The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Jonah is eating latke off the tip of his knife. “Who do you mean ‘we,’ Da?”

  “We. Us. This whole family. Everyone.”

  “First I’ve heard.”

  “What’s in Washington?” I ask.

  “Lots of white marble,” Ruth answers.

  “There will be a great objection movement.”

  Jonah and I exchange shrugs. Mrs. Samuels clucks. “You boys haven’t heard about the march? Where have you been keeping yourselves?”

  Turns out everyone has been alerted but us. “Jesus, you two. There are leaflets all over town!” Ruthie shows off a little metal button, which cost her twenty-five cents and which is funding the enterprise. She’s bought one for each of us. I put mine on. Jonah does coin tricks with his.

  Da holds up ten fingers. “The one-hundred-year marking of the Emancipation.”

  “Which freed no one, of course,” our sister says. Da lets his gaze fall.

  Jonah raises his eyebrows and scans the table. “Someone? Anyone? Please.”

  Ruthie volunteers. “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mr. A. Philip Randolph has organized—”

  “I see,” Jonah says. “And might anyone here know exactly when this manifestation is planned?”

  Da lights up again. “We go down on the twenty-eighth. You come stay here the night before, so we can catch the early bus they are sending down from Columbia.”

  Jonah flicks me a look. Mine confirms his. “Can’t make it, Da.”

  Our father, the solver of cosmic puzzles, looks more confused than I’ve ever seen him. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re busy,” Ruth sneers.

  “We’re booked,” Jonah says.

  “You have a concert? There’s no concert for August twenty-eighth on the list you gave to me.”

  “Not a concert, really. Just a musical obligation.”

  Da scowls. He looks like the famous bust of Beethoven, only angrier. “What kind of an obligation?”

  Jonah doesn’t say. I could break rank, say I have no obligation. I’ll march for jobs and freedom. The instant lasts so long, all my crossed loyalties turn murderous. Then it passes, and I lose my chance of saying anything.

  “You should give up this musical obligation. You should go with us for this March on Washington.”

  “Why?” Jonah asks. “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s not to get?” Ruthie says. “Everybody’s going.”

  “This is civil rights,” Da tells him. “This concerns you.”

  “Me?”Jonah points at his chest. “How?” Trying to force Da to say what he has never, in our lives, come out and said.

  “This march is the right thing to do. I am going. Your sister is going.” Ruth fiddles with her twenty-five-cent Freedom March button, incriminated.

  “Da!” Jonah says. I stand and start stacking dirty plates. “Are you getting political on us in your old age?”

  Da looks past us, a quarter of a century. “This is not political.”

  “And your father isn’t old,” Mrs. Samuels says.

  Ruth glares at the woman. “What’s wrong with politics?”

  A week after the disastrous dinner, Jonah comes back late from Lisette Soer’s. Something has happened. He stands in our doorway, wavering. At first, I think he’s told her we aren’t going to her little gathering after all, that we have to go to Washington with our family for a march that concerns us. Perhaps they’ve fought over this, even broken. I want to support him, to tell him how good he has always been. As good as his voice. Maybe even better. But his stare stops me.

  “Well.” His voice sounds shaky and untrained. “It’s happened. She’s having a kid.”

  I think, She’s seduced someone even younger than he is. Then I figure it out. “She’s pregnant?” Jonah doesn’t even acknowledge. I’m just distraction while he scans the apartment for a surface that will hold his weight. “Are you sure that you’re …”

  He stops me with his eyebrows. “You trying to save my good name, Mule?”

  I make him lime juice in hot water and sit on the floor across from him. It’s not what I think.

  “A baby, Mule. Can you imagine!” He sounds like the boy who once scribbled the “Ode to Joy” under a photo filled with stars. “I told her, ‘The perfect thing about marrying me is that I can pass for the father, whatever color the kid is.’” His eyes gleam as if he’s onstage. His nostrils flare with that crazed intensity she has taught him. “You can’t say that about everybody, Joey!” He snickers and drops the cup. It shatters, and he laughs even harder. I clean up the mess while Jonah keeps talking. “She’s gone insane. Off her nut. She just kept screaming, ‘Do you know what this will do to my voice?’”

