Small Great Things (54 page)

T
HE CAMERAS ARE ROLLING WHEN
all hell breaks loose. One minute, Brit and Francis are standing next to me, listening to me tell some right-wing radio personality that we have only just begun to fight, and then it becomes a literal declaration. A black woman marches up to Brit and touches her arm. Naturally, Brit recoils, and then the woman lobs a blatant lie: that Brittany Bauer, the princess of the White Power Movement, is actually half black.

I look to Francis, the way I have, well, for years. He taught me everything I know about hate; I would go to war beside him; in fact I
have.
I step back, waiting for Francis to let loose with his famous rhetoric, to cut this bitch down to size as an opportunist who wants her fifteen minutes of fame—except he doesn't.

He says the name of Brittany's mother.

I do not know much about Adele, because Brit doesn't, either. Just her name, and the fact that she cheated on Francis with a black dude and he was so furious that he gave her an ultimatum: leave him the baby and disappear from their lives forever, or die in your sleep. Wisely, she chose the former, and that was all Brit needed to know about her.

But I look at Brit's long dark hair.

We see what we're told to see.

She glances up, looking at Francis, too. “Daddy?”

Suddenly I can't breathe. I don't know who my wife is. I don't know who
I
am. For years I would have easily said I'd knife someone black before I'd sit down for coffee with them, and all this time, I've been living with one.

I made a
baby
with one.

Which means my own son, he was part-black, too.

There's a buzzing in my ears that feels like I'm free-falling, dropped from the airplane without a parachute. The ground, it's rushing up at me.

Brittany stands up, turning in a circle, her face pinched so tight it breaks my heart. “Baby,” Francis offers, and she makes a low sound, deep in her throat.

“No,” she says. “No.”

Then she runs.

S
HE IS SMALL,
and she is fast. Brit can move in and out of shadows, and why shouldn't she be able to? I mean, she learned, like me, from the best.

Francis tries to get the Lonewolf.org members who've been at court in solidarity to help us search for Brit, but there is a wall between us now. Some have already disappeared. I have no doubt that they will discontinue their user accounts, unless Francis can do enough damage control to stop them.

I am not sure that I even care.

I just want to find my wife.

We drive everywhere, looking for her. Our network, invisible but wide, is no longer available. We are alone in this, completely isolated.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

As I drive, searching the far corners of this city, I turn and look at Francis. “You feel like telling me the truth?”

“It was a long time ago,” he says quietly. “Before I joined the Movement. I met Adele at a diner. She served me pie. She put her name and phone number on the bill. I called.” He shrugs. “Three months later, she was pregnant.”

I feel my stomach turn as I think about sleeping with one of them. But then, I had done that, hadn't I?

“God help me, Turk, I loved her. Didn't matter if we were out dancing halfway into the night, or sitting at home watching television—I got to the point where I just didn't feel whole if she wasn't with me. And then we had Brit, and I started to get scared. It felt perfect, you know? And perfect means that something's bound to go wrong.”

He rubs his forehead. “She went to church on Sundays, same church she'd gone to as a kid. A black church, with all that singing and hallelujah shit—I couldn't take it. I went fishing instead and told her that was my holy place. But the choir director, he started taking an interest in Adele. Told her she had the voice of an angel. They started spending a lot of time together, practicing all hours of the day or night.” He shakes his head. “I don't know, maybe I went a little crazy. I accused her of cheating on me. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. I messed her up some, which was wrong, I know. But I couldn't help it, she was tearing me apart, and I had to do something with all that hurt. You know what that's like, right?”

I nod.

“She ran to this other guy for comfort, and he took her in. Jesus, Turk, I drove her right to him. Next thing I know she says she's leaving me. I tell her that if she goes, it's empty-handed. I'm not letting her take my daughter away from me. I say that if she tries, it'll be the last thing she ever does.” He looks at me, bleak. “I never saw her again.”

“And you never told Brit?”

He shakes his head. “What was I going to say? I threatened to kill her mother? No. I started taking Brit to bars, leaving her in her car seat asleep while I went in to get drunk. That's where I met Tom Metzger.”

