The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  I turn on the sofa, sidesaddle, to look out the front bay window. No whiter street. I imagine myself a child of this neighborhood, a suburban boy, biking through its manicured blocks, tossing a pigskin across its tracts, party to a fantastic mass evasion. Our parents couldn’t have lived here if they’d wanted. I couldn’t have walked down these streets as a boy and lived. Even now, for this briefest family visit, some neighbor is already on the phone to the police. Tonight, if I walk around the block, they’ll stop me for questioning.

  It strikes me how rarely Jonah and I left our house, even in the city. We stayed home, huddled over the piano, radio, and record player. Mama had to force us out. I count up how many of our childhood tormentors were black, how many white, how many as ambiguous as we were. We covered most bases. “Both, I think. Mostly black?”

  I glance at Jonah, the only real authority. That one-year difference between us was almost an eon back then. Jonah sets down his puzzle and, in a deep gospel bass, intones, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are equal in His sight. Jesus loves the little students of this world.”

  Ruth laughs, despite herself. She leans over him and slugs him in his softening underbelly. “You’re a complete asshole. You do know that?”

  It’s supposed to be playful. He looks up at her impassively. I blunder forward, before there’s an incident. “She was still taking lessons herself, you know. At Columbia, when we were little. She even studied for a little while with Lotte Lehmann.”

  “Is that supposed to be something special?”

  I fall back, mouth open. “Lotte Lehmann?” All I can think to say. A name I know better than my own blood relatives. “You don’t …”

  “Naw,” Jonah says, standing and stretching. “Nothing special. Just some famous diva bitch.”

  Ruth’s ignoring him. It’s the most productive thing she can do with him these days. “What made Mama get interested in classical? Can you think of any reason why she would choose …” Ruth circles the question, unwilling to go to war over something she’s not sure she can win. “How good was she, anyway?”

  I want to say, How dare you ask? “Don’t you know? You must have heard her just about every night for a decade!” The words come out harsher than I mean them. Ruth takes them across the face. I start again, softer. “She was …” The voice against which I measure every other. The sound that my sound strove for. A richness not even Jonah has learned to produce, one that came from giving up everything. “Her voice was warm. High and clear, but full-blooded. Never a hint of a slavishness.” I hear the word before I can suppress it.

  “Sun coming up on a field of lavender,” Jonah says. And I remember why I’ll always do anything for him.

  It almost satisfies Ruth. But she nurses a bigger demon, one that only gets hungrier when the smaller ones are fed. “What was she like?”

  Even Jonah looks up, hearing the edge in her voice. I know just what Ruth wants one of us to say. But I can’t give her the Mama she needs. “When we were little, she used to walk us around, each of my feet on top of hers. Each step we took was a beat of a favorite tune. As if the song she sang was the motor of this enormous walking machine.”

  My sister’s face is a spoiled watercolor. “I remember. ‘I’m Tram-pin’. I’m Tram-pin’.’”

  “She cut out little stars from silver paper and stuck them up on our bedroom ceiling, in the shapes of constellations. She got us growing potatoes and lima beans in water glasses. She was a perpetual sparrowrescuer. We had an eyedropper always filled with sterilized milk, ready for every maimed creature between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

  “She used to beat us boys with nail-studded planks,” Jonah confides. “She’d softened a good deal by the time you came along.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “Never anything longer than carpet tacks.”

  Ruth throws up her arms in disgust and stands up to leave. I hold her and bring her back down. She sits, with a little persuading. There’s no place else for miles around for her to go.

  I stroke her bruised arm. “She’d fret for two days if the subway attendant looked at her the wrong way while she was putting her dime in the turnstile. But she was tougher than Jesus. She could hold her breath longer than she could hold a grudge. She loved having people over. At least to sing.”

  None of this is any use to Ruth. “How black was she?” she asks at last. She studies my face for any cheating, a pitiless external examiner.

  Black is now the going term. Ruth started using it not long after hearing the young John Lewis at the March on Washington. Negro is for gradualists, appeasers, and Baptist ministers. Black means business, and it’s taken hold, after what’s happened this year in Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. The country keeps changing the problem’s name every few years, like a liar elaborating his excuse. I’m not sure what the word for mulatto is at the moment. It’ll be something new a year or so from now.

