Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  He pledged not to hurt anyone. Soon after he got out, he slapped the face of a woman on staff. “I hit Beth!” he bragged. “I’m going to kill all of them! Look at how many people they need to control me! I’m glad I hit her! Do you see how many fucking people they need?”

  Three days before his release date, he let everyone know that a man on duty was about to have his head cracked to bits. He let the girl with wild hair know how pathetic she was.

  At breakfast two days before the date, he challenged a boy by pouring milk down his back.

  One day before, he told the pod, “I am never wrong!” That same day, a therapist evaluated him. “Met with Ryan. Behavioral and emotional functioning seem well stabilized.…Will be discharged to his mother tomorrow.”

  EIGHT

  AT INTERMISSION, RELIEF floated through the lounge between the dressing rooms. Exhales and giddy exuberance filled the air. Everyone had sung an aria to a packed Met house. Everyone had won applause. For a minute, the finalists put aside private comparisons and reveled in having completed, together, the first half of a successful concert. DiDonato, the MC whose mezzo voice commanded major roles all over the world, was caught up in the rush and dealt out high fives.

  Ryan, his relief sweaty and outsize, nearly let himself wrap her in a hug. His voice hadn’t fled. He’d committed no offenses of timing or pitch. He steadied himself, keeping himself from throwing his arms around her bare shoulders and crumpling her gown. But he was light-headed. Inspired by all the grand dresses and tuxedos in the room, he asked her, “Will you be my prom date?”

  She pulled him aside. “After you’re done with your aria,” she said, “stay out there. You were in such a hurry to get off the stage. Let them applaud.”

  “Will you take a picture with me? A cheesy prom shot?”

  He got one of the other singers to snap a photo on his phone. He stood behind DiDonato, smiling wildly.

  The relief ebbed from the lounge. Philippe watched Ryan’s playfulness, deserted by his own whimsy. He sat in despair, worried that he’d looked frightened as he sang. “I want this to be over,” he said almost inaudibly. “It’s been too much craziness.”

  “La calunnia,” Ryan’s second aria, was a comic tribute to sleaziness and manipulation. In spirit, it was close to “Madamina,” his second piece in the semis, and now, as he took the stage after his banter with DiDonato, he embraced the humor and perversity of the role without reservation. He took his hamming to new heights, fingers caressing the air with deceitful, ruinous charm, wide eyes widening with malign obsession, voice seducing with sly excess. On one of his climactic phrases, “colpo di cannone,” he advertised his own destructive talents in a voice so rich and explosive that it seemed everyone in the crowd was riveted.

  He clenched both fists on his final note, heeded DiDonato’s advice, and soaked up the ovation. But his pronunciation had been abysmal. He’d botched the first line. He’d mangled the second. Leggermente…sotto…tumulto—all the backward practicing in his room had accomplished next to nothing.

  Again the eight gathered in the lounge. The judges were debating, tallying. The audience waited in their seats, trading predictions. The singers told one another that they’d won just by being here, just by getting to the finals. They said this over and over, like a mantra. Ryan tried to believe it.

  Through speakers in the ceiling, a voice directed, “Finalists, please come stage right.” They proceeded behind the stage to the wings. Two walked arm in arm; the rest surrendered to their separateness, their hunger. They clustered behind the curtains. “Come on,” a singer whispered as DiDonato, at the mic, praised this year’s group and the tradition of the contest.

  “We have five winners today,” she announced, and began to read out the names.

  “Mr. Philippe Sly.”

  “Yes!” He expelled the lone word from his body with such energy, and with such constriction in his throat, that it was less than a word; it was a growl—primal, animal. He sprang into the lights and applause.

  “Miss Michelle Johnson.”

  She glided toward center stage.

  “Mr. Ryan Speedo Green.”

  Behind the curtains, before walking out onstage, he danced. He slid sideways, heels and toes twisting in unison. His brain went blank. His soles zigzagged and skated; he slithered and churned. His joy held the force of a mild concussion: a half hour later, he didn’t remember a thing about his dancing.

