“Not his music of choice?”
“Don’t get him started on it.”
We were still yards from the house. “His hearing’s really that good?”
“My Jesus, yes. You got it from somewhere, didn’t you?”
The shock of that thought was still banging around in me when a figure drifted out onto the lawn to meet us. A full, fluid, statuesque woman, one shade paler than I remembered her. I was out of the car without feeling myself leave. Michael stayed behind the wheel, giving us our minute. She had her head down as I closed the distance. She wouldn’t look at me. Then I put my arms around my sister.
Ruth wouldn’t hold still for the embrace. But she gave me more than I’d hoped, and I held her longer than I had all my life. Three full seconds: It was enough. She pulled free to look at me. She wore red robes and a green-and-black headdress that even I knew was supposed to invoke Africa. “Ruth. Let me look at you. Where’ve you been?”
“In hell. Here. This country. How about you, Joseph?” Her eyes were deep and broken. Something was wrong with her arms. She hadn’t seen me for even longer than I hadn’t seen her.
“I’ve missed you.” Almost chant.
“Why come back now, Joey? Black men are killed every week. Why did you wait until it was … ?”
For you, Ruth. I came back for you. Nothing else big enough to bring me.
A young boy, maybe a fifth grader, materialized on the lawn beside us. I didn’t see him come up, and the sudden apparition scared me. He was dark, closer to Michael than to Ruth or me. Michael got out of the car and I turned to him. Happy for the deflection, I waved toward the boy. “Yours?”
Michael laughed. “You’re stuck on the escalator, man. You’re in a time hole. My oldest daughter has one of her own almost this old!”
“Mine,” Ruth said.
“Not yours,” the boy told her.
My sister sighed. “Kwame. This is Joseph. Your uncle.” The boy looked as if we were collaborating to cheat him out of his inheritance. He didn’t say, Not my uncle. He didn’t have to. Ruth sighed again. “Oakland. That’s where we’ve been. Oakland.” The word went up my spine like prophecy. “Community organizing. Working.”
“Then the cops killed my dad,” Kwame said.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Ruth put her hand where mine had been, and he suffered it, but believing nothing. Ruth steered her child toward the house, and we men followed.
My mother’s father waited just inside the door. His close-cropped hair was Niagara white. The air around him, like the high-tide mark on a beach, still registered how large a man he’d been. He wore a steel gray suit. Everyone had dressed for this occasion except me. He tilted his head back to get me in the bottom pane of his bifocals. “Jonah Strom.”
“Joseph,” I said, holding out my hand.
My objection angered him. “I still don’t see why she had to give you boys the same name. Never mind. Es freut mich, Herr Strom.” He took my hand, even as I shrank. “Heiβen Sie willkommen zu unserem Haus.”
I stood there gaping. Uncle Michael chuckled as he dragged my bags upstairs. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s been practicing for the last three days.”
“He can make hotel reservations and change your currency for you, too,” Ruth said.
Dr. Daley threatened to break forth in Sturm und Drang. “Sie nehmen keine Rücksicht auf andere.” Something more than three days’ practice.
Ruth put her arm around him. “It’s okay, Papap. He’s not an other. He’s one of us.”
From the hall to my right came crying. A startling sound: the wail of a creature wholly dependent on the unknown. Ruth moved toward the cry almost before I heard it. She slipped into the distant room, murmuring as if to herself. When she came back, she held a dozen-pound squirming infant trying to fling itself free to safety or death.
“Also mine,” Ruth said. “This is little Robert. Five months. Robert, this is your uncle Joey. Haven’t told you about him yet.”
Michael set me up in an upstairs room. “This was my brother’s. We’re moving Kwame into the twins’ old room.” I was violating a sanctuary. But there was no place else to go. “Sleep,” my uncle told me. “You probably need it.” And then he left for his own home.
Ruth came by to check on me. She held little Robert, who every so often stabbed out with his arm to prove my existence. My sister talked to him steadily, sometimes words, sometimes just pitched phonemes. She stopped only to ask, “You good?”