  I don’t even glance at Jonah. I know his answer. “How black?” One drop, I want to tell her. That’s the going rule. No scale, no fractions, no how much. Not something this country lets you have degrees of. The only shade Americans see: One spurned size fits all. Ruth’s known as much since the age of ten. But now she’s decided there’s more to know. Another scale, one that measures degree. I meet her gaze. “What exactly are you asking?”

  “What do you think I’m asking? Don’t be a fool, Joe.”

  “Fool?” I pull my arm off her. “You can sit here asking these questions about your own mother, and you call me …”

  Ruth turns her head. Her neck is the shade of beautiful polished walnut. She waves her hand, casting a fishing rod. “Okay, I’m sorry.” She won’t fight me. I’m the peacemaker, the conciliator, the crossover, the thing she won’t, yet, call me. I reach out and take her slender fingers. She turns to fix me, shaking her head a little, hurt, puzzled, needing me to be with her on this. Like, her look says, you were once.

  Jonah stops his humming, but his words are almost chanted. “You mean did she talk Gullah before you were born? Did she cook chitlins and pone?”

  She doesn’t even turn to look at him. “Who asked you, Tuxedo Boy? Do you have a hang-up with this? Does my asking about this make you uptight?”

  Hang-up, uptight: the terms of the hour. My sister is, as ever, ahead of her time. Or at least ahead of me. A part of me, the white, simplifying part, wants to keep Da from hearing us. But I won’t hush her; I won’t drop my voice. We died when Mama did; no one left to protect.

  A supplicant hang of my sister’s head, and I’m her brother again. Ruth needs from me what no one else in the world can give. From those few extra years I lived with our mother, she thinks I might know the secret of what black is. She knows Jonah won’t hand it over. But me: She imagines I can show her how to slip into it, like an old chemise of Mama’s Ruth has found hanging in a closet of her dreams. My refusal to tell her is simple perversity.

  “What can I tell you, Ruth? Her father was a doctor. One of a couple dozen in all of Philadelphia. More broadly educated than Da. Her family was better off than his. You know what they lived with, Ruth. What’s the secret membership? What else do you want me to say?”

  I’m telling her, saying already, by all I can’t say. Very black. Blacker than her mule sons can enter into. Black inflicted and black held on to. Black by memory and invention. The daily defensive backing off and smiling, twenty generations of remembered violence that doubled you over even when you thought you weren’t doubled. Black in the way that is the sole property of high yellow. The day never passed when she didn’t store it up, when she didn’t have to touch its protecting core. But every bit as light in skin, hair, features, and all things visible as her mixed-race daughter, who hates herself for not being simpler.

  “Black, Ruth. She was black.”

  “Black’s all right,” Jonah says. “Some of my best genes are black.”

  Ruth says nothing. She’s turning over the possibility: The truth is too monochrome and stupid
to make it out. She makes some massive reverse Middle Passage, getting no closer to that coming future our parents imagined than this starter bungalow in the suburban desert of New Jersey, where none of us can live.

  “You don’t know, Joey. A year and a half, back and forth across the Harlem River from University Heights … I sit there in those classes full of crew-cut white business majors, all set to carry their fiancées back home to Levittown. The nice ones look at me like I’m neutered, and the cretins come on to me like I’m some kind of exotic barnyard lust machine. Or they want to know why I talk the way I do. They ask me if I’m adopted. If I’m Persian, Pakistani, Indonesian. Or they’re afraid to ask, afraid to offend me.”

  “Tell them you’re a Moor,” Jonah said. “Works every time.”

  She’s looking at me, her eyes welling, like I can help save her. Save her from America, or at least from her oldest brother. “Nobody at school knows what to make of me. Gangs of those Irish-Italian-Swede dumpling girls talk to me slowly, through foot-long smiles, swearing how close they’ve always been to their domestic help. But at the Afro Pride meetings, there’s always some sister grumbling out loud about infiltration by funny-featured, white-talking spies.” She nods her head, quizzing me: Right? Right? Whatever our parents taught us to recognize in ourselves must have been wrong.

