The curtain rose, the opera began. “The singing, the sets, the outfits—I was transported,” Ryan said. The toreador, his lapels lined with brocade, swaggered through the horde of bullfighting fans, touched their outstretched fingers, flung them his hat, took as his due the fawning of women wearing ruffled, plunging necklines. He sang about his own life, and everyone in the crowd onstage—men lifting their drinks in tribute and women lifting their hands to be kissed—sang in choral agreement.
Le cirque est plein du haut en bas
Les spectateurs perdant la tête…
Car c’est la fête du courage
C’est la fête des gen de coeur!…
L’amour, l’amour, l’amour,
Toréador, Toréador, l’amour t’attend!
The arena is packed from top to bottom
The spectators are losing their heads…
It is the celebration of those who have courage
It is the celebration of heart!…
Love, love, love,
Toreador, Toreador, love awaits you!
“Carmen is in French,” Ryan said, “and up to that point I’d had no exposure to French, none, zero. One of my teachers had us do some research about the story, so I knew a little about what was going on. And at the Met, there are the translated words on the back of the chair in front of you. The whole opera, I was reading, looking up and down, up at the stage and down at the words, trying to follow. But then, during the toreador’s aria, something happened. I stopped. I quit reading.
“The second he started to sing, everyone’s attention—not just the cast and the chorus, not just Carmen, I mean the attention of the audience—it hit a new level. The energy. It was so intense. And I don’t think I breathed for five minutes. My eyes were glued to the stage. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know the words. I knew exactly what he was singing—a song about power.
“There was a standing ovation when he was done, an ovation in the middle of the scene. I’d never heard applause like that, like thunder. There wasn’t anyone in the house who wasn’t up and clapping.
“I knew I wanted that feeling. Some of it was all the masculinity in the song, and some of it was the ovation, but it was also about the language, how he bridged that gap of language between me and him with the music. He made me understand.”
That night, the mezzo playing Carmen was an African American, Denyce Graves. Her voice dipped seductively, elevated coyly, turned every man onstage into a supplicant. Mr. Brown was acquainted with Graves somehow, and after the performance he took the kids backstage. Ryan didn’t know enough to realize how unusual it was to be there. But he was stunned when Graves, saying hello to the students, singled him out for a hug.
Minutes later, as the kids traversed the plaza, with the chandeliers at their backs and their evening ending, Ryan veered over to Mr. Brown.
“I’m going to sing at the Met,” he said.
ELEVEN
GIVE ME YOUR T. rex mouth,” Mr. Brown demanded in the studio. Dissatisfied with Ryan’s attempt, he demonstrated. He opened his own mouth wide. Even in normal positions, Mr. Brown’s was an oversized mouth. Now it looked like the mouth of a monster in a children’s book. He twisted his jaw this way and that, baring his teeth, grimacing, making Ryan laugh, making him feel childlike, even as they grew more serious after the New York trip. Ryan mimicked the gaping jaw, the teeth. It was all an effort to heighten his awareness of the muscles in his lower face.
“That’s it, that’s it!” Mr. Brown’s approval verged on a roar.
But whenever they moved from exercises to singing, Ryan sensed his teacher searching around inside him in futility, trying to find a voice that might lurk somewhere within. “Sing,” Mr. Brown urged. “Sing.”
He asked if Ryan was tired. He asked if he’d gotten a snack before their session. He asked why not, and began giving Ryan money for food. This didn’t cause impressive tones to suddenly flow from Ryan’s larynx, through his pharynx, and out his mouth, any more than Ryan’s hopeful words about someday singing at the Met turned him into a fast-progressing student of music’s technical aspects. Bewilderment didn’t clear; mental stamina didn’t arrive. He didn’t begin doggedly cracking the codes of notation and identifying pitches and mastering musical theory. But Mr. Brown’s gesture of keeping him fed before their lessons made Ryan feel that this man was absolutely determined to shape him into something worthwhile, even if the exact form of that something was unknown, even if it might have nothing to do with singing.