“I am now.”
She shook her head, looking at her baby but talking to me. “Can I get you anything?”
“You call him Papap.”
Little Robert stared at me. His mother wouldn’t. “I do. Kwame, too. We’ve called him that for years.” Then she turned: You have a problem with that? “That’s what he said you used to call him.”
“Ruth?”
“Not now, Joey. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”
Then she went slack, some tendon cut. She hunched over, as if the baby had swelled to tremendous weight. She lowered herself to the foot of the bed. I sat next to her and put my arm on her back. I couldn’t tell if she wanted it there or not. She began to heave, her muscles lifting and falling in rhythm. Her shaking was tight and small, softer than winter branches scraping a roof. Only when little Robert began to cry, too, did she pull herself up into words.
“It’s so old, Joey. So old.” Her calm was forced. She might have meant anything. Every human nausea was older than she could say.
“The license plate was hanging down. He was driving back on Campbell on a Thursday night. Not even that late—nine-thirty-five. Not even in an especially bad neighborhood. Coming home from a council meeting. He was trying to get a shelter built. The man worked all the time. I was home with Kwame and …” She lifted little Robert, her face twisted. I pressed her shoulders: tomorrow would be fine. Or never.
“Two policemen pulled him over. One white, one Hispanic. Because the rear license plate was hanging down a little. Robert told me the day before that he was going to fix it. He got out of the car. He always got out when the police stopped him. He always wanted to take the issue back to them. He got out of the car to tell them he knew all about the license plate. But they knew all about the license plate, too. It came out at the hearing. They ran the number through their system while they were pulling him over. So what those two cops saw was a big, belligerent former Panther with a record coming out of the car at them. Robert always carried his wallet in his front coat pocket. Said he didn’t like to sit on his fortune. He reached into his coat pocket to get his wallet, and these two cops swung into covered positions behind their doors, guns drawn, yelling at him to freeze. He whipped his hand out of the coat to get it up in the air. I know it. He knew exactly …”
Ruth handed me the baby. She jerked her hands in the air in the oddest way. No place to put them. She wrapped them around her head and pressed, forcing back what was left of her brain.
“Why do I even have to say this? You know before I tell you. So old. Oldest song in the whole sick hymnal.” Her words were stale paste. I strained to hear her. “Nothing you can do with your life, but this country’s going to make you a cliché. The shining emblem of your kind.”
Little Robert began to shriek. I had no clue what to do. I hadn’t held a baby for twenty years. I bounced him, a dotted rhythm, and it helped a little. I hummed, long and low, a ground bass. My nephew put his hand to my chest in wonder. He felt the note there, and his wails turned into startled laughter. The sound brought Ruth back. She stood and traced small circles around the bed. Little Robert squealed, hand to my chest, demanding more.
“The thing was, Joey, they didn’t kill him. If they’d killed him, we might have had an uprising, even in Oakland. They did exactly what years of training primed them to do. They aimed for the legs with rubber riot-control bullets, and managed to shatter his right kneecap. Knocked him to the pavement, where he lay screaming. When he got through the pain,
he started cursing them out with American history. They probably wanted to put a metal bullet through his skull just for naming them. The paramedics came. Twenty-two and a half minutes after they were called. They got him on the operating table and cut open his knee. According to the autopsy, he died of complications due to anesthesia.”
She stopped and took little Robert back from me. He started wailing again, reaching for my chest. He was ready to nose-dive out of her arms for a chance to feel those vibrations again. Only when Ruth hummed would he calm down. I listened to her notes. Untrained, a little hoarse. But full as the ocean when the moon pulled.
“The man didn’t die from complications, Joey. He died from simplifications. Simplified to death.” The last word fell off, near silence. “There was a hearing but no trial. Two-week suspension from the force for one, and three weeks for the other. No criminal charges. Justifiable precautionary measure in a high-risk situation. Meaning a war zone. Everybody knows. Every nigger coming at the law, reaching into his coat pocket …”
Her voice bottomed out. Had anyone put a gun in her hands, she could have gone into the street and used it without aim or emotion. Ruth toted her child in automatic circles around our dead uncle’s room, humming as the boy needed her.
