Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (100 best novels of all time txt) 📗

touch people of color at any time. Oh, I knew it on an intellectual level. Hard not to with reports of voter suppression, shootings of unarmed black men, and talk radio folks losing their shit over immigrants at the southern border. But like many nonwhite professionals, I thought my level of success insulated me.”

“Insulated you in what way?”

“Not only was I a somebody, I had been trained well. I knew how to act to minimize threats. Carry your ID at all times. Dress modestly, for business. Put professional markers on your car—official parking tags, membership bumper stickers, other things to show your level of accomplishment. Remain calm in all encounters—at work, in stores, during traffic stops. Use the King’s English and modulate your voice. Keep your hands visible at all times.” Abrupt tears no longer surprise you and you reach for the tissue box. “I hope you have stock in Kimberly-Clark,” you say after a moment of silence spent wiping your eyes and blowing your nose.

“Since grad school,” Dr. Clay says. Another smile.

You laugh briefly and take a breath before continuing. “When those bastards pushed their way inside, they changed everything.” You reach for more tissue, dab, and take another deep breath to steady the flutter in your voice. “You know, it’s taken me a bit to realize how much more than Grant they took from me. My freedom to love and trust others. My comfort around folks I don’t know. My ability to see people in personal terms, not race and politics. I need to get all that back.”

Dr. Clay nods.

“If I had gone to somebody black or female, I think they might have identified with me. Maybe without even thinking about it they would have used their own experiences to reinforce my fears. Especially my new fear… of white men. I don’t want to be afraid of anybody.” You look off for a moment and then turn back to Dr. Clay with what you hope is a mixture of apology and your desperate need to make sense of things. “I’m not qualified to say this, but in America it feels like racism is a kind of metastatic psychopathology. A national madness embraced by so many it affects all of us, and there’s no chance for anybody to escape.”

“Unless we create one,” Dr. Clay says. “Together.”

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, it strikes you the best gift you can give your late husband is to keep his work alive, not to kill the racists who killed him but to take a shot at the racism that inspired them. That night, with his file folders and notebooks on the floor and the nightstand and one open on your lap, the bed feels a bit less lonely. By morning you have decided to continue his research on white supremacy until you have enough material for a major magazine feature or series.

Weeks later, early in the New Year, Grant’s editor Marcy is the one who convinces you his work and what happened to you both should become a book. She invites you to bring a proposal to her as soon as you can.

The comfort you find in having Grant’s papers around you wanes long before you take your ideas to Marcy. At first, so soon after his clothing went away in a Salvation Army truck, the spiky handwriting that used to annoy you on his post-it notes, the partial thumbprints in smudged copier toner, and the doodles on the flip side of pages in his reporter’s notebook brought him back to you in ways that made you smile. But the deeper you delved into his research, the more he retreated into the background. Now, as you make your own notes and use a pink highlighter on his, you chide yourself not only for failing to recognize how much all this must have disturbed him but also for knowing so few specifics of this history yourself. Unsure whether to be grateful or angry he shared so little with you, you realize the term you used in Dr. Clay’s office—metastatic psychopathology—is a more apt description of bigotry than you had imagined. By the time Marcy tells you to write this book, you know a book is exactly where Grant was headed with what he had compiled.

However uncertain you are about finishing such a project, the more people you meet in your husband’s notes, the greater your resolve to try. Founding Father and Declaration of Independence signatory Dr. Benjamin Rush believed black skin was a type of leprosy spread only through reproduction and would infect the future if intermarriage were permitted. Thomas Jefferson wrote of black inferiority in body and mind, even as he fathered six children with his slave Sally Hemings. In 1900 U.S. Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman boasted on the Senate floor of leading marauders to kill blacks during the 1876 South Carolina elections and declared the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments null and void. Tennessee state librarian John Trotwood Moore was a lynching supporter whose 1929 funeral was notable for having black pallbearers dressed as Confederate soldiers.

Then there are the scientists who went to great lengths to prove the superiority of Nordic peoples. Samuel George Morton measured cranial capacities in skulls from around the world to justify a racial hierarchy, despite work by others that refuted his conclusions. Physician Samuel Cartwright coined the term drapetomania to describe the mental illness that made slaves run away. Statistician Francis Galton’s term eugenics led to an academic discipline and numerous professional societies but also to forced sterilizations in America and crematory ovens in Europe.

The connections between racism of the past and white supremacists of the present are direct. From early Southern Baptists citing dark skin as the Mark of Cain and the Curse of Ham to justify slavery to Brigham Young telling Utah legislators descendants of Cain were destined for servitude to imprisoned LDS fundamentalist and child molester Warren Jeffs proclaiming black people are the vessel used by the Devil to carry evil into the