* * *
At a gathering of high school chorus singers from around the area, Ryan met a soprano, a girl whose straight red hair swayed in a ponytail, who popped up in front of him and said something nice about his voice. He stammered out praise for hers. Her mere awareness of him came as a shock, and that day they ate lunch together, took their breaks together. At the end of the weekend-long event, he knew that both her mother and father had died years ago. She gave him her phone number, and from that Sunday evening on, they talked by phone nearly every night.
She lived with her grandparents, and whenever he called and one of them picked up, he took care to chat with them politely. Then they handed the phone over to their granddaughter, and she and Ryan mapped out their future together. He had explained his mother’s rule about not dating till he was sixteen. They both kept track of precisely how many days remained until his birthday.
The calls were their only contact. But she mentioned that she would be singing in her school’s talent show a few weeks before his birthday, and he promised he would be there, that he would win his mother’s permission, that he’d convince her not to count it as a date. Even if his mother refused, he said, he would see her performance one way or another; he would be in the audience no matter what. She told him not to do that. She insisted that they should wait; his birthday was so close.
He agreed. He said he would be patient—but told himself that she was uneasy about how well she would sing. What he should do, it dawned on him, was surprise her: go; sit in the back; make sure she didn’t notice him; hear her sing; wait in the lobby, or wherever people waited at her school; walk over to congratulate her when the show was done and her insecurity was in the past. It made sense to him that she didn’t want him there. She’d told him that she’d auditioned for Governor’s and hadn’t gotten in. Her insecurity was partly on account of that. But he knew she would sing wonderfully.
He needed a ride to the show. Valerie listened to his plan and decided that it was okay. She helped him pick out a necklace at a discount store, to give the girl after the performance. She paid for the haircut he begged for, a box-cut Afro. He dressed in the best clothes he owned, picked and patted and picked and patted his hair, and drove with his mother to the girl’s school. Valerie and Ryan slipped into seats at the rear of the auditorium, where, watching his soon-to-be-girlfriend onstage, he felt tears creeping from the corners of his eyes, caused by how well she sang.
After the show, she burst into the lobby and hugged her grandparents. He sidled through the crowd of families and teachers. He told her how amazingly she’d sung, how amazing she was, how he’d hatched his plan of surprise, how he’d made it all happen. He reached out to shake her grandparents’ hands, introducing himself. Yet he was hardly conscious of them; he was still gushing over her talent and his own stealth.
Valerie tugged at him from behind.
“I want to talk with you,” his mother said, grabbing his hand and pulling him away. He was baffled, angry, but she wouldn’t let go. She drew him across the lobby. He was too confused to resist. “I saw the way they looked at you,” she said.
He refused to believe what she told him in the car: that he would never speak with the girl again, that her grandparents would forbid it, that they hadn’t known he was black, that Valerie had seen the entire story on their faces.
On the day before his birthday, his mother picked up the phone. She asked who was calling, handed him the receiver. The girl was sputtering, crying, m
aking clear in halting phrases that she was at a friend’s house, that her grandparents had put the phone off limits, that if she ever saw him or spoke with him again she would be put out of their house.
He managed to ask why.
“Because they don’t want me to become something I’m not.”
* * *
The twice-weekly sessions with Mr. Brown were supposed to last one hour but sometimes went twice as long. He had Ryan run scales while rocking back and forth and side to side, as if to shake free any potential he had, to loosen it from the lining of his lungs. He had Ryan sing with one arm starting across his torso and sweeping slowly outward, openward, degree by degree along a half circle, the painstakingly gradual motion meant to improve the way he utilized the most crucial part of his instrument: air.
There was, after a year of lessons, an increasing solidity to Ryan’s sound. It was as though a dimension had been added; his tones were more spherical, less thin, more plush. Fleetingly, his singing could be entrancing. And confidence was nudging aside the terror that had made him forget his single line in his first opera. In a school recital, when he was sixteen, he sang a romantic ballad from the musical Camelot. The ballad had a classical formality; opera singers frequently performed it. Mr. Brown felt sure enough of Ryan’s skill to suggest that he flood the last word with emotion by cresting higher than the written note.