  NINE

  WE SAID TO him, ‘Opera? Where’d you get that from?’” His aunt Esther—who’d taken in Ryan and Adrian for a time back while Valerie was with Barry—remembered when she and her husband first heard about Ryan’s new interest, when he was in high school. “We asked him, ‘Isn’t that a white thing?’”

  It was, from perspectives both African American and white—and to some degree wasn’t. Race in opera was like race in so many areas a half century after the transformations of the nineteen fifties and sixties: complicated, fraught, permeated by intractable problems of perception and preconception.

  The history ran like this:

  Elizabeth Greenfield, born a slave in Natchez but adopted by a Quaker from Philadelphia, sang arias for whites-only audiences in Manhattan a decade before the Civil War, and Sissieretta Jones, an African American soprano, performed operatic selections at Carnegie Hall in the eighteen nineties. But these were concerts. Greenfield and Jones and their black descendants in classical singing, no matter how glowing their reviews, weren’t welcome in the glamorous realm of opera itself, not in America and only rarely in Europe. Across the Atlantic, a few African Americans sang scattered roles on opera stages during the first half of the twentieth century; in the United States, even when there were black characters to be cast, in Verdi’s Aida or Otello, opera was a white domain.

  In the nineteen thirties, when the Met produced an opera of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, about a railroad porter, a black man, who becomes a tyrannical ruler on a West Indian island, Paul Robeson was considered for the title role. Robeson, whose father had escaped slavery on a North Carolina plantation and become a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, was a football all-American, Phi Beta Kappa scholar, and class valedictorian at Rutgers; a Columbia Law School graduate; and, by the nineteen twenties and early thirties, a theater star, celebrated in London and on Broadway for his portrayal of Othello and for two black roles in works by O’Neill, including The Emperor Jones. And Robeson’s bass-baritone voice was so heralded that he’d been beckoned by British royalty to sing at Buckingham Palace. But the Met passed him over—and gave the part to a white singer, who performed in blackface.

  It wasn’t until 1955 that Marian Anderson broke the unofficial color barrier at the Met. She had, by then, been celebrated as a recitalist in both America and Europe; the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini had declared that she had a voice “heard once in a hundred years.” In 1939, because of Anderson’s race, the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from giving a concert at Washington, DC’s Constitution Hall, but Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to perform at the Lincoln Memorial instead, and there, for a crowd of seventy-five thousand, Anderson sang a Donizetti aria and “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” That another sixteen years went by before she played an operatic role at the Met was not a simple story. It was not a tale solely of bigotry. Anderson herself felt that she was better off sticking with concerts. Still, those years did go by without the Met courting her or casting any other black vocalist, and when she finally appeared at the Met it was front-page news.

  “An impossible childhood dream came true for Marian Anderson last night,” the New York Times wrote. “It was the culmination of a brilliant international career as a concert performer, and for other Negro singers it was the opening of a big new door to opportunity.…The excitement had been building up ever since Miss Anderson’s engagement was announced two months ago.…People from all over the country had ordered tickets, and some in the opera house last night had traveled from as far
west as California to be present at this debut. Customers for standing room began to assemble in front of the Metropolitan at 5:30 a.m.…Some of these were Negroes, a rare sight in the standees’ queue.…It was a safe guess that no previous Metropolitan Opera performance had so many Negroes in the audience as last night’s show. Reporters from the Negro press in the Far West, the Midwest, and the East were in the theater.

  “In the center box sat Mrs. Anna Anderson, the contralto’s frail, old mother.…In less glamorous locations of the theater were men and women for whom Miss Anderson had been not only a singer but the voice of a people. Two Negro porters at the Metropolitan bought tickets for this performance and proudly took places as members of the audience.…Many in the audience knew that Miss Anderson—like Joshua, but more quietly—had fought the battle of Jericho and at last the walls had come tumbling down.”