I find it hard to imagine the leader of the White Alliance Army slugging a beer, but stranger things have happened.

“He was with some of his guys. He saw me get into my car, and refused to let me drive home when he saw Brit in the back. He drove us to my place and said I needed to get my act together for my kid. I was sloppy drunk by then; I told him how Adele had left me for a nigger. I guess I never mentioned that she was one too. Anyway, Tom gave me something to read. A pamphlet.” Francis purses his lips. “That was the start. It was so much easier to hate them, than to hate myself.”

My high beams cut across a train track, a place where Francis's squad used to hold court, back when they were active. “And now,” Francis says, “I'm going to lose her too. She knows how to cover her tracks, how to disappear. I
taught
her.”

He is riding a ragged edge of pain and shock, and frankly I don't have time for Francis's breakdown. I have more important things to do, like find my wife.

And I have one more idea.

W
E HAVE TO
break into the graveyard; it's after dark now and the gates are locked. I scale the fence and hack at the lock with a sledgehammer from the back of my rig so that Francis can get inside, too. We let our eyes adjust, because we know Brit might run at the glimpse of a flashlight.

At first, I can't see her at all; it's that dark, and she is wearing a navy dress. But then I hear movement as I draw closer to Davis's grave. For a moment, the clouds covering the moon part, and the headstone gleams. There is a glint of metal, too.

“Don't come any closer,” Brit says.

I hold up my palms, a white flag. Very slowly, I take another step. She slashes out once. It's a penknife, one she carries in her purse. I remember the day she bought it, at a White Power rally. She had held up various models, brandishing onyx, mother-of-pearl. She'd pressed a bedazzled one against my throat in a mock charge.
Which is more
me
?
she had teased.

“Hey, baby,” I say gently. “It's time to come home.”

“I can't. I'm a mess,” she mutters.

“That's okay.” I crouch down, moving the way I would if I were approaching a wild dog. I reach for her hand, but my palm slips out of hers.

I look down and see mine is bloody.

“Jesus Christ!” I cry, just as Francis shines his iPhone flashlight down on Brit from behind me, and lets out a cry. She is sitting with her back against Davis's grave. Her eyes are wide and wild, glassy. Her left arm has been sliced deeply seven or eight times. “I can't find it,” she says. “I keep trying to get it out.”

“Get what out, sweetheart?” I say, reaching for the blade again.

But she curls it away from me. “Her blood.” As I watch, she picks up the knife and slashes her wrist.

The knife falls out of Brit's hand, and as her eyes roll back in her head, I lift her in my arms and start running to my truck.

I
T'S A WHILE
before Brit is stable again, and that's a generous term. We are at Yale–New Haven, a different hospital than the one where she delivered Davis. Her lacerations have been stitched, her wrist has been wrapped; the blood has been washed from her body. She has been admitted to the psych ward, and I have to say, I'm grateful. I can't unravel the knots in her mind.

I can barely unravel the knots in mine.

I tell Francis to go home, get some rest. Me, I'll stay overnight in the visitors' lounge, just to make sure if Brit wakes up and needs me, she will know someone is here for her. But right now, she is unconscious, knocked out with sedatives.

A hospital after midnight is ghostly. Lights are low, and sounds are eerie—the squeak of a nurse's shoes, the moan of a patient, the beep and exhale of a blood pressure machine. I buy a knit cap from the gift store, one that has been knit for chemo patients, but I don't care. It covers my tattoo and right now I want to blend in.

I sit in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, and combing through the tangle of my thoughts. There's only so many things you can hate. There are only so many people you can beat up, so many nights you can get drunk, so many times you can blame other people for your own bullshit. It's a drug, and like any drug, it stops working. And then what?

My head actually aches from holding three incompatible truths in it:
1. Black people are inferior. 2. Brit is half black. 3. I love Brit with all my heart.

Shouldn't numbers one and two make number three impossible? Or is she the exception to the rule? Was Adele one, too?

I think of me and Twinkie dreaming of the food we craved behind bars.

How many exceptions do there have to be before you start to realize that maybe the truths you've been told aren't actually true?

