Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  At his regular school, Ryan made the honor roll. “Some of the white kids would tell me, ‘You know, you’re the whitest guy we know.’ They thought they were being nice, but it definitely hurt. Because I am black. They thought they were complimenting my intelligence, but I would think, Do you mean that black people are dumb? It made me—I doubt there’s a word for that exact type of anger. And meanwhile, in the honors classes I took, I was one of two African Americans. How messed up is that?

  “Black and white kids, both, called me Oreo. The white kids said it thinking they were being funny, thinking I thought it was funny. The black kids said it differently. ‘Why are you such an Oreo?’ ‘I can’t understand you.’ ‘I don’t speak proper.’ ‘I don’t speak white.’

  “I wasn’t turning my back on them. Or maybe, at that time, I was. In the places where I grew up, there was such a feeling of separation. Black people used to call middle-class blacks, any black who succeeded, bougie. It was a field slaves, house slaves kind of deal. The black kids who told me I was too white, they weren’t educated, and they weren’t going to get educated. It wasn’t even what they wanted. The stereotypes were just fine with them.

  “Being African American is so convoluted. It’s two hundred and fifty years of slavery. Two hundred and fifty years of endless days, endless servitude. No race since the Jews in the Bible can attest to that longevity of persecution. It was being three-fifths of a human being. And then it was being recognized as one hundred percent of a human being, and still, for another hundred years—no, for longer than that—having to prove yourself to be human, to be equal, mentally, physically, socially equal. Even though you picked their crops, even though you built their houses. Even though you built this country. Being African American is overcoming. It’s willpower.

  “Every other race came here by choice, starting with the Native Americans walking across from Asia. We are the only race who didn’t. I was put here. My forebears were brought here in the galleys of ships. There is nothing prouder to me than being African American. There’s no race more special in the United States. We persevered. With everything I do, every success that I’m hoping for, there’s some spirit out there, the spirit of a person in rags who dreamt of being able to read a book. Or go to a movie. Or run for office. Being African American is the greatest gift God could have given me.”

  * * *

  At Governor’s, musical terms rushed past him in a torrent, or bobbed meaninglessly in his brain. The only things he understood were the basic facts: that in the classical voice program, in his year, the few other blacks came from backgrounds that had nothing to do with his own; that everyone besides him seemed perfectly familiar with signatures and dynamics; that he had nothing to add when kids talked in the halls about favorite composers; that he had no money and so stayed in the lobby when everyone else went outside for snacks; that his clothes came from Walmart; and that he could not sing.

  “I was hopeless. It didn’t help that I auditioned as a tenor, and that I grew that summer and walked in with a voice that was who knows what. Low sometimes and squeaky others.” Not only was his voice erratic, but he had no concept of how to study a score and work on singing a piece of music. “My voice teacher, my first year, she was a nice woman, but she’d never dealt with someone like me, who didn’t know what he was doing at all. She would give me pieces, she would say ‘Go learn this section of music,’ and I would go home and just stare. Make some sounds. Quit. She didn’t understand that I knew absolutely nothing. It was like taking someone who’s never once played football and showing them play formations and saying, ‘Learn this tonight and come back tomorrow and do it on the field.’ She was flabbergasted. She didn’t think I belonged in the program, and she let that be known.”

  He was counseled. He was warned. “I was failing tests right and left.”

  Fischer remembered, “There was a lot of negative stuff. His attitude—he frustrated easily. He talked back; he muttered. He stormed out of situations. I don’t know what his home life was like, but it was like he’d had a lot of negative reinforcement. He was anxious. He had a very, very volatile energy.”

  On the brink of being told that he could not return after freshman year, Ryan was given a tiny part in the spring production of The Ballad of Baby Doe, an American opera. He stepped out onstage and forgot his one line.

  * * *

  “I have told everyone,” Mr. Brown informed him, “that I am going to get you where you need to be.”