No, not in springtime, summer, winter or fall
No, never could I leave you at all
In the audience, Valerie was weeping, as was Mrs. Hughes, who’d come to hear him. “There you go,” Mr. Brown said afterward. “There you go.” Then he and Ryan got back to work.
“Robert’s own training was much more in piano than voice,” Yvette Wyatt, his cousin, said. “He did sing in the Virginia Opera for a good little while, though. And anyway, he could teach opera like nobody’s business. He could fill those kids with that tremendous passion he had, and he knew how to bring out that operatic sound. But then the kids at Governor’s, they’re different from the kids I’m teaching. My school is what is considered an ‘urban’ school; we’re ninety-five percent African American. The students are poor. Lots of them come from where Ryan comes from, those kinds of family situations, that kind of hardship. At Governor’s, even the black kids, when they reach there, most of them, they’ve already been exposed somewhat to a mixture of music, because of the better environments they’ve grown up in. Robert used to tell me, ‘I don’t see how you do it. I couldn’t teach at your school.’”
As a teenager, Wyatt had been enchanted by a wide array of genres: pop, classical, gospel, spiritual. They had all beckoned, and she sang them all, bewitched by the beauty of each. But she subscribed to a controversial theory; in the world of music, it was rejected as often as it was accepted. “The African American voice is located lower down. It’s more about the throat area, less about the head tones. The difference is natural.” She had needed training, during college, to sing classical pieces in the intended style. “I had a teacher who helped me to develop, I won’t say a more European sound, but a more pure sound. More legato. Smoother and brighter and not so heavy and grainy. And more coming from the head, the face, the mask. So the sound comes out this way.” She gestured, her hand at her cheekbones, her nose, her brow, and moving forward, away from her face. “And less from here.” She moved her hand to her throat. “It was a challenge for me to learn. It was a struggle. But for my students it’s even more difficult; it’s harder than it was for me. That’s because for my kids, it’s not just the naturally heavier timbre of our African American voices; it’s that they’ve never had the exposure to that other music. And it’s another thing. It’s their lives. Certain brighter styles of singing don’t make sense to them. I have to do a lot of explaining.
“I have a small ensemble of girls, and I taught them, for competitions, ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves.’ It’s a Henry Purcell piece. It has a lot of ta ta ta ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. And they said, ‘I can’t sing like that, my voice is not like that.’ I said, ‘Y’all going to have to become little white girls.’” She laughed. “They were like, ‘All right, Miss Wyatt. I don’t know how we’re going to do that.’
“I taught them what was going on in history. This is who was king. This was where the singing was performed. I gave them visuals. I taught them, ‘This is what you have to do: it’s airy. It’s not harsh and it’s not heavy. You got to get away from that weight. It’s got to be dee dee dee. And you have to have the proper dynamics. The pianissimos have to be pianissimos, and even when you’re singing forte, you’ve got to keep it light; you can’t oversing.’ It took work. It took me almost six months for them to finally get it. But once they did, they loved it. In competitions, they scored superior. It gave them something.
“What I’m saying, though, it isn’t always the case. I had a young lady, she had an operatic voice. It was her God-given voice. That was where her voice sat; that was where it lay. She tried to sing R & B. She loved Alicia Keys. She wanted to be Alicia Keys. But that’s not what her voice was. I told her, ‘You’re not an Alicia Keys.’ I had her listen to Denyce Graves. That was the sound she had. But I couldn’t really get her to change. And meantime, she dropped out of school. That’s the world I teach in. She didn’t even get to graduation. She just let it go. She took that talent and isn’t doing anything with it at all. She’s working at McDonald’s.”
What Robert Brown had gleaned in Ryan’s voice when he first offered to teach him privately for free, what, if any, sliver of special talent, Wyatt didn’t know. Had he heard intimations of natural operatic tones? Or had other vocal qualities pulled him toward Ryan? Had he sensed a potential for uncanny volume, a voice that might one day carry throughout vast halls unamplified, a sheer strength essential to opera? Or had Brown been inspired, at first, by nothing about Ryan’s singing? Had he simply responded, as a teacher, to a young man on the precipice of failing out of Governor’s, and, all the more, as a black teacher to a young black man in danger of being tossed out of his mostly white school?