When I finish my coffee, I wander the halls of the hospital. I read a discarded newspaper in the lobby. I watch the flashing ambulance lights through the glass doors of the ER.

I stumble upon the preemie NICU by accident. Believe me, I don't want to be anywhere near a birthing pavilion; those scars are still tender for me, even if this is a different hospital. But I stand at the window beside another man. “She's mine,” he says, pointing to a painfully small infant in a pink blanket. “Her name is Cora.”

I panic a little; what creep hangs out in front of a nursery if he's not related to one of the babies? So I point to a kid in a blue blanket. There's a bit of a glare through his incubator, but even from here I can see the brown of his skin. “Davis,” I lie.

My son was as white as I am, at least on the outside. He did not look like this newborn. But even if he had, now I realize I would have loved him. The truth is, if that baby were Davis, it wouldn't matter that his skin is darker than mine.

It would just matter that he is alive.

I bury my shaking hands in my coat, thinking of Francis, and of Brit. Maybe however much you've loved someone, that's how much you can hate. It's like a pocket turned inside out.

It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too.

I
N THE TIME THAT IT
takes for the jury to return a verdict, I sit through forty more arraignments, thirty-eight of which are black men. Micah performs six surgeries. Violet goes to a birthday party. I read an article on the front page of the paper, about a march at Yale by students of color, who want—among other things—to rechristen a residential college currently named for John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice president who supported slavery and secession.

For two days, Ruth and I sit at the courthouse, and wait. Edison goes back to school, knuckling down with renewed enthusiasm—it's amazing what a little brush with the law can do for a kid who's flirting with delinquency. Ruth also has—with my blessing, and with me at her side—appeared on Wallace Mercy's television show, via remote camera. He championed her bravery, and handed her a check to cover some of the money she had lost from being out of work for months—donations from people as close as East End and as far as Johannesburg. Afterward, we read notes that were enclosed with some of the contributions:

I THINK ABOUT YOU AND YOUR BOY.

I DON'T HAVE MUCH, BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU'RE NOT ALONE.

THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE ENOUGH TO STAND UP, WHEN I DIDN'T.

We've heard about Brittany Bauer, who is suffering from what the prosecution calls stress and Ruth calls just plain crazy. No one has seen hide nor hair of Turk Bauer or Francis Mitchum.

“How did you know?” Ruth had asked me, immediately after the debacle that occurred when Wallace brought Adele Adams to the courthouse to “accidentally” cross paths with Francis and his daughter.

“I had a hunch,” I told her. “I was looking through the neonatal screening, and I saw something none of us noticed before, because we were so focused on the MCADD: sickle-cell anemia. I remembered what the neonatologist said, about how that particular disease hits the African American community harder than others. And I also remembered Brit saying during her deposition that she never knew her mother.”

“That's quite a long shot,” Ruth had said.

“Yeah, that's why I did a little digging. One in twelve African Americans carry the sickle-cell trait. One in ten thousand white people carry it. Suddenly, it looked less like a wild card. So I called Wallace. The rest, that's on him. He found out the name of the mother from Brit's birth certificate, and tracked her down.”

Ruth had looked at me. “But it had nothing to do with your case, really.”

“Nope,” I'd admitted. “That one, it was a gift from you to me. I figured there wasn't anything that could put a finer point on the hypocrisy of it all.”

Now, as we come to the close of the second day with no word from the jury, we're all going a little stir-crazy. “What are you doing?” I ask Howard, who has been keeping the vigil with us. He's been typing furiously into his phone. “Hot date?”

“I've been looking up the sentencing difference for possession of crack versus cocaine,” he says. “Up until 2010, a person convicted of possession with intent to distribute fifty grams or more of crack got a minimum of ten years in prison. To get the same sentence for cocaine, you had to distribute five
thousand
grams. Even now, the sentencing disparity ratio's eighteen to one.”

I shake my head. “Why do you need to know this?”

“I'm thinking about appeal,” he says brightly. “That's clearly a precedent for prejudice in sentencing, since eighty-four percent of people convicted for crack offenses are black, and black drug offenders are twenty percent more likely to be imprisoned than white drug offenders.”

“Howard,” I say, rubbing my temples. “Turn off your damn phone.”