  This is what she’s learning at school. Every day, she braves a neighborhood that’s fleeing from her and her nonexistent kind. Last year’s residents are halfway to White Plains by now. The university has tried to salvage the uptown campus, hiring Marcel Breuer to stamp it with pedigreed European high modernism. But all the slabs of brutal concrete, grafted onto McKim, Mead & White’s Italianate arcades, only make it obvious to everyone that the game is over. Soon University Heights will sell its buildings to a “transitioning” community college for pennies on the dollar.

  And my sister knows she’s to blame. I put my hand on her shoulder, the safe top knob of the collarbone. Five inches up from where that policeman grazed her. “Ruthie. Don’t let them beat you up. You aren’t the one, you know.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Joey. What would you know about it?”

  “Joey?” Jonah says. “Joey’s an authority. He wrote the damn book. Gray Like Me.”

  Ruth just snorts. My sister thinks I’m over the line, right up there as light as Jonah, just because I trot out onstage with him night after night, to the applause of near-blind octogenarians. It doesn’t occur to her that Jonah makes me look darker than I’ve ever made her.

  “What would I know about it? Nothing, Ruth. Totally ignorant.”

  “Well, where the hell were the two of you, then, while I was growing up? You could have run interference for me. You could have told me what …”

  I can’t answer. More time has passed than I can account for.

  “Ron yoor own race,” Jonah says. “Ron yoor own race.” I jerk up and shush him, hoping Da hasn’t heard him go this far. My family is coming undone, faster than it did that first time. Ruth’s words swing in the air in front of us. She’s past the first accusation and is on to a new one, below skin, up against bone. Where were we when she was growing up? Off somewhere, singing. Who said we should spend our childhoods away? Why can’t I remember her between the ages of eight and eighteen? This woman disappears into no place I recognize. Worse by far than the one I lived through. The identical place, changed by the run of a mere few years.

  My sister opens her throat, but nothing comes out. She tries again. At last, the rasp catches. “Jesus Christ. It gets so old.”

  “It was old when Mama was young.”

  “What were they thinking?”

  Jonah says, “I’m not sure thinking is the operative word.”

  I inhale. “They wanted us to grow up believing …” But that’s not quite right. “They thought they could raise us beyond …”

  The bile in her throat spits out in an acid laugh. “Beyond? They got that one right, didn’t they?”

  My eyebrows work away on nothing. “I must have been seven before I saw how different Da’s and Mama’s tones were.”

  “You, Joey, are beyond beyond.” My sister shakes her head, mourning me. But around her eyes, the folds of recognition.

  “They wanted us to be what happens next. To transcend. They didn’t want us to see race. Didn’t even want us to use the word.”

  “Da didn’t,” Ruth says.

  Jonah’s gone back to his slider puzzle, to Fauré. It makes Ruth cover her ears and shriek. When she stops, I say, “They were very big on the future. They thought the thing was never going to get here unless we leapt into it with both feet.”

  “We leapt into something all right.” Ruth wrinkles her nose. “Soft, warm, foul-smelling? Is that the future we’re talking?”

  “Parents have done worse,” I say.

  “What did she do with her blackness? After she married. After she had us three.”

  This blackness, a misplaced trinket—a ring of keys, a scribbled note. Jonah hears what I do. “It’s probably still around here somewhere.”

  Ruth presses her head. “Well, you two seem to have set it down somewhere you can’t find.”

  My fault, everything I can’t deliver to her. But she’s my sister, every drop, and there’s nowhere she can go without my finding her. I circle around the one thing, that fact I ought to tell her, even though she may read it totally wrong. Yet whatever Ruth might make of it, I have to give it over. For it’s already hers.

  “It’s true. She used to laugh more, early on. Dance around. Like there was music all the time, even when there wasn’t.”

  Ruth bobs her head, taking my concession, for which she gives thanks. Neither of us owns this woman’s memory. But as Ruth’s head bobs its short, shallow dips, I see pure Mama. She enters into our mother without knowing it, reincarnating her, body for body, nod for nod. She moves the way Mama used to move on those nights when our family sang, five lines flying in all directions.