  He calls her repeatedly over the next few days but gets no answer. “She’s doing Cosi again. I’m going to go wait for her afterward.”

  “Jonah. Don’t be crazy. A black guy waiting out on the street by the Met stage door? We don’t have the bail money.”

  I talk him into waiting for her soiree, that intimate gathering of one hundred of her closest friends that keeps us from marching on Washington with Da and Ruth. By the time we arrive at the Verdian nightmare, things are in full swing. Lisette moves around the room in a violet strapless sheath that hangs to her by animal magic. She looks as if she’s never been touched by man. She flits from guest to guest, spreading license and joy—all but belting out the aria that will fatally break her weakened heart.

  I know with one look into the room. We should never have come. We slink to the drinks table, keeping together. A black man in black-tie regalia stands behind the table. He takes our orders, all three of us avoiding eyes. Jonah’s glance keeps darting out to his walking secret, waiting for a chance to corner her. She hits a lull in her rounds, and, cutting through the room’s cocktail haze, he materializes at her side. Her hands go out to push on his chest, but I can’t read the gesture. The room is riddled with conversation on all sides: a dozen manic topics crawling over one another. But raised on counterpoint and drifting near, I pick his tenor line out of the chorus of noise.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Brilliant. Why do you ask?”

  “Do you think you should be—”

  “That’s Regina Resnik over there. Isn’t she lovely? I’m so glad she’s gone over to mezzo. It so suits her. Come with me, boy. I’ll introduce you.”

  “Lisette. Stop it. I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

  “Ooh. Where’d you learn all that fire?”

  They lean against the wall, each aping casual. Both whisper, but even the whispers of a trained voice carry. He grips her wrist. On the wall behind Lisette hangs a photo of her as Dido, singing “When I Am Laid in Earth.” “Talk to me,” he orders.

  “Relax. There’s nothing to worry about. Drink up. Enjoy yourself.”

  “Lisette. You’re not going through this by yourself. I can take care of the child while you enter your prime. Then I’ll be hitting my own stride while you …”

  “While I what? Say what you were going to say, little boy. While I go into my decline?”

  “You’ve told me yourself: There’re no limits to the career I might have. I’m a good bet, Lisette. I can keep you comfortable.”

  “You’ll protect me—is that what you’re saying? You’ll take care of me and watch out for my poor little offspring when I’m old?”

  “I know you think I’m still a child. But someday, we’ll be the same age.”

  “Someday you’ll be the age I am now. And you’ll hear how young you sound.”

  “Marry me, Lisette. I can be a good husband. I can be a good father to this child.”

  “Husband? Father?” She gags on his words.

  A trio of riotous high voices approaches them, all talking at once. “What do we have here? Private lessons? Tête-à-tête? You two look like you’re about to go do something illegal.”

  Lisette breezes off, turning the trio into a quartet. I cross to Jonah. “Let’s get out of here
.”

  His head wobbles. But he’s not ready to go yet. He stalks her through the crowded apartment, clumsy, upwind, spooking the prey every time before he can close in on her. I stand on the edge of the gathering, drowning in the general hilarity. There’s no saving him. He catches her at last, by accident, when she turns in the wrong direction. He takes her by the upper arm. “We can do this any way you want. But I told you, Lisette. I’m not leaving you to deal with this yourself.”

  “And I told you, Mr. Strom. Everything’s fine. There’s no problem. Do you understand me? No problem!”

  I’m no longer the only one listening. Nearby conversations fall quiet. Lisette makes a comic show of patting Jonah’s head, to chuckles all around. Jonah does his best to grin. As soon as we can do so without disgrace, we run. He swears at her all the way home.