“Everybody knows. Oldest song and dance there is. We can’t even hear it anymore, it’s so in us. Not a lynching, see? Just self-defense. Not murder; an accident. Not racism; just an unfortunate reaction that his profile created in … Tell me another one, Joey. One that doesn’t turn everyone in it into a … One of the cops sent me a grief-stricken apology by registered mail.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter? The white. Does it matter? None of it … none of this would have happened if …” If this wasn’t this world. “What else you want to know, Joey? What else you want me to tell you?” She stopped pacing and faced me, a reference librarian handling a nuisance client. What else? About Robert’s death, about Robert, about the police, about the hearing, about Oakland, about the law, about the oldest song there is, the song of songs that trumps all others? How can you sing? How can you sing the things you sing? “Ask me. I know every detail. All the events I wasn’t there to live through. I’m trapped in it, Joey. Again and again. What am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to tell you?”
I thought she was breaking down. Then I realized that she wasn’t talking to me at all. These last two questions were for her son, who only smiled at me from the curl of her arm and tried to vocalize.
Ruth turned to me, numb. “You sleep.” The words branded me, an accusation. It was too late for me to change my ways now, this late at night.
Sleep was beyond imagining. I lay in bed at 2:00 A.M., turning over a hundred times before the clock’s minute wheel turned over once. I couldn’t locate myself: upstairs, turning in bed, in the middle of a house whose banned image had run my life without my once being able to form it. When I did sleep, my dreams filled with sirens and gunfire.
I went downstairs at 5:30, unable to stay in that padded coffin another minute. I needed to sit, there at the hour before anyone else was alive, and steal my way back into this house I’d long ago lost. Going downstairs, I saw Jonah tearing up the steps behind our uncle Michael, with a boy not yet four struggling to keep up with them. A force of nature stood at the stair bottom, shouting, No running in this house! The house had shrunk, like a fetus in formaldehyde. Only the contour of these stairs remained, and the sound of our running.
I wasn’t the first awake. Dr. Daley sat at the kitchen table, hunched over last night’s newspaper. He had on a shirt and tie, changed from yesterday’s. He looked up at my footfall. He’d been waiting for me, whatever the hour. He studied me from his chair, his face demanding to know what we were to make of a waste so large. Who taught people to throw away the thing they most feared losing?
“Cup of coffee?”
“Please.”
“How do you take it?”
“I …”
The smallest hint of amusement staked out his mouth. “Milchkaffee? Halb und halb?”
“Something like that.”
He sat me down and brought me coffee, just right, as if he’d seen me make it. The color of my sister’s hand. Dr. Daley sat across from me and folded the paper in neat quarters. “Do you want to hear my definition of life? Of course you do. Harassment and coffee, day after day. All right. First. You talked to your sister?”
“Briefly.”
“So you know what you’ve come home to.” I nodded, but I knew nothing. All I could hear was that one-syllable locale. He held silent for the barest moment, giving a eulogy he’d had to give too often in his life. He tightened his lips and returned to the unlivable. Public again. “Now then. Your father.”
It took me a long sip before I realized he was asking a question. Then I couldn’t figure out what the question was. “I … My father?”
“Yes. David. How is the man?” He wouldn’t look at me. No one knew the first thing about anyone else.
“There’s no saying,” I said. And I couldn’t manage any more.
My grandfather looked up, diagnosing my answer. His chin made a tiny lift and fall. “I see. How long ago?”
“Ten years. I’m sorry—twelve. Almost thirteen. Nineteen seventy-one.”
“I see.” He pressed his hands against his face. Nothing more to outlive. “Your sister will want to know. You know that?”
“I’m not sure. Given everything.”
He stared at me, livid. “Of course she’ll want to know! Do you think a week has passed when she hasn’t thought about him?”