  The two of them—Mr. Brown, dapperly dressed, stretching six five to the top of his impeccably trimmed box-cut and booming out every word, and Ryan, at fifteen, only a few inches shorter—seemed to occupy every inch of Brown’s studio at Governor’s. “So I am letting you know, I am going to beat you into shape. There’s no playing around. You are going to do what I say, or it’s going to be me who personally kicks you out of this school.”

  It was the beginning of Ryan’s sophomore year. Mr. Brown directed him to lie on the floor below the piano.

  * * *

  Brown had grown up, during the late fifties, the sixties, the early seventies, mostly in Virginia Beach, just outside Norfolk, in a subdivision newly built by an undertaker who wanted a community for his kind of people—blacks who went to his church or churches like it, blacks who shared his way of thinking, blacks of a certain accomplishment, a certain standing. The low, modestly spacious brick houses faced a line of pear trees whose fragile blossoms appeared in profusion every spring. A swath of well-tended lawn, shared by all the residents, sloped down to a small lake. The lake belonged to the community on the opposite shore, a community of similar houses and similar trees, a community for whites. The residents there put up a chain running tight to the waterline on the black side, a chain defending the purity of the water, a chain with signs that read “Keep Out.” Some of the signs bore the additional letters “KKK.” The blacks gazed out their front windows at the ripples on the water, the warnings.

  Three years after Brown was born, the governor of Virginia gave a speech that was televised and broadcast by radio across the state. “To those whose purpose and design is to blend and amalgamate the white and Negro and destroy the integrity of both races…to those working day and night to integrate the schools…to those who defend or close their eyes to the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere, to those who would overthrow the customs, mores, and traditions of a way of life which has endured in honor and decency for centuries and embrace a new moral code prepared by nine men in Washington…to those who would substitute strife, bitterness, turmoil, and chaos for the tranquility and happiness of an orderly society…let me make it abundantly clear, as governor of this state, I will not yield.…I call upon the people of Virginia to stand firmly with me in this struggle.”

  Virginia schools had yielded only slightly to integration by the time Robert Brown, living beside the lake, began attending them. But he was able to visit a local library with his father, who worked as a laborer with the Department of Defense, and with his mother, a teacher of home economics. And there, at the age of six, he picked out biographies of Bach and Beethoven. His parents had no idea why. It was a puzzle—how he got those musicians into his head. But he read their stories and said that he needed to learn the piano.

  * * *

  “Now take a breath,” Mr. Brown instructed as Ryan peered up from the floor. He lectured on relaxing the abdomen, on letting the belly puff, on putting the diaphragm to full use. He assigned Ryan fifteen minutes of breathing on his back each day at home. He admonished that he would know if Ryan failed to do this, and he made the pronouncement that every kid at Governor’s knew: “Education without practical application is useless information.” This was Mr. Brown’s line, his invention and motto; he delivered it constantly to his students, and it echoed through the rehearsal spaces of the school.

  Mr. Brown’s bass voice, cascading down from his great height, d
ominated classrooms and corridors, dominated the program’s theater as he conducted the chorus.

  “I have had an epiphany,” he would declaim, prefacing his ideas.

  “Do not mess with a diva,” he would warn students who were slow to heed him.

  “The quarter note is not the center of the universe,” he chastised singers who blundered in their timing, lingering on a syllable.

  “You sound like a bad Baptist choir,” he scolded his chorus.

  “You are disgracing me. Give me more consonants!”

  “This is not Robert Brown’s sound! You are not giving me Robert Brown’s sound! And yes, it is all about me. I’m the diva here. You are an expression of Robert Brown.”

  Everything he said was spoken at high volume; everything he did was done with animation; every mood that crossed his face was pure—fury, joy—and was accompanied by dictatorial certainty. To the teenagers, he was a legend, fearsome, loving. And for Ryan, to be singled out by him, to be made his personal project, to absorb all his attention during their sessions in the studio, was to feel that good fortune had scooped him up.