“This is bad, right?” Ruth says. She rubs her arms, although the radiator is belching and it's broiling in the room. “If they were going to acquit, it would have been quick, I bet.”

“No news is good news,” I lie.

A
T THE END
of the day, the judge calls the jury back into the courtroom. “Have you arrived at a verdict?”

The forewoman stands. “No, Your Honor. We're split.”

I know the judge is going to give them an Allen charge, a glorified legal pep talk. He turns to the jury, imperial, to imbue them with resolve. “You know, the State has spent a great deal of money to put this trial on, and nobody knows the facts more than you all do. Talk to each other. Allow yourself to hear another's point of view. I encourage you to arrive at a verdict, so that we do not have to go through this all over again.”

The jury is dismissed, and I look at Ruth. “You probably have to get back home.”

She looks at her watch. “I have a little time,” she admits.

So we walk downtown, shoulder to shoulder, huddled against the cold to grab a cup of coffee. We slip out of the biting wind into the buzzy chatter of a local shop. “After I realized I couldn't cut it as a pastry chef I used to dream about opening a coffee place,” I muse. “I wanted to call it Grounds for Dismissal.”

We are the next to order; I ask Ruth how she takes her coffee. “Black,” she says, and suddenly we are both laughing so hard that the barista looks at us as if we are crazy, as if we are speaking a language she can't understand.

Which, I guess, is not all that far from the truth.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Judge Thunder summons Odette and me to chambers. “I got a note from the foreman. We have a hung jury. Eleven to one.” He shakes his head. “I'm very sorry, ladies.”

After he dismisses us, I find Howard pacing outside chambers. “Well?”

“Mistrial. They're deadlocked, eleven to one.”

“Who's the holdout?” Howard asks, but it's a rhetorical question; he knows I don't have that information.

Suddenly, though, we both stop walking and face each other. “Juror number twelve,” we say simultaneously.

“Ten bucks?” Howard asks.

“You're on,” I tell him.

“I knew we should have used a peremptory strike on her.”

“You haven't won that bet yet,” I point out. But deep down, I imagine he's right. The teacher who couldn't admit to having any implicit racism would have been mightily offended by my closing argument.

Ruth is waiting for me in the conference room. She looks up, hopeful. “They can't reach a verdict,” I say.

“So now what?”

“That depends,” I explain. “The case can be tried again, later, with a new jury. Or else Odette just gives up and doesn't pursue this any further.”

“Do you think she—?”

“I learned a long time ago not to pretend I can think like a prosecutor,” I admit. “We're just going to have to see.”

In the courtroom, the jury files in, looking exhausted. “Madam Foreman,” the judge says. “I understand that the jury has been unable to reach a verdict. Is that correct?”

The foreman stands. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you feel that further time would enable you to resolve this case finally between the State and Ms. Jefferson?”

“Unfortunately, Your Honor, some of us just cannot see eye to eye.”

“Thank you for your service,” Judge Thunder says. “I am dismissing this jury.”

The men and women exit. In the gallery, there are hushed whispers, as people try to understand what this means. I try to figure out in my head the odds that Odette will go back to a grand jury for that involuntary manslaughter charge.

“There is still one final thing that needs to be done in this trial,” Judge Thunder continues. “I am prepared to rule on the defense's renewed motion for judgment of acquittal.”

Howard looks at me over Ruth's head.
What?

Holy shit. Judge Thunder is going to use the escape hatch I gave him as a matter of routine. I hold my breath.

“I have researched the law, and have reviewed the evidence in this case very carefully. There is no credible proof that the death of this child was causally related to any action or inaction of the defendant's.” He faces Ruth. “I am very sorry you had to go through what you did at your workplace, ma'am.” He smacks his gavel. “I grant the defense's motion.”

In this humbling moment I learn that not only can I not think like a prosecutor, I am woefully off-base about the mental machinations of a judge. I turn, a dazed laugh bubbling up inside me. Ruth's brow is furrowed. “I don't understand.”

He hasn't declared a mistrial. He's granted a bona fide acquittal.

“Ruth,” I say, grinning. “You are free to go.”