I felt what it must have meant to be this man’s child. We sat for a long time. I sipped; he glowered. At last, he snorted. “‘No saying.’ He nodded his head, smirking at my formulation. “Your brother?”
My brother. How much of a lifetime I’d spent answering that question. “He’s well. He’s happy living in Belgium. Singing early music.”
My grandfather didn’t bother to move his head. I’ve no time for your foolishness. The question’s a simple one. Do you mean to answer or not? “Am I going to see my oldest grandson again before I die?”
I felt my blood rising. “There’s … there’s never any saying with Jonah, either.”
Papap grinned grimly. “Still after his kind of freedom. I remember that from when he was six months old. Is he finding it, do you suppose?”
His tone held something of judgment, without the sentence. I had my private guess. “You have to hear him sing.” The only answer that answered him.
Dr. Daley rose and took my emptied coffee cup and saucer. I stood to help him and he waved me down. “It doesn’t seem as if I’m going to be granted that experience in this lifetime.” He washed my dirty dishes and, hands trembling, placed them in the strainer, next to his own. “I’ve tried more than once to tell your sister what came between us. Yes, the innate insanity governing all races. But don’t be misled. We put our personal stamp on it. Your father and I. Your parents …”
He came back to the breakfast table and lowered himself into his chair, where he’d taken breakfast for the last half a century. Same table, with everything else in existence around it changed.
“Your parents thought they saw some way out of the rule. The rule of the past.” He stared out onto the spring lawn, trying to picture what they saw. “They wanted a place with as many categories as there were cases. But they still had to bring you up here.” His voice was desperate, racing the clock. “They wanted a place where everyone was his own tone.” He shook his head. “But that’s blackness. There is no shade it doesn’t already contain. You weren’t any more double than any of us. Your mother should have known that.”
Footsteps came down the stairs, and my sister wandered in. She toted little Robert, and something heavier. She wore the same red robes and green-and-black West African headdress as she’d worn the day before. My sister the widow. Her face was bleary with the hour. “This child had me up all night.” On cue
, the baby gurgled with pleasure. How could either of them live?
“That’s their job description.” Our grandfather, lifelong family practitioner, stood to make coffee for Ruth. It seemed an old ritual. To me, he said, “I made things worse.”
Ruth needed no program. She’d been listening on the stairs. She shook her head. “You did nothing, Papap. They were living a dream. Mama’s the one who married a white man. She chose her path.”
“I was too proud. Your mother always said so.” He froze in place. “I mean, your grandmother.” He brought Ruth her coffee—black, with a teaspoon of sugar. “I was afraid. Afraid of losing myself in their idea. The orienting righteousness. Afraid of—”
“Of whiteness’s whole sick trip,” Ruth interrupted. “Fucked-up. To a man.”
“Don’t swear.”
“Yes, Papap.” She bowed her head to this ninety-year-old, like a child of nine.
“I made your grandmother pay for my principles. I lost her her daughter, her grandchildren. I never got to see you come into …”
Ruth stood and traded him a cup of coffee for the baby. She took the cup and sipped. Then she started hot cereal and fruit mash for little Robert. “You didn’t make her, Papap.” The old man raised his hand to his head to deflect the words. “Grandma was with you all the way.”
“And who was I with?” Dr. Daley asked no one. No one who could hear him. “Hypodescent. You’re familiar with the word?” I nodded. I was the word’s boy. “It means a half-caste child must belong to the caste with the lower status.”
Ruth spooned food into little Robert’s mouth with one hand and stirred the air with her other. “It means white can’t protect its stolen property, can’t tell the owners from the owned, except by playing purebred. They’re pure all right. Pure invention. One drop? One drop, as far back as you can go? Every white person in America is passing.”
He thought a moment. “Hypodescent means we’re supposed to take everybody else in. All the rest.”
“Amen,” Ruth said. “Everyone who’s not insane with inbreeding is black.”
The Time of Our Singing Page 73