What Wyatt recalled, more specifically than how her cousin spoke, early on, about Ryan’s sound, was how he spoke about Ryan’s life. “He would talk about his situation. He would say, ‘I’ve got to get him something to wear. We are going to Nordstrom’s.’ I would tell him, ‘Robert, you don’t necessarily have to take him to Nordstrom’s. You can take him to J.C. Penney’s.’ But he would say, ‘J.C. Penney’s is not where I shop. That’s not where we’re going.’”
It wasn’t only clothes. Mr. Brown gave him driving lessons. This followed their work in the studio. He let Ryan steer his car around an empty parking lot and then to a fast-food drive-through. Sometimes, after retaking the wheel and driving Ryan home, Mr. Brown went in if Ryan and his mother were spiraling.
“He was our middle guy. He would intervene,” Ryan said. “I needed that.”
“Ryan was trying to figure himself out, smelling himself, and whenever it got serious enough, it prompted me to telephone Mr. Brown,” Valerie said. “He would get Ryan to behave himself. Straighten him out.”
Or as those on the Governor’s faculty who heard Mr. Brown’s account of his role with Ryan and his mother told it, he would calm Valerie down, run interference for Ryan. “That woman!” he would say.
* * *
During this period, at his regular school, Ryan said, he felt at times like a foreigner. “In history, it was like I was a liaison, like I was a representative from all the chapters of oppression. I don’t think there were any other black kids in my honors history. We didn’t have any Jews, so even on the Holocaust it felt like the questions were aimed at me, like everyone was waiting for my opinion, like, Your people were oppressed. What do you think about this?
“We spent a good while on Hitler and World War II. Then we watched Schindler’s List. And after the movie, I got upset. I asked why we didn’t watch a movie about slavery. We’d studied slavery for maybe two or three days. Our teacher said something about not w
anting atrocities like the Holocaust to happen again. And I said, ‘Didn’t the Holocaust happen in Germany, and didn’t slavery happen here? Weren’t my ancestors enslaved by your ancestors?’ We ended up watching Glory, that movie about black soldiers in the Civil War. And after that, I was really the representative. Everyone wanted to feel like now that we’d discussed the movie, we’d done enough.”
* * *
Valerie’s life was in yet another vortex. She had a car accident. “An old man ran me off the road,” she said. It left her dependent on painkillers and, for a while, unable to work. And she was feuding with her family over medical bills that remained after her mother’s death. “I couldn’t make my payments, and I couldn’t make the electric bill, and everything just got out of hand.” Valerie and Ryan were forced to move out of their home when he was seventeen, during his junior year. She told him they were leaving because the trailer park wasn’t safe. A pair of kids from the low-income apartments across the road had broken into their place. They’d broken into twelve others. Valerie didn’t say that the real reason they were moving was because she could no longer afford the mobile home.
She found something in a town closer to Norfolk, a tiny green wooden house that looked to her like a shack. When she first saw it, people were drinking on the back steps, and there were empty bottles and used condoms along the strip of side yard and on the tight square of dirt and grass behind the house. But she had no better options; she signed the lease. She and Ryan moved their belongings one afternoon, driving across the concrete overpass at one end of their new street. The overpass spanned railroad tracks. It rose and descended steeply; it felt like a wall, separating the street from the rest of the town and making the street seem like a remote valley. The wider houses of the valley were fronted by porches with crumpling roofs; windows were covered by trash bags instead of glass; train horns resounded. “No Trespassing” signs marked most of the front doors. Valerie thought of the sign nailed to the clapboard of her place as a plea to any cop who might come by on patrol. It meant that if a cop noticed anyone on her low stoop, he should deal immediately with that person; he should assume that person was trouble; the cop shouldn’t hesitate.
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