  Anderson was then fifty-eight years old. Her voice was past its prime, and as it turned out, other African Americans did not pour through the “big new door to opportunity.” Among black women, Leontyne Price earned an ovation that lasted half an hour after a Met performance in 1961, and she was followed by a thin line of black female voices—Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Denyce Graves—a line that had attenuated by the time Ryan entered the Met contest. Among black men, the history, within or outside the Met, was even more tenuous. Robeson sang in the 1959 Hollywood movie of Gershwin’s composition about black life in a South Carolina slum, Porgy and Bess—a work that most critics refused to recognize as opera at all until the nineteen seventies, well after Robeson’s career was over. William Warfield, one of the richest male voices of the twentieth century, was relegated to a Porgy and Bess tour in Europe in the early fifties. Robert McFerrin performed at the Met as the Ethiopian king in Aida following Anderson’s breakthrough, and in 1956, he starred as the hunchbacked Italian jester in Verdi’s Rigoletto. But in all the decades of opera after that, in America and Europe, only a handful of black men had made anything of a significant mark.

  Eric Owens, who was in his mid-forties, was perhaps poised to become one of those black men. He’d made his career playing a pair of warped creatures—the monster in Grendel and, at the Met, Alberich, the fierce and lonely dwarf of Wagner’s Ring cycle—and I talked with him about the forces at work in keeping African American opera singers so scarce. Partly it was the sentiment that Ryan’s aunt had expressed—that opera was “a white thing,” that its very sounds were at odds with black identity—and partly it was a matter of education and exposure, of opera being thoroughly unfamiliar, foreign. But Owens, whose upbringing wasn’t anything like Ryan’s, and who had studied piano and oboe before attending one of the country’s most elite conservatories for voice, spoke about other obstacles.

  “It’s quite a nuanced situation,” he said. “We’re dealing with art, with the subjective, the incredibly subjective—with the immeasurable. But do I believe that black singers have a harder time—that they’re at a disadvantage before they even open their mouths, as they step into a room with the casting director sitting there? Yes. Things are a hell of a lot better than they were sixty years ago. But yes. And some of it is just marketing; it’s what your ticket buyers are going to feel comfortable with, unconsciously. There’s a song from the musical Avenue Q, ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,’ and that phrase doesn’t mean that everyone’s closed-minded. But there’s a tribalism, a social thing and an evolutionary thing; there’s the comfort we feel with the kind of people we’ve been around since we were born, and, going back to the beginning, there’s the whole survival aspect: those other people over there are competing for our food, and we’ve got to get out and hunt before they do, and be on guard because they’re coming to steal our stuff. This mind-set might not be of any use in this day and age, but it’s in the backs of our brains. Underneath, it’s there. And it bleeds into every facet of our lives. So if I’m a casting director, a white guy, there are a lot of things playing around in my head, things I’m aware of and things I’m not, when a black singer walks in the door.

  “It’s true that some people are championing the idea of putting singers of color in roles that aren’t characters of color, that aren’t Othello or Aida or the cast of Porgy and Bess. But for the black artist, more often than not—hello and welcome to earth!—there is a double standard. That’s the planet we live on. Some of it is a laziness of imagination. You can’t ever assume, though, that the color of your skin is why you didn’t get a role. Because that can breed your own laziness. The antidote to color, to all the crap going through the minds of the people behind that casting table, is to sing so well that people go, Oh shit. You have to overcome the visual. You have to make the visual irrelevant. You have to overcome aurally. I knocked it out of the park in certain roles, and people suddenly thought, Where’s this guy been? Well, I’ve been right here, incognegro.”

  * * *

  “After the center, I knew where the lowest of the low was,” Ryan said. “And I never wanted to end up there again. I was so scared of being put back in that place. I was so scared of being in seclusion. I was going to do whatever I had to never ever to go back, whatever it took mentally. I was not going to be the person I was.”