  That first day, after the breathing exercise, Mr. Brown told him to stand. “Now you are going to drop the chain. Singing is like a sport. Singing is physical. You played football—you wouldn’t just go out and start hitting people.” He showed Ryan how to stretch, how to “let the chain go,” link by link, slackening the body in increments at a pace that seemed, at first, unbearably slow, from his scalp to the base of his spine, from the backs of his knees to the bottoms of his heels.

  There was exercise after exercise like this, addressing Ryan’s anatomy. Somehow Mr. Brown unlocked his rib cage; it felt like Mr. Brown stretched his very bones. He led Ryan through scales and through octave leaps so he would begin to intuit how that span sounded. They couldn’t easily find time for lessons. The only chance for a regular slot was in the early evenings; Mr. Brown said that he would stay late. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he lamented during their initial hours. One meeting per week, he said, would never suffice, though their goal was that Ryan learn just enough so he could remain at Governor’s. Ryan required two meetings, minimum. Mr. Brown offered to tutor him, unpaid, as much as he needed. And because Ryan had no way to get home once the last school bus was gone, Mr. Brown drove him the forty-five minutes to the trailer park in his car with the license plate that read “Batovn.” The law didn’t allow enough letters to spell “Beethoven.”

  * * *

  As Ryan entered the trailer, Mr. Brown’s aura tended to fade. He felt foolish breathing on the floor. But if he went for his next lesson having skipped any of the exercises he was assigned, exercises that became more complex as the months went by—minor scales, scales with melismas at the end—Mr. Brown would cut him off. “That’s it. We’re not going to be singing any music today.” He seemed, to Ryan as a teenager, semitelepathic in his ability to detect when Ryan had failed to practice, though, more likely, mistakes on the scales and melismas gave him away. As punishment, he would torture Ryan with an hour of theory.

  Partly through his powers of understanding and partly because Ryan confided in him during breaks in the studio and along the nighttime highway heading home, Mr. Brown knew that Adrian was gone, that Ryan’s father had been gone basically forever, that his grandmother had recently died, that his mother was struggling, that she was proud that her younger son was in Governor’s but doubtful that this training in classical music could be of any use, that it could amount to anything of value.

  There were things Ryan didn’t say. One was this: his mother had taken him to Hooters on his birthday, snapping photos of him surrounded by breasty waitresses in low-cut tank tops and red short shorts. She had determined that without a father in the picture this was what a mother ought to do. Somehow she arrived at this conclusion despite her churchgoing and her Bible study and her decree that he couldn’t date until he turned sixteen.

  Her efforts at being both mother and father didn’t make much difference in the way things went between them. At the door of the mobile home, Ryan found himself, one night during his sophomore year, picking up a metal stake from the horseshoes game his mother kept outside. He clutched it in his hand. Valerie was inside; she had locked him out for some infraction. He stood there, poised to smash his way in.

  He put down the stake before following through on his impulse, but not before his mother phoned her current boyfriend and told him to deal with the situation. The man drove over and told Ryan to get into his car.

  He steered them to a local baseball diamond, unlit and dusty. He directed Ryan to get out, stepped out himself, and made a show of locking the doors. Ryan got the message: he wasn’t going to be able to scramble back into the car for refuge.

  “You going to threaten your mom?”

  Ryan said that he hadn’t.

  The man shoved him backward against the hood and doubled him over with the first of his punches.

  * * *

  “How he came to love classical—that is a mystery,” Yvette Wyatt, Mr. Brown’s cousin, said. “Robert and I grew up like brother and sister, but how that came to be I do not know. All I know is that he always did. He ate it, he drank it. That was his passion. In the car, he kept his radio locked on the classical station and waited for opera to come on.”

  Wyatt led the chorus at Booker T. Washington, a high school across town from Governor’s. Her singers were black. She, too, had been drawn to classical music as she’d grown up, but for her, the attraction had begun as a teen, not as a young child, and it had taken hold through a teacher, rather than arising without cause, as it seemed to have done in Brown’s mind. And for her, it was only a fraction of the repertoire that moved her. For him, it was almost everything.