  He wants to call her first thing the next day. I make him wait three hours, until 9:00 A.M. She tells him again, over the phone: There is no problem. She has to say it a few times and ways for him to understand. No problem: no baby.

  He takes longer to hang up the phone than Mahler takes to resolve a chord. He calls my name, although I’m standing right there. “Joey. I don’t understand.”

  “False alarm. You both should be relieved.”

  “That’s not it. She’d have said that.”

  I’m not slow. Just stupid. “She lost it.” I hear the words. Lost it, in her carelessness.

  “When? Thirty minutes before the party? That’s what gave her the halo glow?” He wants me to shut up, to never say anything again. But silence will drive him mad. “She’s going to get somebody to do it, Joey. If she’s not on her way to do it right now. She loves my people. But she’d rather kill my baby than—”

  “Jonah. Look. Even if it is yours—”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Even if … You still don’t know that she …”

  He knows everything. Knows where we’ve lived our whole lives.

  Da calls to tell us what we missed down in Washington. “The whole world at once, walking down Independence Avenue!” Jonah listens to every detail, indifferent, frantic for distraction.

  Time confirms Lisette Soer. No problem: no baby. “Taken care of,” Jonah tells me. Something in him has been taken care of, too. The gap in their ages closes, faster than he predicted to her. He sits on the piano bench, chin on his knees, fetal. But older than she is.

  “She didn’t want to lose her peak career years,” I say. Every word makes him hate me. “She didn’t want hormones wrecking her voice.” Didn’t want a baby. Didn’t want a husband twelve years younger. Didn’t want a husband. Didn’t want him.

  He nods, rejecting my every sop. “She doesn’t want black. She doesn’t want a kid with lips. Why take chances with your life? Once black is in the blood, it’s Russian roulette.”

  At night, he smashes things. He hurls a plate of spaghetti I’ve made out the window. It shatters in the street, almost hitting a pedestrian. Now that we need a road trip, we have no bookings. Not that he could sing. The top of his range drops two full steps. He goes out alone and returns reeking of reefer. I chat with him until bedtime about nothing. Jonah, his slack face unrecognizable, sits and giggles. I jabber to a man who can’t talk back, all the while terrified that the smoke he’s inhaling has already ravaged those vocal cords.

  A week later, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham explodes. We see it on the television, then in the two newspapers we buy the next day. The church is a spew of brick and slag, glass and twisted metal. I’m standing on the scorched, frozen sidewalk outside our house that day eight years ago, while the car waits, trying to recognize my life. I stare at this new photo, swallowing down the taste that rises into my throat, half memory, half prediction.

  The bombers have waited for the church’s annual Youth Sunday. The explosion rips out the church basement, where the children practice their parts in the special ceremony. Four girls are killed, three fourteen-year-olds and one eleven-year-old. My brother can’t stop staring at their photos, running his fingers over their beaming faces until he smears the newsprint. He’s a boy of ten, singing a euphoric duet for a church so pleased to have a little Negro singing Bach for them. He’s seeing his own little girl a decade from now, the one just taken away from him. Seeing these four dead girls: Denise, Cynthia, Carole, and Addie Mae.

  Seven bombings in six months. Bloody battles roll through the streets of Birmingham, like something the United States ordinarily exports abroad. The Reverend Connie Lynch tells the world, “If there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say ‘Good for whoever planted the bomb!’” Two more black children are killed, a thirteen-year-old shot by a pair of Eagle Scouts and a sixteen-year-old murdered by a state trooper.

  The nation I lived in is dead. The president speaks of law and order, justice and tranquillity. He calls on white and Negro to set aside passion and prejudice. Two months later, he, too, is dead. Malcolm says: The chickens have come home to roost.

  Lisette Soer calls my brother but gets me. She wants to know why he’s missed three lessons. She wants him to call her back. The first time, I tell her Jonah’s laid up with a virus. She sends him daisies. The second time, I tell her he’s gone to Europe and won’t be back for a long time. My brother sits ten feet away, barely able to nod. Miss Soer takes the news with stunned rage. Lisa Sawyer, the brewer’s daughter from Milwaukee, calls me a lying monkey.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I tell her. But by now, this monkey has a fair idea.