  Valerie and her boys moved from the apartment complex, where the police had carried Ryan down the stairs, to a trailer park in Isle of Wight County, halfway to the North Carolina border. This was where he found himself after he was let out. The skinny aluminum boxes floated on a lake of grass, some of it mowed, some of it mangy. Both blacks and whites lived in the trailer park, the blacks mostly on the lesser rows. Ryan’s row was all black. Across the road was a treeless cul-de-sac, an all-black low-income housing development. The trailer park and the cul-de-sac lay at the edge of a town whose main intersection, marked by one of the town’s two traffic lights, had a Dairy Queen and a couple of gas stations. Up the road, past acres of cotton and corn, the shacks of a black hamlet crowded the pavement, porches spilling forward and outhouses standing behind the shacks.

  Ryan and his mother didn’t see their new home the same way, not then, not a decade later, in memory. Even the phrase they used to categorize it was different. Ryan called it a trailer park, but as Valerie and I turned at the light and drove toward it, she wanted something understood. “There’s a difference between a trailer and a mobile home. I call this a mobile home park. A mobile home is more like a modular home. Anyway, people hear ‘mobile home’ and they think drear and whatnot. Good gracious! Shoot! I kept it really pretty inside.”

  The life they lived there, at any rate, was not pretty. The violence persisted, between the brothers, between Valerie and the boys. “I remember one time Ryan said something to someone, running his mouth, talking smack, and these dudes started hitting him,” Adrian said. “He was on the ground. Dude kicking him. I was there, and I just stood and watched. I was like, that’s what you get for talking smack, you’re going to get smacked. Then my mom found out about it. She beat my butt, because I didn’t try to protect my brother. So I turned around and beat him up all over again.”

  Not long after he left the facility, the police locked Ryan up again briefly. Neither he nor Valerie could recall what he’d done that time; the past was just not a safe place to travel. And the record on this incident, unlike everything having to do with the center, had been expunged. “Maybe stole something,” he said. “Maybe threatened someone at school.”

  The facility he’d left, the trailer park he’d come to, the family he was imprisoned within, the person he’d always been, the person, he said, who was “the worst of the worst”—he needed to escape everything, escape himself. He had scarcely any notion about how to achieve this. But his desperation was extreme; it exceeded his cluelessness; and he had one advantage. He held within him the lessons Mrs. Hughes had taught, the lesson she had taught with the phrase “content of their character” and the lesson contained in the fact that, until he wound up being driven across the state in shackles, he’d made it from her classroom out into t
he normal world.

  Haphazardly, he took paths of escape. He glimpsed routes away from himself and raced down them. He got inspired by a TV show. ER had a character named Dr. Greene—this seemed to Ryan a magnificent coincidence. There was also Dr. Ross, who’d been abandoned by his father long ago and who was now a renegade pediatric surgeon doing anything he could, within and beyond the emergency room, to rescue children. Ryan decided that what he had to be, what he was going to be, was a pediatric surgeon.

  And he started to imitate the pronunciation of the doctors. He listened keenly to their patterns of speech. He did the same with the anchors on the TV news. “I wanted people to think I was smarter than I was. To think I didn’t live where I lived. I wanted to be different from the kinds of kids I’d always been around. I didn’t want to use slang and say the n word and sag my pants and spend my time up to no good.”

  Fear and need and sheer will led him to make the least predictable choices. A year after getting out of the facility, he joined the Latin Club at school. “I was going to hang out with the nerdy kids—not just the nerdy kids, the nerdiest kids. And the teacher who ran the club, and who taught Latin class, he was unbelievably nerdy. We read The Cat in the Hat in Latin. We watched a newscast about Pompeii in Latin. I was so bad at it. I was probably the worst kid in there. The other students were the only reason I could do the work at all. They helped me. With the club, we did quiz bowls. You had to slap the table in a specific way. ‘Who were the Greek and Roman goddesses of wisdom?’ ‘Who stabbed and killed Julius Caesar?’”