  The two of them had collaborated during their college years: their voices, his piano. They gave small concerts, performing classical pieces and, too, spirituals like “Steal Away to Jesus,” songs he cherished for the history they contained, the lyrics whose lineage ran back to slavery. He loved to perform them with classical formality. Listening to Leontyne Price, the African American opera star, sing “Ride On, King Jesus,” in the same shimmering and vaulting tones that had won her ovations at the Met, put him in a place of bliss.

  “But gospel,” Wyatt said, shaking her head, “gospel he called trash.” The distinction was in the style, in the purity and operatic flourishes and meticulous tempo of spirituals—at least when they were sung the way he felt they should be sung—and in gospel’s graininess and raspiness, its howling and carrying on. Gospel was rough; it was clamorous. In the back and forth between lead singer and choir, in the competition between choir and band, in the convergence of lead singer and choir and congregation, gospel bordered on sheer noise.

  Yet for all his devotion to the music he considered superior, and for all his disdain for the music he thought was barely music at all, the church sounds he grew up with were inside him. Shiloh Baptist, where his father was a deacon, dated back over a century. Its stone building east of downtown Norfolk had grand turrets surrounding its main steeple. Inside, behind the pulpit, the choir’s pews rose sharply toward a scarlet curtain, and behind that lay the baptismal tank. The sanctuary, with its paneled wooden divider in front of the choir’s section, and with its high-backed wooden altar chairs for church dignitaries, expressed a measure of reserve. But reserve gave way when Shiloh’s choir got going.

  I’m going to take a trip in that good old gospel ship

  And go sailing through the air

  There were howls and cries, hissings of cymbals and poundings of keyboards, abrupt pauses and abrupt accelerations, surges of voices and drums. The choir wasn’t as unbound as some; at Shiloh, the lead singers didn’t tear utterly free of melody and harmony, giving themselves over to hoarse and plaintive half shrieking as they left language behind. Still, there was no shortage of raw yearning.

  When that ship comes in, I’ll leave this world of sin

  And g
o sailing through the air

  That yearning was part of him, embedded in him, Wyatt said. She had grown up in an African Methodist Episcopal church that favored relatively restrained music, but she sang gospel in her current church choir. She seemed to radiate the jubilance of her Sunday music. Big glittery earrings lent extra light to her toothy smile. Brown, she went on, was gay—more or less openly in some areas of his life, like at Governor’s, and secretly in others. He’d told Wyatt back in high school, and she’d assured him that she’d already guessed it and that it wouldn’t change a thing in their friendship.

  In his thirties, Brown wandered away from Shiloh. Eventually he settled at the nearly all-white Unitarian Church of Norfolk, and took on the part-time job of directing the Unitarians’ two-Sundays-a-month choir. This wasn’t because he felt affinity with the Unitarians’ almost secular, God-free ideas. And it wasn’t because he enjoyed their constrained, uninspired, and feeble singing. It was because the church had openly gay members; it was because the church made its acceptance of homosexuality and all manner of diversity prominent in its principles. Shiloh, like the other traditional churches that he knew, and like the church Wyatt now attended, took Leviticus at its word: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, it is an abomination.” Death would seek out such a man if he did not reform.

  * * *

  The classical singers of the Governor’s School took a trip to New York, to the Met, during Ryan’s sophomore year, and Mr. and Mrs. Hughes paid his way. The kids saw Carmen. They crossed the plaza with the white stone columns; they passed the fountain with the innumerable plumes; they approached the immense windows of the opera house with the murals—angels and their instruments—hanging behind the glass; they stepped under the chandeliers and stood at the top of the winding stairs with gold railings. “It was like being inside a palace. It was like being inside a royal wedding. It was so overwhelmingly beautiful.”