she doesn't, she's not worth the fight."

  I put my arm around his shoulders; Edison leans into me. "That doesn't make it suck any less."

  "Language," I say automatically. "And no, it doesn't."

  Not for the first time, I wish Wesley were still alive. I wish he hadn't gone back on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan; I wish that he hadn't been driving in the convoy when the IED exploded; I wish that he had gotten to know Edison not just as a child but as a teen and now a young man. I wish he were here to tell his son that when a girl makes your blood rush it's just the first time of many.

  I wish he were here, period.

  If only you could see what we made, I think silently. He's the best of both of us.

  "Whatever happened to Tommy ?" I ask abruptly.

  "Tommy Phipps?" Edison frowns. "I think he got busted for dealing heroin behind the school last year. He's in juvie."

  "Do you remember in nursery school, when that little delinquent said you looked like burnt toast?"

  A slow smile stretches across Edison's face. "Yeah."

  It was the first time a child had mentioned to Edison that he was different from everyone else in his class--and had done so in a way that also made it seem bad. Burnt. Charred. Ruined.

  Before that maybe Edison had noticed, maybe he hadn't. But that was the first time I had the Talk with my son about skin color.

  "You remember what I told you?"

  "That my skin was brown because I had more melanin than anyone else in the school."

  "Right. Because everyone knows it's better to have more of something than less. And melanin protects your skin from damage from the sun, and helps make your eyesight better, and Tommy Phipps would always be lacking. So actually, you were the lucky one."

  Slowly, like water on parched pavement, the smile evaporates from Edison's face. "I don't feel so lucky now," he says.

  --

  AS LITTLE GIRLS, my older sister and I looked nothing alike. Rachel was the color of fresh-brewed coffee, just like Mama. Me, I was poured from the same pot, but with so much milk added, you couldn't even taste the flavor anymore.

  The fact that I was lighter got me privileges I didn't understand, privileges that drove Rachel crazy. Tellers at banks gave me lollipops, and then, as an afterthought, offered one to my sister. Teachers called me the pretty Brooks sister, the good Brooks sister. During class portraits, I would be moved up to the front row; Rachel got hidden in the back.

  Rachel told me that my real father was white. That I wasn't really part of our family. Then, Rachel and I got into it one day and started yelling at each other and I said something about going to live with my real daddy. That night my mama sat me down and showed me pictures of my father, who was also Rachel's father--a man with light brown skin like mine--holding me as a newborn. The date on the photo was a full year before he left all three of us for good.

  Rachel and I grew up as different as two sisters could be. I'm short, and she's tall as a queen. I was an avid student; she was naturally smarter than I was, but hated school. She embraced what she referred to as her "ethnic roots" in her twenties, legally changed her name to Adisa, and started wearing her hair in its natural kinky state. Although a lot of ethnic names are Swahili, Adisa comes from the Yoruba language, which she'll tell you is West African--"where our ancestors actually came from when they were brought here as slaves." It means, One who is clear. See, even her name judges the rest of us for not knowing the truths that she does.

  Now, Adisa lives near the train tracks in New Haven in a neighborhood where drug deals go down in broad daylight and young men shoot at each other throughout the night; she has five kids, and she and the father of her children have minimum-wage jobs and barely scrape by. I love my sister to death, but I don't understand the choices she's made any more than she can understand mine.

  I've wondered, you know. If my drive to become a nurse, to want more, to achieve more for Edison all came from the fact that even between two little Black sisters, I had a head start. I've wondered if the reason Rachel turned herself into Adisa was because feeding that fire inside herself was exactly what she needed to believe she had a chance to catch up.

  --

  ON FRIDAY, MY day off, I have an appointment at the nail salon with Adisa. We sit side by side, our hands under the UV drying vents. Adisa looks at the bottle of my chosen OPI nail color and shakes her head. "I can't believe you picked a polish called Juice Bar Hopping," she says. "That's got to be the whitest color ever."

  "It's orange," I point out.

  "I meant the name, Ruth, the name. You ever see a brotha in a juice bar? No. Because nobody goes to a bar to drink juice. Just like nobody asks for a sippy cup full of tequila."

  I roll my eyes. "Really? I just told you all about getting barred from a patient's care and you want to talk about what color I'm putting on my nails?"

  "I'm talking about what color you chose to live your life, girl," Adisa says. "What happened to you happens to the rest of us every day. Every hour. You're just so used to playing by their rules you forgot you got skin in the game." She smirks. "Well. Lighter skin, but still."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  She shrugs. "When was the last time you told someone Mama still works as a domestic?"

  "She hardly works now. You know that. She's basically a charity Mina contributes to."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  I scowl. "I don't know when I mentioned it last. Is that the first thing you bring up in conversation? Plus, it doesn't matter what color I am. I'm good at my job. I didn't deserve to be taken off that case."

  "And I don't deserve to be living in Church Street South, but it's going to take more than me to change two hundred years of history."

  My sister likes to play the victim. We've had some pretty heated exchanges about that before. If you don't want to be seen as a stereotype, then the way I see it, don't be one. But to my sister, that means playing a white man's game, and being who they want her to be, instead of being unapologetically herself. Adisa says the word assimilation with so much venom that you'd think anyone who chooses it--like I did--is swallowing poison.

  It's also very like my sister to take a problem I have and turn it into her own rant.

  "None of what happened at the hospital is your fault," my sister says, surprising me. I figured she'd say I had this coming to me, because I've been pretending to be someone I'm not and somewhere along the pretending, I forgot the truth. "It's their world, Ruth. We just live in it. It's like if you up and moved to Japan. You could choose to ignore the customs and never learn the language, but you're going to get along a lot easier if you do, right? Same thing here. Every time you turn on the TV or the radio you see and hear about white people going to high school and college, eating dinner, getting engaged, drinking their pinot noir. You learn how they live their lives, and you speak their language well enough to blend in with them. But how many white people you know who go out of their way to see Tyler Perry movies so they can learn how to act around Black people?"

  "That's not the point--"

  "No, the point is you can do as the Romans do all you want, but it don't mean the Emperor will let you into his palace."

  "White people do not run the world, Adisa," I argue. "There are plenty of successful people of color." I name the first three that pop