Ponder Post: Small Great Things

Ruth Jefferson has been a labor and delivery nurse for twenty years. She is black. When a white supremacist couple come into the hospital to give birth to their first child they instruct the hospital that the black nurse is not to touch their baby. The hospital administration instructs Ruth to abide by the wishes of the parents. But when an emergency situation arises, Ruth is alone with the baby. Does she intervene to help the child against orders, or refrain from touching the baby so she does not lose her job due to disobedience? The nurses' equivalent to the Hippocratic oath of doctors is based on the Nightingale Pledge. One line stresses the importance of following orders, "To co-operate faithfully with the other members of the nursing team and to carry out faithfully and to the best of my ability the instructions of the physician or the nurse who may be assigned to supervise my work". Does Ruth follow her instinct or her pledge? Either path may cost her her livelihood.

Ruth's actions catapult her into a high profile court case. Lawyers are trained to follow the commonly accepted and advised practice of avoiding the mention of race in a trial. But the proverbial elephant in this court room is extremely difficult to ignore. How can the accusation of a white supremacist couple against a black nurse not have racial undercurrents? Jodi Picoult, author of the novel Small Great Things ©2016, modeled the title after a quote often attributed to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way."

The chapters in this novel are titled and told in the voice of the main characters: RUTH, the nurse on trial, KENNEDY, her female white lawyer, TURK the white supremacist father of the baby. I almost set this book aside about a quarter of the way into it because the chapters by Turk were so harsh, so violent, so revolting, so vile, so blatantly ignorant and manipulative, that it disgusted and disturbed me to read them. I was however intrigued enough with the Ruth and Kennedy chapters that I forged ahead and I am glad I did. This is a book well worth reading. It promotes an awareness in the reader that prejudice and racism are not one and the same. Just because someone does not pre-judge does not mean he is not racist. Racism can be manifested in failing to realize and acknowledge that the benefits and successes one does have can be attributed, in a large part, to the the color of his skin, and not only to his own efforts and hard work.

There is a dialogue where Kennedy tells Ruth that she, the black woman, needs equity, not equality. As Ruth tries to correct her Kennedy insists. "No, I mean equity. Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed. The first one sounds fair, the second one is fair." Beware, the review cited below has spoilers, but I credit this image to https://shereenawrites.com/tag/small-great-things/

Jodi Picoult is sometimes an uneven author in my opinion but this particular novel was very thought provoking and a winner for me. I read this book in one fell swoop, taking only one necessary break to sleep at night but getting right back into it the next morning. I think I may even give it 5 stars except that the Turk chapters are such a turn-off. If you do choose to read this book, do not stop at the story's conclusion but continue to read on through the Author's Note at the end. Some good nuggets of information are included there.