  Then Ruth holds still. “What happened to her?” Her voice falls off to nothing. For a beat, I misunderstand. This is the question I’ve dreamed of asking her, a hundred times a year since our mother’s death. Dreamed-of asking Ruth, the one who had to look on it, up close, with a ten-year-old’s eyes, seeing the evidence, watching the house while Mama burned alive. Then I come back. She means: What happened to her, before what happened to her?

  “I think …” Two notes in, I have to stop. Breathing has always been my downfall. Jonah can go for huge phrases and never break for air. I’m already gasping after a measure and a half of moderato. “I think it wore her down. Hammered from all sides, every waking minute, even when nobody said anything out loud. Her crime was worse than being black. Destroying the barriers, marrying: the worst any two people can do. This woman spit on her once, as we were coming out of the elevator to the dentist’s. Mama tried to make us think it was an accident. Can you imagine?”

  “I think it was an accident, Joey,” Jonah says. “I think the woman was trying to hit you.”

  “She gets spit on, and she has to keep us from thinking there’s anything wrong. Wore her out finally. More shit than even she could survive.”

  “Joey sa-id ‘shi-it,’” Ruth calls out, singsong. The best Christmas present I could give her. And her burst of delight: the best she could give me, or ever again will.

  “Her face changed, when we were older. What would you call it, Jonah? Punch-drunk. Like she’d never imagined it could be so hard. She couldn’t even take us into a clothes store to outfit us for school without a security guard cornering us. No right course left, except to send us away.”

  Ruth’s own face glows at the notion, as if these horrors vindicate her. She leans back on the sofa, her body relaxing into confirmation. She savors the record of our mother’s blackness, the first description of that shade where Ruth can go join her. She turns her full brown eyes on me. “How many sisters and brothers did she have? All together.”

  I look at Jonah. His hands go
up and his eyebrows down, Pagliaccio-style, a burlesque of innocent ignorance.

  “Where do they live?”

  Jonah’s on his feet. His muscle-twitch walk leads him into the kitchen for what’s left of our sesame chicken Christmas dinner. Ruth turns at his sudden departure, and I see it for a second in her face: Don’t leave me. What have I done?

  “Most of them still in Philadelphia, I guess. She took us to see her mother once. Right after the war. We met in a diner. We weren’t supposed to be there. That’s all I can remember.”

  Jonah comes back from the kitchen, his mouth full of chicken scooped straight out of the white cardboard delivery carton. Ruth won’t even glance at him. She speaks only to me, now. “Was that the only time?”

  “Her brother was there at her funeral. You remember.”

  “For God’s sake. Look at us! How can we not know our own grandparents?”

  Her pitch shatters Jonah’s Buddha smile. I say, “You’d have to ask Da.”

  “I’ve asked him for ten years. I ask him once every three months, and he never does anything more than grin at me. I’ve asked him every damn way I know how, and get nothing but detached, evasive crap. ‘You’ve met your grandparents already. You’ll meet them again.’ The man’s out there beyond the Crab Nebula. If the three of us disappeared for twenty years, he wouldn’t even notice until the day we showed up again. The man doesn’t care what’s happened to us or where we’re headed. He’s lost in scientific mumbo-jumbo. ‘Time isn’t a flow. Nows don’t succeed one another; they simply are.’ What kind of arrogant, intellectual, self-satisfied …”

  Jonah sets down the carton of sesame chicken. Maybe he needs both hands to talk to her. Maybe he’s just finished eating. “Hey, Rootie.” Her turn to flinch at a taboo word. “Hey, squirrel.” Jonah, too, somehow believes all nows simply are. He sits down on the couch again, on Ruth’s other side. He shoves her right shoulder, an old team sport where he and I, our little sister between us, volley her body back and forth like a metronome. The game once occupied the three of us for endless stretches: a slow increase of speeds, Jonah calling out tempi, me keeping the beat, Ruthie giggling in the life-sized accelerando until we hit a crazed “Prestissimo!” Jonah pushes her now, and, caught off guard, Ruth gives a little. So I shove back, but even with this first nudge, we feel her stiffen. She isn’t playing anymore. It takes Jonah halfway to andante to give the game up for lost. I see his face, too, flash an even briefer fear: I’ll hurt you before I’ll let you refuse me.