  AUGUST 1963

  They gather at the base of the Washington Monument. People pour in from wherever there is still hope of a coming country. They rumble up from the fields of Georgia on broken-down grain trucks. They ride down in one hundred busses an hour, streaming through the Baltimore tunnel. They drive over in long silver cars from the Middle Atlantic suburbs. They converge on two dozen chartered trains from Pittsburgh and Detroit. They fly in from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas. An eighty-two-year-old man bicycles from Ohio; another, half his age, from South Dakota. One man takes a week to roller-skate the eight hundred miles from Chicago, sporting a bright sash reading FREEDOM.

  By midmorning, the crowd tops a quarter of a million: students, small businessmen, preachers, doctors, barbers, salesclerks, UAW members, management trainees, New York intellectuals, Kansas farmers, Gulf shrimpers. A “celebrity plane” airlifts in a load of movie stars—Harry Belafonte, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando. Longtime Freedom Riders, veterans of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Albany, join forces with timid first-timers, souls who want another nation but didn’t know, until today, how to make it. They come pushing baby strollers and wheelchairs, waving flags and banners. They come straight from board meetings and fresh out of prison. They come for a quarter million reasons. They come for a single thing.

  The march route runs from Washington’s needle to Lincoln’s steps. But as always, the course will take the long way around. Somewhere down Constitution are jobs; somewhere down Independence is freedom. Even that winding route is the work of fragile compromise. Six separate groups suspend their differences, joining their needs, if only for this last high-water mark.

  The night before, the president signs orders to mobilize the army in case of riot. By early morning, the waves of people overflow any dam the undermanned crowd-control officers can erect. The march launches itself, unled, and its leaders must be wedged into the unstoppable stream after the fact, by a band of marshals. There’s agitation, picketing, a twenty-four-hour vigil outside the Justice Department. But not a single drop of blood falls for all the violence of four hundred years.

  Television cameras in the crow’s nest of the Washington obelisk pan across a half a mile of people spilling down both sides of the reflecting pool. In that half mile, every imaginable hue: anger, hope, pain, newfound power, and, above all, impatience.

  Music breaks out across the Mall—ramshackle high school marching bands, church choirs, family gospel groups, pick
up combos scatting stoic euphoria, a funeral jubilation the size of the Eastern Seaboard. Song echoes from staggered amplifiers across the open spaces, bouncing off civic buildings. A bastard mix of performers work the staging area—Odetta and Baez, Josh White and Dylan, the Freedom Singers of SNCC and Albany fame. But the surge of music that carries the marchers toward the Emancipator is all self-made. Pitched words eddy and mount: We shall overcome. We shall not be moved. Strangers who’ve never laid eyes on one another until this minute launch into tight harmonies without a cue. The one thing we did right was the day we began to fight. The song spins out its own rising counterpoints. The only chain we can stand is the chain of hand in hand. All past collapses into now. Woke up this morning with my mind on freedom. Hallelujah.

  David Strom hears the swelling chorus in a dream. The sound bends him back upon his past self, the day that first took him here, the day that made this one. That prior day is here completed, brought forward to this moment, the one it was already signaling a quarter century before. Time is not a trace that moves through a collection of moments. Time is a moment that collects all moving traces.

  His daughter walks beside him, eighteen, just two years younger than her mother was then. The message of that earlier day travels forward to her, too. But she will need more time, another bending, before it will reach her. His daughter walks two steps ahead of him, pretending that this pale face tagging along behind her is nothing she knows. He humiliates her, just by being. He trots and stumbles to keep up with her, but she only walks faster. “Ruth,” he calls her. “You must wait up for your old man.” But she can’t. She must disown the day he carries. She needs to deny him, if she’s to have any chance of signaling to her later self or remembering her way into the future she will make, the next time here.